Association of Jewish Libraries 2024 Conference San Diego

The Database of Recorded Jewish Music (DRJM), a project of the UCLA Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, is a multi-faceted research and discovery tool that provides both scholars and the public unprecedented access to five archival collections of recorded Jewish music held in United States institutions. This presentation will provide an introduction to the project, a demonstration of the interactive database visualization and analytical possibilities. Our aim is to share this work for the first time with the professional community of Judaica librarians and archivists from around the world with the idea of facilitating future partnerships, nationally and internationally.

Immigration and the Sound of American Jewry: How the Immigration Act of 1924 Affected the Production of Commercial Jewish Music Recordings--Jeff Janeczko
The 1920s was a fruitful decade for Jewish music in America: the Yiddish musical theater was in its heyday, European cantors were playing to sold-out crowds, Jewish composers were creating Jewish classical music while also making their mark on the American musical landscape, and Jewish songwriters on Tin Pan Alley helped create the American songbook. It was also a decade in which the growing music industry created and marketed "race records" to a country that was obsessed with both race and the technology of recorded music. A surge of musical recording activity that had been supported by a steady stream of new Eastern European Jewish immigrants collided with the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of new immigrants allowed into the U.S. to 2% of existing population estimates based on ethnicity (and excluded immigrants from Asia entirely). If, as William Howland Kenney argues in Recorded Music in American Life, musical recordings in late 19th and early 20th centuries played an important role in shaping "collective aural memories through which various groups of Americans were able to locate and identify themselves" (1999: xvii), how might this new law have altered the collective memory and identity of American Jewry? This paper utilizes the UCLA Database of Recorded Jewish Music to investigate a steep drop in the production of commercial Jewish music recordings that occurred in the years surrounding the passage of the 1924 immigration bill. It asks how politics influenced changes in the production of these recordings, and how the recordings reflected and influenced a population as it adapted to American life in the roaring twenties.

The Frequent Sounds of Sacred Jewish Music: The Uniqueness of Kol Nidre--Mark Kligman
Through analysis of titles in The Database of Recorded Jewish Music, “Kol Nidre” emerges as the most recorded title. Represented as a classical piece of music in Max Bruch’s Kol Nidre, written in 1880 for cello and orchestra, and vocal rendition for liturgical and non-liturgical contexts, an investigation of Kol Nidre is a unique example of Jewish recorded music. With over 500 recordings identified, this presentation will show 4 contexts of Kol Nidre (classical, liturgical, Yiddish Theatre, popular) there are many sonic aspects to explore and the context of its representation in films and popular culture. This presentation will utilize the analytical tools of the Database of Recorded Jewish Music to show a new way to do research in Jewish Music.

Gendered Voices of Home and Hopes for Tomorrow: Examining the Recorded Lullaby in Jewish Émigré Life through the Database of Recorded Jewish Music--Danielle Stein
The lullaby, a song used to soothe children to sleep, has also served as a vehicle for nostalgia and the aspirations of its creators and as such has been a popular genre for recording mediums. The recorded lullaby’s presence in Jewish émigré life is evidenced throughout the Database of Recorded Jewish Music (DRJM), a Digital Humanities project at UCLA. This database provides for an expansive investigation of the Jewish lullaby. Through a series of visualizations utilizing Tableau software, this paper examines Jewish immigrant domestic life, aspirations and anxieties, gendered listening and consumption practices, as well as the recording trends and hierarchies present in Jewish American life.