Reviews

Antho­ny Rus­sell, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Verets­ki Pass (Joshua Horowitz on piano, Cook­ie Segel­stein on fid­dle, and Stu­art Brot­man on cel­lo), inter­twines Jew­ish East­ern Europe folk music and African Amer­i­can spir­i­tu­al traditions. 

Nov 06, 2018

William Pim­lott reviews Gill Tofel­l’s Jews, Cin­e­ma and Pub­lic Life in Inter­war Britain and Alan Dein’s Music is the most beau­ti­ful lan­guage in the World: Yid­dish­er Jazz in London’s East End 1920s-1950s.

May 23, 2019

In this ground­break­ing study, Lachs draws upon often ignored doc­u­ments of pop­u­lar cul­ture (con­ven­tion­al­ly writ­ten off as shund by her pre­de­ces­sors) in order to paint a vivid pic­ture of work­ing class immi­grant Lon­don at the turn of the 20^th century.

Nov 04, 2019

Despite the shift­ing sta­tus and pop­u­lar­i­ty of this Ashke­nazi instru­men­tal music and its musi­cians, Joel Rubin is, sur­pris­ing­ly, the first researcher to devote seri­ous and sus­tained atten­tion to one of its most impor­tant and pro­duc­tive peri­ods: New York in the 1920s, and in par­tic­u­lar the remark­able — and nowa­days canon­i­cal — record­ings of its two best-known and most influ­en­tial fig­ures, Dave Tar­ras (1895÷7−1989) and Naf­tule Brandwein (1884−1963).

Jan 26, 2022