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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the director of Public programs of yivo, and we're very pleased to have you joining us today for Yiddish tangos and Klezmer mambos. This is a panel discussion that's a part of Carnegie Hall's Nuestros Sonidos Festival, which explores the impact of Latin American musical culture on culture in the United States. We're so pleased to bring you this program exploring that influence on Yiddish speaking communities in particular. And we have for your enjoyment, three wonderful scholars presenting. Ronald Rabboy is a musician and independent scholar based in San Diego, where he was a professional cellist for many years and Beginning in the 1970s, an early west coast experimentalist in the klezmer revival. He's written and lectured extensively on Yiddish theater Music, and in 1998 was named Senior researcher for Michael Tilson Tomaszewski project. In 2023, Raboy led YIVO Institute's reconstruction of the score to composer Joseph Rymszynski's operetta Shira Shiram. So we're going to first hear from Ron speaking about Yiddish theater music. And after Ron, we'll hear from Sonia Gallins. Sonia Gallins is Associate professor of Yiddish Studies at University College London. Her work focuses on Yiddish and German literature, dance, theater, and gender. She is the author of It Could Lead to Mixed Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She has taught at the University of Vienna, the Ohio State University, and the University of Guttingen, as well as klezmer festivals in Europe and North America. Finally, after Sonya, we will hear from Josh Kuhn. Josh Kuhn is a cultural historian, Author, Curator, and MacArthur Fellow. He is Vice Provost for the Arts at the University of Southern California, where he is professor and Chair in Cross Cultural Communications in the USC Annenberg School. Josh was also on the curatorial council for Carnegie Hall's Nuestro Sonidos Festival. And without further ado, I want to hand it over to Ron, who's going to get us started.
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Hello. I'm really, really excited and honored to be here and especially to be working with Sonia and Josh, whose writing I've been following for a long time. So this is great. The tango, of course, originated in Argentina and Uruguay in their capital cities, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where el tango, it is important to say, developed among descendants of enslaved Africans in those lands. Uruguay had abolished slavery in the 1840s, but in Argentina, where in the early years of the 19th century, up to a third of the population of Buenos Aires was reportedly black. Complete abolition was not achieved until 1861. During that time, maritime trade also brought Afro Caribbean sailors and culture to South America, and with it the Cuban habanera. That is, the habanera, with its inimitable rhythm, Dun da da da da da da da. Which not only became a rage in Europe. Think Carmen. Yeah, Carmen. But it also provided a germinal seed for the tango in South America. Histories of this are fascinating to read, but we are more concerned here with how a mania for the tango, or better said, a mania for the foreign stylization of the tango, how it arose and grew outside of South America. Conventional wisdom has it that the European tango, with its air of exotic danger and frank eroticism, first appeared in Paris, France, around 1945. From Paris, it spread across Europe and to North America and elsewhere in the world. In contrast to the rhapsodic fluidity of the Argentine tango, though, the international version, as much as I confess I love it, is more of a melodramatic caricature. With its stiff armed pacing back and forth, the tango must have reached the Yiddish stage from several directions. International tango mania certainly appeared in New York early on, and the dance's first documented appearance on the Polish stage, for example, was in 1913 in a Warsaw production of the Marriage Market and operated by Victor Jacoby, a Hungarian Jew. Be assured, just as there were plenty of Jewish musicians in Warsaw playing tangos and everything else that was in popular demand, the same was true in Buenos Aires, where Yiddish speaking Jews had been immigrating in increasingly large numbers. At the same time, in New York, after the close of their season, many Yiddish actors and musicians would create year round work for themselves by touring to South American Jewish population centers during June through August, that is, during the height of the season in the Southern hemisphere. We know that they networked and performed with their colleagues in Buenos Aires and elsewhere, and exposure to the tango culture was inevitable. Tangentially, I must add that the tango remained extremely popular among Yiddish speaking Jews in Eastern Europe, where Jewish songwriters were adapting and composing new ones right up to and including the years of the Holocaust. It has been documented that many of these were sung by doomed inhabitants of the ghettos and camps to the end. The earliest tango I can think of from the New York Yiddish stage is Mein Yiddishe Medela, My Jewish Girl, with music by Sholem Secunda, whose name parenthetically is best known for having composed. He's best known for having composed the song by Mirbistu Shane his tango came earlier in his 1927 operetta Sein Yiddishe Medel, his Jewish girl. The character who sings it is a Russian army officer in love with a young Jewish woman. The scandal and frisson of a taboo intermarriage is rendered moot when he learns he is really a Jew. Lucky surprise. Bear in mind this is an operetta. It's not Ibsen or Tolstoy, but when he first sings this song, the lovers still think he is a Russian. And the unkosher thrill of the tango reflects the thrill of and is a metaphor for their forbidden love. This clip is from a period recording by the singer William Schwartz. In 1934. Composer Abraham lstein and theater star Molly Pecan, who were both American born, collaborated on a Yiddish musical that featured the devastating tango Eugen. Eugen means eyes, and recordings of it from that era are scant. But in more recent years it has become especially popular and more and more performances of it, not only in North America, but in Europe, in Israel and even Buenos Aires, are showing up on YouTube every time I look. This is the Argentine Shantus zulli Goldfarb in 2006.
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Foreign.
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The same year as Eugen and I can imagine this is not coincidental. Elsteen's friend and rival Alexander Olshanyetsky wrote a very suave tango for another operetta in New York. It was more plausibly of the kind that the greatest tango singer ever, the the uber romantic Carlos Gardel, might have been singing in South America at that time than it was of the caricatured tango mania sort. Olshanytsky's operetta, on the other hand, about a Roma fortune teller who falls in love with a Jew, but when she reads his fortune she learns he will love another. That plot was as hackneyed as the one about the Russian officer who learns he's a Jew. But Olshanetsky's tango Li I love you too much was first rate and became a classic. Its lyrics were by the singer and actor Chaim Tauber, who was one of the finest lyricists in the Yiddish theater. To my ear, his words to the well known song Shane v D Livona comprise what may be the finest lyric of any Yiddish theater song. In Ichabdich tzufi Elieb Tauber's lyric is pitch perfect, dramaturgically speaking, I love you too much, I carry no hate toward you. That's how the song's chorus opens, though we wonder if it means exactly the opposite of what it's saying, because later in the song's bridge, the fortune teller ominously adds, my thoughts turn not to vengeance. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Here is a recording of the superb singer Seymour Rechtseit. Obscured in its lush arrangement, though, is the song's origin as a tango. An arrangement I made for String Trio some years ago, based on the song's original published sheet music, brings out its tango ness, I hope in a way that Rechtseit's vocal recording did not. This audio clip, recorded live with consumer electronics but played beautifully, is from an in school outreach performance by my former colleagues in the San Diego Symphony. Notice especially the habanero rhythm that Olshinecki wrote for the bass line. We will return to I love you too much, time permitting, but but before we do that, listen to a bit of another tango Liebe, meaning love. Abe Elstein wrote it probably in the 1930s and again with lyrics with Molly Pecan. Again a fine recording by Seymour Rechtseit.
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Sit in breath for a deal.
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After the Second World War, probably even more than tango's Afro Cuban music, mambos, roombas, cha cha chas were becoming the rage in North America, as I anticipate we'll be hearing lots more about from Sonia and Josh. But it was also a moment when Yiddish novelty recordings came to the fore. The actor and songwriter Jack Rechtseit wrote this over the top number Tango Margarita for his brother Seymour to sing.
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Senorita.
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Composer Joseph Rumshinsky, a generation older than the others we've heard, was in the twilight of a long career when he wrote this song Dina, which means yours for an operetta in 1950. I think it was conceived of by Rumshinsky as a Roomba, though it's doubtful many actual Cuban rumberos would have recognized it as such.
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Lord God,
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Let's return now to Olshany's Tango. There is a classic story by the Yiddish writer Il Perritz entitled A gilgulfhenanygen, meaning the transmigration of a tune. The story follows the changes that happen to a melody and to those who sing it or play it as it is passed along from one performer to the next across time and across locales. We can trace something similar in Yecheb dich Zufili. Songwriter Don Ray, best known for Beat Me Daddy Ate to the Bar, who was not Jewish and certainly did not grow up speaking Yiddish, nonetheless wrote an English language lyric for Ichab Dich Zufil Lieb, titling it not I love you too much, but I love you much too much. Beginning in 1940, big band vocalists began recording it and many covers appeared across the next few decades. This one was by Gene Krufa and his orchestra with celebrity vocalist Irene Day.
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I love you much too much
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I've
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known it from the start
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but yet my love is such I can't control my heart I love you much too much.
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On his 1962 LP Cha Cha de Amor, singer and Rat Pack regular Dean Martin sang Middle of the Road crooner Fair in Nelson Riddle's Latinized arrangements, mambos, cha cha chas, all deriving from Hispanic Afro Caribbean culture. Here I love you too much too much is treated as a stylized cha cha cha. I love you much too much
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I've
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known it from the start
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but yet my love is such a much I can control my heart. I have no idea if anyone associated with this recording knew the song had begun as a tango. But there they were, reuniting the deracinated English incarnation of the Yiddish original to some kind of Latinidad, that is, to a kind of Latinness in a full circle that Yitzchak Leibish Perlitz might have appreciated. To take it even further, Carlos Santana, the exemplar from the hippie era and beyond of rock, blues, Latin jazz fusion, put his cover of Olshinecki's tune on his Zibop an LP in 1981,
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Though
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on the album it was titled I love you much too much, suggesting the English lyrics. There were no vocals on it, so it was really just Olshanetsky's melody, Ichab dich tzufil lieb returning, if not as a tango, then at least returning to a certain Latinidad that I would characterize as Hispanic plus. But it was also an emiser gjilgulfenanigl, a true transmigration of a Yiddish tango. Thank you very much. See you guys.
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What a great presentation and such lovely music. So thank you for the introduction and it's really great to be on a panel with Ron and Josh. We'll start by continuing with this theme of tangos. In 1948, a Polish born American writer named Samuel Burshin wrote a short piece in Yiddish called Dermaskin Ball von Verdorbenheit, or in English, the masked ball of depravity. Not surprisingly, given its title, this story describes the most decadent masquerade ball scene I've found in Yiddish literature. And I say this as someone who has built a career on finding bonkers scenes of dance and literature. More specifically for our purposes, this sketch contains a particularly memorable tango Scene. I'd like to share it with you now. Picture a vast stateroom with women dressed as famous ancient queens and goddesses and our masked narrator having fun dancing with them. Bershtein writes, my gaze fell upon an Aphrodite. She nodded her head yes and I took her for the dance. We danced a melodious, passionate tango which dramatized free love and eroticism. Fragrant perfume wafted around us in harmony with the music and general elegance of the environs. The orchestra began a waltz and we moved in new forms of musical expression. The waltz completed. I said adios mexicano to the refined lady and took myself on a people watching stroll around the grand hall. Venus approached me and gave me a smile. I bowed to her and took her for a dance. A lyrical tango played full of longing, which dramatized an unhappy, impossible love. I moved slowly in time with the wonderful, melodious music and said to the majestic Venus that she should not lose her hands like the Venus de Milo in the Musee du Louvre in Paris. She understood my remark, intelligently smiled and sang a song with passion and great gusta. Bershtein describes these tangos as passionate dances between men and women that were danced at a ball attended by Jewish sophisticates. Even if there is nothing about this passage that seems particularly Jewish other than the fact that it was originally written in Yiddish, there are more references to classical mythology than to Jewish culture. The narrator welcomes the opportunity to dance a tango and throw out a Spanish phrase. And indeed, Latin dances such as tango's were internationally popular with Jewish dancers in the United States and in Europe. But part of the thrill of dancing tangos was a sense that this kind of intimate partner dance might mark a break from traditional Jewish culture or demonstrate a fun, athletic form of physical expression that was identified with cosmopolitanism. Research on the dances of Yiddish speaking Jews has tended to focus on documentation of East European dance traditions and Hasidic dance styles, rather than Jewish performances of social dances that were popular in the United States. Even in my own research, I've tended to focus more on swing than on salsa. My talk today represents some of my initial findings about a topic that isn't very well studied. Although there are other examples, such as a documentary I'll be mentioning soon, that does shed light on this matter. And if anyone in the audience has personal knowledge about Jews and Latin dance choreography, I'd welcome that in the Q and A. That being said, there are several reasons why Latin dances thrilled Jewish dancers. First of all, these dances were generally popular with everyone, including Jews. The tango originated in Argentina and Uruguay and became a worldwide ballroom sensation in the 1910s. Yiddish writer Herr Stobed Nurnberg was famous for tangoing with married women at the association of Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw on 13 Tomatsky street as pictured in this rather well known cartoon and also just really wonderful in terms of what it says about the connection between tangos and modern Jewish culture. We also have examples of Polish tangos with lyrics in Yiddish from the inter war period and even examples, as Ron mentioned, of songs that were reworked with a darker meaning during the Holocaust. The competitive, acrobatic Cuban mambo similarly swept through ballrooms in the late 1940s and 1950s, particularly after Maxwell Hyman, the Jewish owner of the New York Palladium Ballroom, introduced Latin music and racially integrated his club. In the 1940s, the palladium became the center of Afro Cuban music. Lex Gillespie's 2019 documentary film the Mamboniks tells the story of American Jews known as Mamboniks based on the title, who were avid mambo dancers in the 1950s. Historians sometimes refer to a mambo craze in the 1910s. Sorry, historians often refer to a tango craze in the 1910. A mambo craze in the 1950s. Latin dances were tremendously popular and performing them was a sign of being modern and fashionable. At the same time, Jewish dancers may have considered these dances to be particularly transgressive or exotic. Latin dances could be regarded as risque because they were identified with a sensuality that might have seemed to contrast starkly with traditional Jewish dance idiom. As Karen Goodman has noted, Polish born American Jewish choreographer Nathan Vazanski claimed in a 1930 Yiddish language article about Jewish folk dance that Jewish folk dances invoked different emotions than non Jewish dances. In Vazanski's view, Jewish dance was not dominated by passion, but instead emphasized gentle humor, biting satire and deep tragedy. Furthermore, according to him, Jewish dances were spiritual and focused on hand gestures, in contrast to non Jewish dances, which he regarded as earthy and focused on footwork. Although Vazansky does not specifically listen to Latin dances when he mentions non Jewish dances, Latin dances are often associated more with earthly or typically associated more with earthly passion than with satire or tragedy. Yet this emotional tone was not the only aspect of Latin dances that might have seemed foreign or daring to Jewish dancers. I'd like to take some time here to talk about my research on the traditional Jewish prohibition on mixed dancing, since part of what makes Latin couples dances exciting is the thrill of intimate communication with A dance partner. For centuries, rabbis have forbidden Jewish men and women from dancing together, often in colorful terms. The fact that these prohibitions had to be frequently repeated suggests that Jews defied communal religious laws. They also found ways around them, such as by dancing with a separating handkerchief. Prior to the era of emancipation, Jewish authorities were primarily concerned with the potential for sexual transgression within the Jewish community, such as adultery. Yet by the late 18th century, in Western Europe and and later further east, mixed dancing was frequently identified with values from outside the traditional Jewish community and, in short, identified with the changes wrought by modernity. Dancing was an important social accomplishment for upwardly mobile and politically radical Jews alike during the long 19th century, including journalist Abraham Khan and anarchist Emma Goldman. Like military service and athletics, dancing demonstrated that Jews could properly discipline their bodies, yet in a way that challenged traditional gender segregation. Social dance was a courtship activity that invited dancers to evaluate the stamina, grace, and physical connection they felt with their dancing partners. Young people could dance and flirt with individuals whom their parents might deem inappropriate marriage partners, and they could form relationships based on attraction or mutual interests instead of shared communal values. As a result, writers of literary fiction and religious authorities treated mixed dancing as a symbol of the social changes that transformed Jewish communities in the modern era. Immigration was one of the factors that changed Jewish communities, and a particularly crucial one for our focus on American Jewish communities. In the period between Tsar Alexander II's assassination in 1881 and the restrictive immigration act of 1924, two and a half million Jews from Russia, Poland, the Austro Hungarian Empire, and Romania immigrated to the United States. Dances were an extremely popular form of entertainment for immigrants in this period, including Eastern European Jews. Whether in commercial dance halls or neighborhood associations, dancing academies, or saloons, writers identified dance spaces with youthful revelry and American capital capitalism. But it would be difficult to talk about American Jewish leisure culture without mentioning the Catskills. From the turn of the 20th century through the 1970s, there were hundreds of resorts, hotels, summer camps, boarding houses, and bungalow colonies in New York's Catskill Mountains that catered to a Jewish clientele, giving the region the moniker the Borscht Belt. The Borscht Belt heyday of the 1940s to 1960s corresponded with a period in which Latin dancing was extremely popular. Young people regarded these summer vacation sites as a prime location for courtship and flirtation, which frequently took place on the dance floor to a Latin soundtrack. As entertainer Jack Eagle put it, quote, latin music was created by the Cubans and Puerto Ricans, but somehow the Jewish people became addicted to it. Every hotel had a mambo teacher. End quote. Catskill's veterans described the way Latin music seemed to transform Jewish hotel guests. Lou Goldstein, social director at the famous Grossinger's Catskills Resort Hotel, recalled how some resort guests would walk down the corridor to the nightclub or looking physically awkward, then, quote the Latin music would start and all of a sudden they'd come to life. They'd run to their instructors, start dancing, and somehow they would become taller and sleeker as they moved to the music. End quote. Concord orchestra leader Altieri observed, quote Latin music gives a girl a chance to undulate, to move more than anything else. You'd see a smartly dressed woman dancing the cha cha or the merengue or the mambo, and you'd see something very sensuous. End quote. Jackie Horner, a mambonik who worked as a professional dancer at Grossinger's starting in 1953, recalled the popularity of Latin dances. Quote Latin was all the craze. Rumba had come in during the 1940s and was still going strong, but everybody wanted mambo and cha cha. Merengue and bossa nova came in a bit later, around 1963. End Quote While every hotel had a dance team, Grossinger's and the Concorde had the biggest, biggest dance staffs. With 10 teachers working at Grossinger's every summer, dance teachers would would teach each day from 9:30am to 6pm before going to Mambo Night before. So he would teach each day from 9:30am to 6pm rehearse from 7pm to 9pm perform a 10pm show, then dance with pupils from 11pm to 1pm before going to Mambo Night at a local restaurant or club, dancers would show off dances like the tango and samba until four or five in the morning, with the dancers catching a few hours of sleep before starting all over again at 9am the next morning. As Horner recalled, quote, it was a gold mine. I made maybe $20 a day and worked my took us off, but I loved it. End quote. She described how dancers had a lot of closet space in their accommodations for their many costumes and added that they were able to get good deals on clothing because so many resort guests worked in the garment trade. For Horner and other catskills Veterans, the 1987 romantic film Dirty Dancing was an important cultural reference point. They confirmed that many aspects of the film corresponded to their memories of the Borscht Belt. The film demonstrated how mixed dancing, in this case Latin dancing, could still be a radical act in the 1970s 60s at a time when idealistic young people like protagonist Francis Baby Hoffman, the housemen, were becoming civil rights activists and protesting the Vietnam War. Set at a Catskills Resort in 1963, the film portrays an interethnic relationship between bourgeois Jewish resort guest Baby and working class dance instructor Johnny Castle. When the film begins, Baby's doting father brags that she is going to change the world. Yet Baby has very little control over her own body. She performs awkwardly in a merengue class, and when the instructor tells the female students to each choose a male dancing partner, Baby is shown leading an elderly woman instead, seemingly incapable of claiming a space for herself as a heterosexual woman on the dance floor. And later that evening, she dances with the resort owner's obnoxious grandson. And even though he brags about being such a good catch, his behavior on the dance floor suggests he's not really a matched partner. He's not skillful, he's not attentive, and he's unable to prevent another dancer from bumping into Baby on the crowded dance floor. Johnny, in contrast, effortlessly clears a wide space for himself and his mambo partner at the center of the dance floor, and so they're able to show off their dance moves without getting jostled by the other dancers. It is only when Johnny starts teaching Baby to dance to prepare for a mambo dance competition that she learns to relax, feel comfortable in her own body and develop her sexual confidence. Johnny's most famous line from the movie, when he tells Baby's parents nobody puts Baby in the corner before he publicly dances with her, is a claim that he is better able to respect her space and autonomy than is her family. His statement shows how mixed dancing could be seen as a way for women to experience pleasure and public recognition with male partners. That would have been impossible within the social constraints imagined for them by their parents. The film suggests Latin dancing is a challenge to even liberally minded bourgeois Jewish values because it breaks down ethnic and class barriers, since Johnny is working class and presumably not Jewish. Yet ultimately, the film does so in a way that even Baby's parents can enjoy, since they and all the other resort guests end up joining in Baby and Johnny's dance finale. So we get a happy end. The continued popularity of Dirty Dancing today shows the continued resonance of Latin dancing and the universality of a story about young love and finding confidence on the dance floor. It also suggests that a story set in a Jewish resort where the Afro Cuban band leader uses Yiddish to chat with the Jewish owner can have a broad appeal. Both a summer resort like in Dirty Dancing and a decadent masked ball like in Burstein's story, are places where people can escape temporarily from their everyday lives and have some fun. And as probably all mamboniks would agree, these Latin dances can be a great deal of fun. Or as Jackie Horner put it, recalling the heyday of the Catskills, quote, it was mambo time and it was a more innocent time. And that in itself was wonderful. End quote. Thank you.
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Hello everybody. Sonia and Ron, thank you so much for those wonderful presentations. Thrilled to be joining this conversation. So I wanted to actually just start by addressing what we might call the white Jewish elephant in the room, which is that work on these topics has been dominated for decades by white Jewish scholars, myself included. But so much of the on the ground theorization of so many of these histories has actually come from Latino musicians themselves. I'm thinking especially of Ellie Palmieri, Roberto Juan Rodriguez, who's made albums like El Danson de Moises, musicians like Arturo o', Farrell, who I was excited to collaborate with on staging a concert called Mazel to Mis Amigos, which is a concert featuring Arturo with Andy Gonzalez, Larry Harlow and others back in 2009 at Lincoln center, but also more recently by Latino scholars. And I'm thinking specifically of Benjamin Lapidus work, really important book, New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, which I hope people go and seek out. It's a really detailed and definitive history of so many of these topics. So I want to offer my remarks today in the spirit of that ongoing dialogue. A lot of the music that I'll probably not be able to get to, but I'll reference quickly you can find on a 2 CD compilation that I helped produce many years ago now called It's a Scream How Levine does the Rumba. And you can find that floating out there on the Internet somewhere. So I wanted to start with two musical moments that put the breadth and depth of what I'm thinking about as Latino Jewish musicalities into prime relief. We can start here, ladies and gentlemen, good evening.
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With the playing of their theme, the Grossinger Hotel takes great pride in presenting Tito Puente and his world famous orchestra.
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This is from 1959 when legendary Spanish Harlem raised Puerto Rican band leader and timbale master Tito Puente headlined the grand ballroom at Grossinger's Hotel, that flagship Jewish mountain resort in the Catskills that we just heard so much about. It was not the first time that Tito Puente and his world famous orchestra had played for the vacationing Jewish masses at Grossinger's but it was the first time that one of the Sullivan County Catskill sessions was was recorded and soon after released by his label RCA Records as a full length album Cha Cha with Tito Puente at Grossingers. Now the song you hear is actually an ode to the resort grossinger's Cha Cha Cha. It's one indication of just how central as we've already heard that Catskill's resorts had become as reliable gigs for Latin bands ever since the Concord Hotel's booking agent Al Beckman first went to Havana in 1938 and came back convinced that the mountains needed mambo. And after that the Catskills, as Sonia really pointed out, became the so called mecca for Latin music, including major major Latino musicians and Latino band leaders like the great iconic Afro Cuban band leader Machito, who released his own testament to Latino Jewish vacation intermingling on Kiamisha Lake called Vacation at the Concord which came complete with photos of Concord golf pro Jimmy Demeret and swimming director Buster Krabs and Machito's own resort specific mambo about the hotel itself. When La Plata Sextet recorded their Swings at the Raleigh Hotel album, it only made sense for them to include the Catskill Cha Cha and Puerto Rican pianist and band leader Johnny Conquette. The image for this album was the theme image for this event. Took the Latin Jewish Catskill synergy the farthest with 1958's raisins and almonds, Cha Cha Cha and Merengues, a studio recording that was marketed as a live Catskill show in the fictional Cha Cha chateau of the of the make believe Merengue Manor resort hotel. The album's liner notes were printed as a Catskills hotel newsletter, the Nasherai News and Conquette performed songs like Matzo Ball Merengue. When Tito Puente put together that opening set that I started with for his 1959 Catskills recording, he was so aware of this Jewish musical Latino filia that he included two curious songs on his set list. The Miami Beach Rumba and Manana Nicaragua, two Afro Cuban inspired compositions written not by Tito Puente but by Irving Fields. Puente playing Irving Fields was one of Latino Jewish circuitry's greatest loops. There's a little bit of Tito playing Irving Fields. When Tito Puente played for the Jews, he played a Jewish musician, Fields playing Latin. Irving Fields most famous composition, Miami Beach Roomba began as a waltz, his own takeoff on the French staple Autumn leaves. But in 1946 when Irving Fields, who got his start the Yiddish theater, performed his Autumn Leaves at the Versailles Hotel in Miami beach for mostly Jewish audience. Their demand for his Latin inspired piano composition forced a mid song transformation of Autumn Leaves into a Roomba, which Fields soon called the Miami Beach Roomba with bilingual Spanish and English lyrics. When Fields was first signed to Decca Records to record it, he was signed to their purple Latin label, but not as Irving Fields, he was signed as Campos and Pianista, literally Fields, the piano player. That Tito Puente would perform the song at Gross Singers was no surprise. It was Tito Puente who arranged that song into a hit single for none other than Xavier Cugat when Cugat recorded it in 1947. The second musical moment I wanted to start with Today is from 1967 when the Bronx born Puerto Rican pianist and band leader Pete Rodriguez recorded a song originally written by two fellow Puerto Rican New Yorkers, Tony Pabon and Manu Rodriguez. And it went like this.
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Let me say this now, here and
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now let's get this fate.
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I Like it like that instantly became the upper unofficial anthem of Boogaloo, that uniquely New York City collision of Afro Cuban rhythms with RB and soul. The song was engineered by Fred Weinberg, the Colombian born son of Jewish refugees who also worked with Jose Feliciano, Mongo, Santa Maria, La Lupe, Eddie Palmieri and Weinberg, who you see on the left, I believe, of your screen, was one of several Jewish engineers who became foundational to the mixing consoles and mixing boards of Latin studio sessions, including other engineers like Irv Greenbaum, who is a veteran of sessions with Candido, Sonora, Poncena, Joe Bataan, Willie Colon and many more. And of course the legendary John Fausti, who as the house engineer for Fania Records, helped shape the sound of the biggest names in salsa music. I Like it like that was produced by Francisco Morris Mori Pelzman, better known as Pancho Cristal, a Polish Jewish Cuban who took a Cuban beer brand for his last name. And he was Everywhere on the 1960s New York salsa scene. He was a producer for Tico Records, an enabler of Tito Puente, Mongo Santa Maria, a liaison to La Lupe. He was the ultimate salsa power broker who received his own tribute from Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz, who actually wrote a song about him as a kind of Pied Piper of the Wangwango, who was leading Descargas to the stage of the Village Gate. I Like it like that was released on Allegra Records, the pioneering New York Latin music label founded by Bronx record store owner Al Santiago and the Jewish clothing entrepreneur Ben Perlman, who ran Grossman's Clothes, which was next door to Santiago's record store, Allegra, was one of a Number of key 60s indie labels specializing in Latin music that were helmed by New York Jews. There was Sydney, Single, Sydney Siegel, who's Casa Siegel. General Store in East Harlem was soon parlayed into Seco Records, a label he dedicated to the finest in Latin American recordings. Seco Records actually built consumer bases in both New York and in Cuba and Puerto rico. And in 1954 they released the first Latin recording ever on a 12 inch LP. There was also Teco Records, a joint venture of Art Pancho Raymond, the Yiddish music radio star turned Latin music radio star, and George Goldner, the ragman turned rock and roll music man. And then there was Fiesta, the 1950s Latin American label created by composer, arranger and musician Jose Morand, who, depending on which account you believe, was born as either Jack Morand or Jack Cooper and was originally a Jewish kid from Brooklyn. Finally, I Like it like that became popular with a great boost from plays on WebD radio by the New York born son of Yiddish speaking immigrants, Sidney Tarnipel, better known as Symphony Sid, the best known of a crew of prominent Jewish radio DJs including Art Pancho Raymond, Dick Ricardo Sugar, who were some of Latin music's most important on air influencers. Which is all to say, every time you hear I Like it like that, yes, you are hearing an anthem of Latino New York, but you are also hearing a note in this whole other network we've been hearing about already today, the Latino Jewish nexus that for stretches of the 1950s and 70s was an indispensable driver of post World War II Latin music in New York, but also in Los Angeles. So on the surface, there's nothing Jewish about I Like it like that, but it is a song that wouldn't have become what it became without Jews and Latinos making things together. Both Tito Puentes, Miami Beef Roomba and Pete Rodriguez's I Like it like that are born of an influential musical and social ecosystem of influence, collaboration and industry. What we might call emergent Latino Jewish musicalities. Now, I'm using the term emergent musicalities in the spirit of recent work by the pianist, composer and music scholar Vijay Iyer, who explores musicality as something that precedes and exceeds music itself. For Iyer, when we talk of music, we're talking about embodied human interaction. The quote, sound of people listening to each other, listening bodies interacting in sensorium, bodies in relation. The social, he says, is not an element that gets added to music after the fact, that rather it is humankind's being together, our sociality that conditions music making in the first place. So we might take the music of I Like it like that in Miami Beach Roomba and understand it instead as a record of embodied human interactions between Jews and Latinos. Specific groups of people doing things together in particular places at Catskill's Ballroom, a Miami beach hotel, a New York City recording studio, and at a particular time, 1959, 1967. These embodied human interactions include multiple actions that preceded the music we just listened to and that ultimately exceeded the conversation, the dancing, the tours, the live shows, all the fans, all their dancing, all their conversation, and so much more. These two songs open up a door to this big, expansive and complicated world of Latino Jewish musicalities. With the humorist Harry Golden. Golden once defined as the actual history of Jews in America. The history of Jews in America, he wrote From Sha Shah to Cha Cha. That history, from Shasha to Chacha, from Shasha to Rumba, from Shasha to Mambo, from Shasha to Boogaloo, from Shasha to Salsa is vast and I do not have time to cover it all today. You can check out some of the music on It's a Scream, Halloween does the Rumba. But you get all kinds of different figures like the great trombonist Barry Rogers playing with Willie Colon and Eddie Palmieri. You get the trombonist and flutist Mark Weinstein recording Cuban roots. You get the great Larry Harlow El Judio Marivilloso who recorded over 50 albums for Fun Your Records and produced over 100 of them including 1978's La Raza Latina, a salsa suite and salsa's first opera, a Latin opera. It includes the Brooklyn born Abigail Abby Lane Lastman's collaborations with Tito Puente and the Bronx born Sephardic singer Edie Gourmet becoming a household name across Latin America through her landmark recordings with the New York City formed Mexican Puerto Rican trio Los Banchos. It includes Joe Quijano doing Fiddler on the Roof Goes Latin. It records figures like Alfredo Mendez Mendelssohn and Alfredito Levy and the Argentinian Jew Israel Wittenstein. Wurm, better known as Carlos Argentino, includes Jewish musicians who recorded tributes to the Jewish love of Latin music like Ruth Wallace and the Barton Brothers. It includes dozens of versions of Hava Nagila by Latino musicians including Perez Prado and Celia Cruz. And it includes this crazy album that everyone should go listen to that I'm happy and proud to say that I was a part of Reissuing, which was a supergroup of 1950, a 50s faux Latino Jewish supergroup named Juan Calle and his Latin Lancemen, who were not landsmen at all. Juan Calle was Italian American banjo player John Cali. And the Lansmann were Ray Barreto, Willie Rodriguez, Charlie Parmietti, Doc Cheatham and Clark Terry. I want to just briefly make clear that this was not just an east coast thing. Similar musical exchanges were happening here in Los Angeles, where I'm based and from, though in very different contexts with groups like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass artists. There's a responses to Herbal and the Tijuana Brass, Al Tijuana and His Jewish Brass and the Yeshiba Brass, and artists like Don Tosti, a Mexican American Chicano artist who recorded a number of songs with bits of Yiddish mixing with Spanish. And finally, Rene Bloch, who went as. Who was known as Mr. Latin, who's a son of French Jews, was raised in Mexico, whose parents were raised in Mexico, and then he was raised in South Los Angeles. So how do. I'll just end by asking this question about how do we account for these. This Jewish love of Latin music that we've been hearing about and that helped inspire all of these emergent Latino Jewish musicalities? So the theories have abounded. There's what we might call the diasporic genetic memory theory that traces these stories back to 15th century Spain and centuries of colonial displacement and encounter, these histories of musical kinship and musical solidarity. There's the minor key theory that both Jews and Latinos both love a good minor key. And that minor key has helped connect their musical sensibilities over many, many decades. And then there's the neighborhood theory, where we look at neighborhoods like the Spanish Heart, like Spanish Harlem, like the Bronx, like Boyle Heights or South Los Angeles, that it was in these neighborhoods where Jews and Latinos were living side by side, rubbing shoulders, exchanging music, exchanging food, listening to similar radio, joining each other's bands and groups and influencing each other. But finally, the theory that I have returned to the most in my work is that in post World War II America, and speaking about Ashkenazic Jews, this is a group who were in limbo between racial. Between being racial others and assimilated white Americans. So that going Latin was a way of staying an outsider in American culture without becoming a white American. So Jews could go Latin in order to go Jewish. In the vast majority of Jewish Latino musical experiments, the goal was not to erase one's Jewishness, it was to reimagine it and reinvent it. And I'll end by Just mentioning that a masterpiece of this story, albeit a deeply novelty one, is The Berry Sisters 1952 version of Chana From Havana. It tells the story of how, after a 10 day cruise to Havana, away from her husband, whom she's left back in Miami, Channa becomes a cubophile. Now all she wants to do is dance mambo on the cha cha cha. Now she calls her bubala bubalu. And her newfound love of Cuban music convinces Channa that she doesn't need need her husband. And so she and she falls for a Latino man. Not a Cuban, though. A Mexican or a Mexicaner. Yet just when Chana thinks she has left her life as Hana Cohen of Miami behind the Barry Sisters pull a typical Jewish Latin craze trick. It turns out that the Mexicaner is actually Sam Shapiro, another Jew who went Latin to find himself. Not to mention that all the while the song's Latin shuffle is continually interrupted by a blaring old school Eastern European klezmer Freylach that fades in and out but never goes away. Just like her new Mexican man, Channa's new Cuban identity is still a Jewish one. So maybe Perry Goldin got it half right. The cha cha was not displaced by the cha cha, it was reimagined by it. The cha cha was the new cha cha, the sound of Jews performing themselves through someone else's music. A new way of keeping time with the shifting geographies of Jewish American identity. Thank you.
- [54:42]
D
I say stop or else it's goodbye. She says, I, I, I live by mention.
- [54:50]
B
Thank you so much, Josh. Thank you, Sonia, and thank you, Ron. These have been really fascinating talks and we just have a few minutes for Q and A. But before we dive into that, I just want to say dovetailing with Josh mentioned Arturo o', Farrell, and we have a concert with his Afro Latin jazz ensemble here at yivo that's coming up. That's also a part of the Nuesho Sonidos festival, so I encourage you to come hear them in person. Really fantastic ensemble. And they'll be playing some repertoire from, from his father, kind of inspired by his father's experience of playing Latin American arrangements of Jewish melodies and vice versa in the Borschfeld. So it's amazing material. Come check that out. And in just our last five or ten minutes here, let's dive into questions. If you have questions, put them in the Q and A. And I've got some questions myself. So coming back to Josh, what you were just saying about this particular point of contact between like Jewish American and Latin American experience of different ways of being kind of not quite other, having a special connection between these groups. And Sonia, you spoke about, you know, Latin American dance being this particular, having a particular kind of effect on Jewish communities with their kind of prescriptions about dancing. So I want to pose the question to all of you that what do you think is kind of like those things distinctive about the Jewish encounter with this music? Right. Because this culture, as many of you noted, was taking America by storm in general. And that's what this Carnegie Hall Festival is about. So what else can you say about the distinctive Jewish encounter with it, aside from the wonderful repertoires, obviously, of, you know, music that came out of that encounter?
- [56:50]
A
Who's to speak?
- [56:53]
B
Would you like me to get us started?
- [56:56]
A
Yeah, no, I just remember, you know, well, I grew up in. In the bottom corner of Southern California, right on the Mexican border, so I was never engaged particularly with Afro Cuban music as much as I was with Mexican music. And also my mother used to play. She had a volume of South American stuff that she would play on the piano that I just remember jumping all over the living room when she was playing. But I can't exactly tie it, except I agree with Josh that it was a way. It was a solidarity with otherness in the context of white America.
- [57:42]
C
And.
- [57:42]
A
And I encourage Josh and Sonia to turn their sound on. I noticed that your mic, I would
- [57:47]
C
just quickly, quickly add. I mean, I agree with, you know, Ron, with what you just said. I mean, I think what I tried to rush through at the very end there is my attempt to answer that question, Alex, which is, you know, I think there were demographic specificities, there were kind of urban neighborhood specificities, but there was also this kind of, I think at moments, at moments, particularly Post World War II moments, similar limbo ness of the kind of outsiderness of both communities. Not to mention that there were a ton of Latino Jews themselves who were also the kind of mediators and bridges there. But in neighborhoods like Spanish Harlem or the Bronx and neighborhoods like Boyle Heights here in Los Angeles, there were these brief periods, you know, a couple decades long, where both communities really did live side by side. And that's not to say Italians weren't. Weren't going through some of the same things, but the, I think the singularity of the Holocaust, about this being a post Holocaust moment where Jews in the US were reckoning with their status as kind of racial outsiders, but also as American newcomers who can. Who could increasingly start to assimilate into American whiteness. I just think it laid the groundwork for an opportunity for collaboration that always wasn't smooth, we should say, but collaboration that really galvanized in those periods.
- [59:17]
D
I would agree with a lot of the things that my panelists have said in some of the texts that I look at. There's a real consciousness among Jews who are experimenting with. With popular social dances that doing this kind of cultural work and leisure culture is a way of demonstrating that they're modern and that they're cosmopolitan and that they're willing to do certain things differently than previous generations of Jews. But then it also mixes in with a lot of this. This encounter as immigrants, as people that are largely based in New York in terms of both mambo and Jewish communities, and that are experimenting with a lot of these different types of language contact that are going on.
- [60:16]
B
So, you know, Sonia, you spoke about how there were other kinds of dances that were also, you know, really popular. And I wonder if that's something that everyone could reflect on. You know, one of the things that I find interesting in these repertoires is how you have different kind of, you know, ethnically particular dance forms which get brought in and in dialogue, but then you also have these kind of international forms, and then you have also Jewish particular forms. They all kind of collide. So I wonder. Yeah, I wonder if you could reflect on, you know, the relationship of Latin influence to other influences. Oh, sorry, Sonia, would you like to start?
- [60:53]
D
Yes. Yeah, you can finish.
- [60:55]
B
No, no.
- [60:58]
D
An anecdote that I didn't really have a chance to mention in when I was speaking is that about. About 10, 15 years ago, Klez Canada, the culture festival, Yiddish culture near Montreal, had a theme that was integrating, that was about Latin culture and Jewish or Yiddish culture. And so one of the things that was incredibly fun was that there was a dance class where I believe Steve Weintraub and Aviya Moore were teaching a share, which is a Yiddish square dance that also included. It was like a cha cha share that was incorporating different Latin music intuit and Latin dance styles. And so there is this space in some of the contemporary Yiddish dance culture to be experimenting with some of these new forms, although we don't do it quite often enough. There's more. I mean, so when I was saying that a lot of this research was on the early stages, this is not. I mean, we've seen with my other panelists that there's a lot of research that's really great in terms of the musical style, but there's more. I think more has been done in terms of the dance research on Swing. And then in a European context, the waltz has had a particularly prevalent role in terms of thinking about some of these different cultural encounters. Does that answer your question at all?
- [62:40]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Ron or Josh, do you have any thoughts about that?
- [62:43]
C
No, I just want to shout out Paul Shapiro, who I see is joining us, who is part of our model Thompson Amigos show way back. So just. Hey, Paul.
- [62:51]
A
Hey, Paul.
- [62:53]
B
Ron, do you have any thoughts?
- [62:54]
A
You know, I can't theorize it. I can only speak from my personal experience. And it happened that I was in a. In an early cohort, a post war cohort, where I was. They thought, well, let's try teaching foreign language earlier and let's use conversational methods with tape recorders instead of teaching grammar. So when I was 11, I entered. I started taking Spanish in junior high school. And at the same time I was also explaining to my class what my 11th grade, not 11th, 6th grade class, on the schoolyard when I dropped a ball, a fly ball, I was out in right field, beyond anywhere, and they yelled Jew. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then they yelled Jew at someone else who dropped a ball. And I realized that they had no idea what it was. And at dinner I told my parents and they were concerned and they talked to my teacher and I ended up explaining to the class what Jews were because I was the only one in Pacific Beach Junior High, in Pacific beach, the elementary school at that time. I can't even imagine what I said because to do it now is. I mean, people have devoted many, many books to water Jew is. But, but those were going on at the same time. I was taking Spanish and I was a. Explaining what a Jew was. So I can only speak from that personal experience, that and the fact that our uncle, who, who was the secretary treasurer of the Painters Union in Boyle Heights, was in Boyle Heights. And we'd go to visit him. And one of the great anecdotes in our family was my little brother was sleeping as we were driving up to LA from San Diego. When he awoke, we were on what is now Carlos Chavez. But it was Brooklyn Avenue at that time. He woke up and looked down. He said, why are we in Tijuana? And it was, ha, ha ha. No, we're in Los Angeles. But it said it all at the time. So I've said too much and it was all personal anecdote, but so much for theorization.
- [65:14]
B
Well, there's a lot of other questions I would love to get to, but I'm afraid we're out of time. So I just want to say thank you all so much for being a part of this panel.
- [65:23]
C
Pleasure. Thank you, Alex. Thanks, everybody.
- [65:25]
D
Thank you.