n is to let the leaders theorize and con- demn all they want. The people dancing at weddings know the truth. The teenager listening on her AirPods knows the truth. The Chassid who decided to learn the bass knows the truth. The klezmer and hazzanut of the future is the dance and synagogue music of today. when a tune’s composer is no longer known due to age or other vagaries of transmission over time. I used to think this was a cute way of approaching these songs, especially as many of them are fairly ubiquitous. Then I heard a haredi rabbi, in a presentation about high holiday prayer, describe these as the very mel- odies that the Israelites sang at Sinai. I resisted the urge to go up to him after- wards and ask if he really believed that these people, at their greatest moment of national revelation, were listening to songs based on 17th century folk scales from Eastern Europe. I now realize that the true answer to such a distorted understanding These writers and musicians know that their audience is aware of their greater cultural world. They may not be the most sophisticated creators of music, but they definitely have a knack for hearing sounds that might not be part of the culture and bringing them into the fold. There is a term that Jewish musicians and especially cantors like to use: Niggun MiSinai . This term, which translates to “a melody that comes from Sinai,” is used role of feminism in society more broadly in supporting these performers, empowering many of these women to find their voices. Music can be both a mirror held up to a society, revealing its values, as well as a doorway between cultures. The haredi community likes to think of itself as insulated and practicing unchanging, ancient traditions. But haredi music paints a completely different picture: one of a community that assimilates new ideas, sometimes slowly and sometimes with remarkable rapidity. However many rabbis might decry the sounds that are played at Jewish weddings—and certainly some do—those sounds aren’t going away. The community’s desires are clearly outweigh- ing any edicts. Then again, the sounds that have filtered in are selective: the absence of hip-hop influences in Contemporary Haredi telegraphs the community’s deep uneasiness with African-American culture. None of this exists in a vacuum.
Mordechai Ben David and Shmueli Ungar
Digital Age , by ethnomusicologist Jessica Roda, was published earlier this year; in it, Roda discusses how these women are being empowered and choosing to perform, even if for a limited audience. Some of these women—singers like Bracha Jaffe, who has YouTube videos with slick production values and plays large concerts—have significant followings in the community. Others choose to remain understated, circulating their music on private WhatsApp groups and using only their first names to avoid scrutiny. The remarkable thing about the phenomenon is that this genre of performer exists because of a confluence of factors both old and new, communal and secular. Historically, when women gathered for prayer in Ashken- azi communities, there was a chazente, or female prayer leader, who guided servi- ces even if they weren’t including parts of prayer that were traditionally limited to male minyans. Orthodox girls’ schools also have a long history of putting on plays or musicals, which is where many of the current crop of performers got their starts. But it would be impossible to ignore the
thing you’d expect to hear at a wedding. But maybe that’s what makes it interest- ing. Perhaps this is a community of young adults showing where they might be if not for religious boundaries—maybe wayward haredi youth actually sneak away to raves, or the weddings they dance at serve as a kind of analogue for that experience. It is, perhaps, a telling example of how culture can reveal a community’s actual prefer- ences over their stated ones. A few words about gender are warranted here. If all you knew about haredi music was what was played at weddings and in stores, you might well think that this world is male dominated. While the public-facing music is certainly exclusively male, there is a growing segment of haredi women that are making music to be listened to by other women. These women feel bound by the halachic concept that a woman’s sung voice should only be heard by other women, and are creating music within those boundaries, accepting traditional constraints but not being fully silenced. The book For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy through the Arts in the
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