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January 08, 2009

A Secret History of Jewish-American Music...

L.A. Weekly | Read Full Story >

Following a foreword by Neil Sedaka, Kun and Bennett cover 40 years’ worth of music, dating back to the 1940s and the liturgical albums by cantors who were treated like highly paid rock stars of their day. The 1950s saw the resurgence of the Yiddish language by way of Yiddish theater classics as pop tunes. “After the Holocaust, the population of Yiddish speakers was virtually destroyed,” says Kun. “In the U.S., there was an attempt to keep Yiddish alive and what that language was a part of, which was this enormously beautiful and thriving culture of literature and film and theater and the arts. After World War II, artists tried to keep that world alive, to try to jump-start a new interest in how these older songs could be remembered in new ways.”



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