Scholarship

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies and ethnomusicology. His work engages with issues arising from peering into the archive and imagining the power of “lost” forms of expression to articulate keenly felt needs in the present. Both his music performance and scholarship gravitate towards the Jewish liturgical music and Yiddish expressive culture of the early 20th century and the reverberations of this cultural moment in present day artistic and religious communities. Jeremiah’s research considers the work of cantors as arbiters of social, intellectual and aesthetic change in times of crisis and cultural transformation. Jeremiah received his PhD from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies in 2021. He is currently a Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.

In 2021-22, Jeremiah was a Research Fellow at the UCLA Milken Center for Jewish American life. As part of this fellowship, he wrote a 30-part blog series offering snapshots of his archival and ethnographic research. CLICK HERE TO EXPLORE THE BLOG. Jeremiah is the Lead Researcher for the Cantorial and Synagogue Music Archive (CSMA), an ongoing project of the Cantors Assembly Foundation. In this role, he works with elder cantors to preserve, digitize and disseminate their personal collections of unique 19th and 20th century cantorial musical scores. The archive that is being built is currently available online even as it continues to grow. CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE CSMA ARCHIVE. Jeremiah was a 2022-23 Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Download Jeremiah's Resume:

Jeremiah_Lockwood_CV2023-24.pdf

Jeremiah was the 2019-20 recipient of the YIVO Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music and Theater, the 2020 AJS Women's Caucus innovative scholarship award and the 2021 Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award. His writing has been published in Religion and American Culture, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Germanica, and In geveb, as well as in popular publications such as Tablet and the Forward.

Jeremiah’s book, Golden Ages is an ethnographic study of young singers in the contemporary Brooklyn Hasidic community who base their aesthetic explorations of the culturally intimate space of prayer on the gramophone-era cantorial golden age. Jeremiah Lockwood proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to disrupt the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their conservative community, defying institutional authority and pushing at normative boundaries of sacred and secular. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, golden age cantorial music offers aspiring Hasidic singers a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority are aligned.

Projects

Golden Ages

Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era relates the engaging stories of a group of non-conformist musicians in the New York Chassidic community. Cantorial revivalists are singers who have immersed themselves in the archive of early 20th century commercial Jewish liturgical records, approaching them as a source to build performance identities and musical style. The work of cantorial revivalists is a product of the digital era, shaped both by access to internet-based archival sources and social media platforms for self- promotion. More frequently heard online, in private parties and in concert venues than in synagogues, the work of cantorial revival pushes at normative associations with Jewish prayer, blurring the line between ritual and art.

Order your copy here.

I suggest that contemporary Hasidic cantorial revivalists are not only reviving a style of music but are also engaged in a revival of a form of comportment in prayer that foregrounds the role of cantor as arbiter of sacred experience. For cantorial revivalists to achieve their musical goals they must interpolate audiences into an embodied emotional response to the musical cues of the prayer leader. Producing this kind of sacred music community, centered on the experience of listening to the archive, is a utopian aspiration that has not been realized by the revivalists, and perhaps cannot be achieved in the cultural climate of the American synagogue. This has not dissuaded singers from investing time and resources into self-cultivation of a musical practice with no clear home in the current moment.

Golden Ages: Brooklyn Chassidic Cantorial Revival Today, an album produced by Jeremiah Lockwood featuring some of the brightest voices in the Brooklyn cantorial scene, will be reissued in 2024.

Concerts of cantors featured in the book take place on an ongoing basis. Look out for a Germany tour in March 2024! A concert with Yanky Lemmer, Yoel Kohn and Shimmy Miller, produced, accompanied and featuring new string quartet arrangements by Lockwood, debuted at the 2022 Krakow Jewish Culture Festival.

Melody Like a Confession: a Cultural History of the Cantorial Gramophone Era

The term cantorial “golden age” signals a period of mediatization and popularization of Ashkenazi liturgical music in the transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish community from roughly the last decade of the 19th century to the decade following the Holocaust. In this period cantors moved ritual music out of synagogue spaces and into the newly emerging media sphere of concert stages, Yiddish theater, radio and, most crucially for the emergence of new practices of sacred listening, the gramophone record. Cantors of the golden age offered a model of a new form of Jewish personhood: an artist who moved between worlds of aesthetic achievement, performance, sensual pop culture iconography, engagement with the burning political ideologies of the period, and sacred authority.

My proposed second book project I am currently at work on, Melody Like a Confession, will constitute the first monograph on the cultural history of the transnational gramophone era cantorial phenomenon. This proposed book project will bridge archival research, ethnomusicological analysis, and a cultural studies approach steeped in the fields of performance studies and comparative literature. The project is premised on the view of cantorial music as both a form of expressive culture and an intellectual movement within a rapidly evolving period of social change and cultural reinvention. Cantorial music, in the eyes of its key practitioners and their critics on both sides of the Jewish Atlantic world, offered a populist response to modernization, state violence, and migration.

Presentation Prayer and Crime, December 2020, with Yoel Kohn and David Reich

In my previous dissertation research and book project, titled Golden Ages: Hasidic singers and cantorial revival in the digital era, I offered an ethnographic study of young singers in the Brooklyn Hasidic community who look to the cantorial golden age for the stylistic basis of their own aesthetic explorations. In my book I propose a view of their work as a non-conforming social practice within the conservative contemporary Hasidic community. Hasidic cantors call upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to stage a disruption in the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their community. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, golden age cantorial music offers a model for aspiring Hasidic singers of a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority were aligned. The work of these contemporary cantors offers clues about the meaning of the work of gramophone era cantors, suggesting that these historical figures offer a precedent for musical and social practices that defy institutional authority and push at normative boundaries of sacred and secular by foregrounding artist’s voices in the culturally intimate space of prayer.

I intend for my further research on “golden age” cantors to amend a lacuna in modern Jewish cultural history and contribute to broader interventions that advocate for a view of artists and aesthetics as needed elements in constructing histories of marginalized communities. Pursuing archival research about gramophone era cantors, I have made preliminary findings in the Yiddish press that suggest cantors were founts of passionate controversy, aesthetic partisanship, and fulcrums of communal fundraising and organizing in the immigrant community in the United States. Cantors and their critics debated the appropriateness of sound recording, performance outside of the synagogue, and the commercialization of the sacred. These themes in the cantorial sphere paralleled discussions among Yiddish authors about the dialectical role of literature and theater as forms of intellectual cultivation versus their potential impact as a degrading form of populism. Cantors engaged in cultivating a conception of Jewish memory that pivoted between nostalgic images of an imagined Jewish folkloric past and appeals to the ineffable and transcendent in music that would establish a Jewish aesthetic parallel to the achievements of European classical music. These aesthetic claims run parallel to contemporary Jewish political movements that pivoted between nationalism and socialism.

Artists in the cantorial market were often considered “outsiders” because of their lack of rabbinic pedigree or economic elite status. Cantorial stars were at times reviled by conservative critics for their lack of adherence to norms of religious orthodoxy, even as they were subjects of public adulation. The emergence of new media opened cantorial performance to artists with controversial identities, including women cantors, often referred to in Yiddish as khazentes. The khazente phenomenon, that seems to have begun in the 1910s, brought women cantors to the forefront of popularity, even as they were rejected as ritual leaders in synagogues. The study of the cantorial golden age will bring these important yet forgotten artists into the light of day and reevaluate the gendered history of liturgy and aesthetics by attending to their work.

Melody Like a Confession will address the central themes of the cantorial populist movement in thematically organized chapters. I have already completed a draft of a chapter on the khazentes, early 20th century women cantors. I have developed a prospectus and research agenda for the other chapters of the book. The proposed chapter are: an introduction that will offer a synthetic approach to the representation of cantors and their music in the Yiddish press and literature; a chapter focusing on the political commitments of cantors and their pivotal involvement as ideologues and fund raisers in labor union politics and Zionism; a chapter that will focus on the culture of chastisement and the ethical ambiguities that surrounded cantors as both preservers of sacred heritage and pop culture stars; and a final chapter that will look at the reception of the cantorial gramophone era in its various “afterlives” across the 20 th and 21 st centuries. This work will present an important reparative to the dearth of serious scholarship on an era that is referred to as a “golden age” and that plays an outsized and highly mythologized role in the conception of Jewish musical heritage. By placing cantors in dialogue with Yiddish literature and Jewish political movements, I will move the discussion of Jewish sacred music out of its current highly parochialized place and cultivate a more robust approach to this pivotal intellectual and aesthetic movement in Jewish life.

Live davenings: technologies of ritual learning and the convening of a Jewish sacred music underground

Forthcoming article in Jewish Social Studies.

At the onset of the 21st century, Jewish musicians from across a diverse array of communities have displayed a renewed interest in khazones, an aestheticized version of cantorial prayer leading associated with a mass mediated pop culture phenomenon in the early 20th century. This musical revival of a century old genre of prayer music has been facilitated in part due to a new accessibility of recordings of cantorial prayer performance through the internet. Surreptitiously collected field recordings of cantors at the pulpit, made in disregard for the rules of synagogue comportment, circulated for decades among a small group of collectors in an underground economy of homemade dubbed cassettes. These secret recordings, referred to as “live davenings,” usurp the characteristic ephemerality of prayer to document a 20th century aesthetic concept of cantorial music as an art form beyond its ritual function. In the past decade many of these recordings have surfaced on YouTube and file sharing sites, reaching an expanded audience, exposing a new generation to a largely abandoned style of liturgical performance. Through ethnography with elder field recording makers, internet-savvy collectors, and the artists who use the secrets in the live davening archive to build projects of cantorial revival, this article offers an examination of a body of archival material that has not previously been the topic of any scholarly investigation. This exploration of live davenings contributes to a fuller historical picture of the role media plays in determining what constitutes a reliable source of knowledge about Jewish sacred sound in America, arguing that electronically mediated prayer music serves as a form of prosthesis that repairs lost cultural intimacy, protecting against the perceived deterioration of tradition, a crisis that haunts both the cantorial profession and broader discourses within Jewish American culture.

Publications

BOOKS

Lockwood, Jeremiah. Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era. UC Press in the Jewish Cultures and History Series. 2024.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520396425/golden-ages

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

Lockwood, J. “Live davenings: technologies of ritual learning and the convening of a Jewish sacred music underground.” Jewish Social Studies. Forthcoming.

Lockwood, J. “Jewlia Eisenberg and Queer Piyut.” Contemporary Jewry. 2023.

Lockwood, J. “Hassidic Cantors ‘Out of Context’: Venues of Contemporary Cantorial Performance.” Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music. 2023.

Lockwood, J. “Prayer and crime: Cantor Elias Zaludkovsky’s concert performance season in 1924 Poland.” In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. 2022. https://ingeveb.org/articles/prayer-and-crime

Lockwood, J. “What is the cantorial ‘Golden Age’? hefker khazones (wanton cantorial music) or ‘the key to the Jewish soul’?” Cantors Assembly 75th Anniversary Journal. 2022. https://www.academia.edu/86287460/What_Is_the_Cantorial_Golden_Age_Hefker_Khazones_or_the_Key_to_the_Jewish_Soul_

Lockwood, J. “Prière et crime dans la Pologne de l’entre-deux guerre: L’agenda musical 1924 du chantre Elias Zaludkovsky.” Translated by Marie Schumacher-Brunhes. Germanica, no. 67. December 2020.

Lockwood, J. and Ari Kelman. "From Aesthetics to Experience: How Changing Conceptions of Prayer Changed the Sound of Jewish Worship." Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. 2020. https://www.academia.edu/85943555/From_Aesthetics_to_Experience_How_Changing_Conceptions_of_Prayer_Changed_the_Sound_of_Jewish_Worship

Lockwood, J. “A Cantorial Lesson: the lineage of a learning encounter.” Studies in American Jewish Literature, Special Issue, American Jews and Music, 2019. https://www.academia.edu/40580083/A_Cantorial_Lesson_The_Lineage_of_a_Learning_Encounter

Kirzane, J., et al. “Teaching Guide to Erotic Yiddish Poetry.” In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, 2019. https://ingeveb.org/pedagogy/teaching-guide-to-erotic-yiddish-poetry

Kelman, Ari Y., et al. “Safe and on the Sidelines: Jewish Students and the Israel-Palestine Conflict on Campus.” A study by the Research Group of the Stanford Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies, 2017.

BLOG

Conversations: Words and Music from the American Jewish Experience. Thirty-part series for the UCLA Milken Center for American Jewish Experience. 2021-2. https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/resources/conversations-words-music-from-the-american-jewish-experience/

BOOK REVIEWS

Lockwood, J. review of The Lost World of Russia’s Jews: Ethnography and Folklore in the Pale of Settlement. by Abraham Rechtman, Nathaniel Deutsch and Noh Barrera. Ab Imperio, 2022.

Lockwood, J. review of Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack. by Judah Cohen. Musica Judaica Online Reviews, 2020. https://mjoreviews.org/2020/10/30/jewish-religious-music-in-nineteenth-century-america-restoring-the-synagogue-soundtrack/

SELECTED JOURNALISM

Lockwood, J. “Performing the High Holidays,“ Tablet, 2021

Lockwood, J. “Golden Ages: Cantors and their Ghosts” Jewish Culture Festival: News, 2020

Lockwood, J. “Blues Man of the Dirt” Satellite Magazine, 2015

Lockwood, J. “Legendary Voices: The Education of the Great Cantors” Jewish Currents, 2014 https://archive.jewishcurrents.org/legendary-voices-the-education-of-the-great-cantors/

Lockwood, J. “Saving Bulgaria's Jews: Church, State and Citizens United” Jewish Currents, 2013

Lockwood, J. “Songs of Desert Wanderers”, Tablet, 2012

Lockwood, J. “Searching the Torah's Seams: A Roundtable” Shm'a, 2012

Lockwood, J. “A Year of Revolutionary Nigunim” The Jewish Daily Forward, 2011 https://forward.com/culture/134799/a-year-of-revolutionary-nigunim/

Lockwood, J. “The Shofar and the Power of Memory” Shm'a, 2010

Lockwood, J. “Out of Africa: Hazanut and the Blues” The Jewish Daily Forward, 2009

Lockwood, J. “What is Jewish Music?,” “What is a Cantor?,” “What is a Shofar?” My Jewish Learning , web video series, 2009