The Jewish Music Forum
will host the next lecture in the 2008-2009 series:
December 12, 2008
10:30 am – 12:00 pm
“Engaging Ethnography and Institutionalization in Jewish Music.”
This event is sponsored by the American
Society for Jewish Music and the American Jewish Historical
Society. All events are free and open to the public.
“American Jews, Music and the Memory of the Holocaust: 1945-1962”
Professor Hasia Diner, New York University
Respondent: Cantor Bruce Ruben, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of
Religion
Center for Jewish History / Kovno Room
15 W. 16th Street (between 5th and 6th Aves., north side of the street)
New York, NY 10011
In the years from the end of World War II through the early 1960s American
Jewry engaged in a massive, spontaneous, and multi-faceted project to remember
the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi
brutality. With no direction from any central body, they created multiple
times, places, and texts by which to create a memorial culture. In that project
music played an important part. From concerts to
recordings, from singing at public gatherings, issuing songsters, and
creating new liturgical works they took upon themselves the double chore of
remembering the tragedy and attempting to invigorate Jewish life in America.
Hasia Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American
Jewish History at New York University and the Director of the Goldstein
Goren Center for American Jewish History. A specialist in immigration
and ethnic history, American Jewish history and the history of American
women, she is the author of numerous published books, including In the
Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 (1977,
reissued, 1995); Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in
the Nineteenth Century (1984); A Time for Gathering: The Second
Migration, 1820-1880 (1992), the second volume in the Johns Hopkins
University Press series, “The Jewish People in America”; and With
Reverence and Awe: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the
Holocaust, 1945-1962, which will be published by New York University
Press in spring 2009.
Bruce Ruben was awarded the diploma of hazzan from the Jewish
Theological Seminary in 1981. A year later he began a twenty-four year
tenure at Temple Shaaray Tefila in New York City, where he ran several
choirs, put on special music programs, composed numerous liturgical
compositions, commissioned works by many other composers, and taught
classes on Jewish history, liturgy, and music. He earned his Ph.D. in
history from the CUNY Graduate Center in 1997 with a dissertation on the
early American Reform rabbi Max Lilienthal. Beginning in July of 2006
Cantor Ruben became the director of the School of Sacred Music, the
cantorial school of the Reform Movement.