pepi litman: double entendres, workplace sexual assault, and khazones without theocracy
last summer, Klezcadia hosted the premiere of a new show by the great yiddish singer/scholar jeanette lewicki (no relation, as far as we know), featuring the repertoire of turn-of-the-20th-century yiddish cabaret-chantant singer pepi litman. through jeanette’s efforts over more than a decade of exploration (and those of other singer/scholars like miryem-khaye siegel), litman has become a known name again in the yiddish cultural landscape, especially among queer yiddishists. she remains, however, better known through photos showing off the sharp sartorial style she brought to her onstage menswear – shirt, tails, and top hat; or kapote, hitl, and a hint of peyes – than through the many 78rpm discs that preserve her voice. her yiddish is from the theater and street, not from YIVO or borough park, and its slangy, topical flavor can be very hard to parse even without the scatchiness of century-old grooves, which is part of why jeanette’s work is so important.
a friend asked me what i was so excited about in jeanette’s tour through litman’s repertoire, and i thought i’d write up longer versions of the three things i said, and share them a little more widely, since i think these songs are important and fascinating as well as awesome.
double entendres
first of all, litman’s songs are so inventively filthy!
they sit squarely in the center of the vaudeville / cabaret-chantant / variety theater world of the period, where the varied censorship regimes performers traversed as they toured helped shape the aesthetics of their humor. mae west’s virtuosity at this, or alberta hunter’s, can give english-speakers a window into how this operated in the anglophone u.s.
litman’s double entendres make active use of the different layers of the yiddish language, which allowed her to choose words with hebrew or aramaic roots to carry the burden of the joke, so that a censor in (for instance) budapest (who would likely speak hungarian, german, and a slavic language) would be less likely to understand where the laughs were coming from. this choosing among synonyms or parallel phrases to adjust who understands what isn’t an unusual strategy in everyday as well as onstage yiddish (linguists talk about it as “component consciousness”) – it’s just cool, and striking, to see it so prominent in a body of songs.
so, for example, litman sings about the beauties of a shabes evening at a hasidic holy man’s house, heightened by the sight of “dem grobn ek / fin indzer rebe’s heylike havdole” [the fat tip / of our rebbe’s holy havdole] whose delights inspire “loyfn ale vaybelekh in fayer” [all the dear wives / women to run through fire]. by triangulating through the name of the ritual separating sacred and everyday time, litman can refer to the rebbe’s cock as the thick, braided candle used in shabes practice1, naming it as something desirable, holy, and personal – with one word, whose translation will not help a censor figure out what’s going on.
in another song, the repeated punchline “lomir beyde davnen fin eyn makhzerl” [let’s both pray from one holiday prayerbook] starts out literal, as the marker of a synagogue bore, then marks two shady businessmen’s agreement to collude instead of competing, but ends with a synagogue official discovered in a compromising posiiton inviting the rabbi to join him and a “gants voyl almone” [very nice widow] in a threesome. again, the key words in the sexual, and thus potentially censorable, final verse – makhzerl, almone, eyshes-eysh [prayerbook, widow, woman] – are all from the hebrew/aramaic side of the yiddish lexicon, and the core phrase, in isolation, can be as innocuous as “let’s get on the same page”.
yet another song plays the changes on the traditional imagery of “oylem habe” [the world to come]: “an ort vus yeder yid miz kimen dort” [a place where everyone must arrive], “tayerer fin gelt” [dearer than gold], “yene-velt” [that world/the world to come/paradise] “di eybike velt” [the world of eternity], and “di rikhtike velt” [the corrected/just world] – the last itself nodding to “likhtike” [illuminated] as a conventional description of a sanctified afterlife. here, however, “a shtikele oylem habe” [a little piece of heaven] is what’s traded in transactional sex – in the first verse as a better alternative to being sexually assaulted as a domestic worker; in the second by a wife seeking the rebbe’s help to have a child despite her husband’s disinterest, incapacity, or absence. the song carries more than a slight echo of the punchline title of gustave courbet’s vulva painting “The Origin of the World”, which would’ve been familiar to much of litman’s audience as a succès de scandale, if not a cause célèbre, from the previous generation.
the songs i’ve mentioned, by hanging their sexual double entendres on words from loshn koydesh related to ritual practice, also show off three different flavors of veltlekh [of-the-world/secular/anti-clerical] moral critique of the rabbinate. “Dem Rebns Heylikn Havdole” is a pretty classic satire of religious sexual hypocrisy, naming the sexual appeal and sexual exploitation covered over by the spiritually-articulated charismatic appeal of hasidic wonder-working rebbes, in both the weekly routine which havdole punctuates and the more explicitly transactional scenario in the second verse’s offer of a reward for granting a ritual divorce. “…Eyn Makhzerl” is in a somewhat similar mode, but addressing a sexual adventure that is extracurricular rather than integrated into ritual relations. “Oylem Habe” is rather different, transvaluating sex and religion to set up “di eybike… rikhtike velt” [the eternal… just world] as an embodied, erotic, presence in the world we live in, rather than as a spiritual phenomenon deferred to a future beyond the grave.
domestic violence and progressive silence
at the heart of pepi litman’s repertoire is one of the defining genres of yiddish song, which is, however, practically never acknowledged as even existing: songs about sexual violence in domestic contexts, especially directed against domestic workers.
traditional yiddish song is definitionally women’s music by the simple fact of being in yiddish. even religious texts in the language were labeled “for women and men who are like women” – marking the fact that “proper”, socially valued, manhood expresses itself in the hebrew or aramaic of the religious tradition and the theocracy that enforced it, not in the everyday language of the community, which was dismissed by the wealthy and the rabbinate as “dzhargón” [gabble, not-really-language]. it’s not until there is a strong workers movement rejecting the rule of the rabbinate and its wealthy partners that yiddish song becomes significant among men, and even then it’s specifically among working-class men, and especially those connected to radical movements for social transformation.2
but even more than that, as ethel raim and other singer/scholars have pointed out, yiddish song is in particular a music of women domestic workers. that’s noticeable in what we know of who traditional singers learned songs from, and who they were, and it’s also true in what is expressed in the repertoire. lullabys that talk about rocking another woman’s baby. ballads that lament the lack of money for a dowry, which pushed young women into domestic work. songs about romances taking place in the scant hours free from work. nostalgic tunes about hometowns and families left behind in pursuit of economic possibility, in a time where domestic labor was one of the only available options for young women.
and, very prominently, songs like this one, which singer/scholar ruth rubin learned as a kid on the streets of montréal:
bay mayn balebos / sheydim veysn vos / sheydim veysn vos iz dos?
mit a grobn boykh / mit a kurtsn haldz / mit a peripendikl
git men dos a drey / git es zikh a gos / sheydim veysn vos iz dos?
at my boss’s house / demons know what / demons: know what this is?
with a fat belly / with a short chest / with a tube that sticks out
you give it a twist / it gives a spurt! / demons: know what this is?
the last verse as rubin sings the song, which doesn’t appear in all the versions she collected from other women, tames the very clear implication of a warning against sexual demands from a domestic employer:
ay biztu a nar / s’iz dokh a samovar / s’iz dokh a samovartshikl!
ay, you’re a fool / it’s of course a samovar / it’s just a little samovar!
but it’s pretty clear from the song itself that the offer of a sanitizing answer to the riddle could be either an addition to make the tune into a “safe” children’s song, or, just as easily, a tag put on by domestic workers to make the warning possible to present under the guise of a simple dirty joke, so it could continue to do its work of helping potential targets stay on their guard.
it’s notable how many of litman’s songs are precisely in this tradition of critique and warning, the singers’ side of the whisper-network of mutual protection. there’s no way to know whether “Dem Rebns Heylikn Havdole” was written about a specific hasidic rebbe. but there’s no need to assume so: we only need to listen to the reams of testimonies collected by escapees from the frum world (and those struggling for change within it) to know how pervasive sexual exploitation and violence are within it today. and we only need to look to the statements of leaders in hasidic and other frum communities to see how enthusiastically impunity for its perpetrators is defended by those with authority in that world, where ‘doing as their forefathers did’ is the constant justifying refrain. litman’s songs may be partly warnings like “Bay Mayn Balebos”, but more centrally, they are efforts to say in public, through catchy tunes to hum and hilarious double-entendre lines to repeat to friends, what everyone already knew.
these kinds of violence aren’t every secret. they’re just kept private. kept outside of the public conversations of ‘serious’ people. kept unsayable. and especially so in jewish communities, where a fantasy of jews as sexually continent, sexually safe, sexually ‘chosen’ for morality (whether defined by cisheteropatriarchal norms or queer- and trans-affirming progressivism3) is central to our self-image.
that was true in pepi litman’s lifetime. it was true in the 1980s and 1990s, when jewish feminists began to air these kinds of dirty laundry (melanie kaye/kantrowitz’s The Issue Is Power and elly bulkin’s enter password, recovery : re-enter password include landmark accounts of parts of that process). it was true in 2011, when singer/scholars adrienne cooper and sarah mina gordon wrote a piece for Lilith which remains one of the only published articles on gendered violence (especially within families and relationships) in the yiddish song repertoire. and it’s still true, even in self-definedly radical circles.
an example of how that plays out:
for over a decade, nyc’s Jews For Racial and Economic Justice focused much of its energy on supporting domestic workers’ struggles for liveable working conditions. in partnership with Domestic Workers United, it was central to the passage of new york state’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights – a major, if almost entirely unenforced4, step towards including domestic work under protective labor laws5 – and the creation of the current constellation of national organizations advocating for domestic workers rights. almost completely absent from JFREJ’s campaign was the prevalance of sexual violence, coercion, and exploitation in domestic work. while DWU and other partner organizations have at times highlighted it (especially when pursuing support for a particular worker willing to share her experiences), it was simply not a significant part of JFREJ’s presentation of the issues at play.
this is unsurprising, given that JFREJ’s staff chose to center their work on mobilizing employers – who were mainly, especially at first, not members of the organization – rather than working with either their existing domestic worker members (i was at a meeting of active JFREJ members early in the campaign where a majority of those present were current or former domestic workers – afternoon nannies, live-in au pairs, sex workers, and others) or the potential members to be found among the many thousands of immigrant jewish domestic workers present in the city (promising leads, including a hot-shop organizing campaign, and existing connections to organizations working with ukrainian jewish home health aides and ethiopian jewish domestic workers were presented by rank-and-file members and never followed up).
one major part of what was at play in that decision was a toxic and paternalistic politics of allyship that excluded the possibility of JFREJ members (current or potential) being seen as similar to DWU members even while working the same jobs. another was the alinskyite dogma of focusing on influencing those with existing unjust power rather than even attempting to remove that power. and part of the stated rationale was staff worries about whether jewish domestic workers shared JFREJ’s other political commitments – a concern which again erased the domestic workers who were already JFREJ members, and, interestingly, didn’t come up at all in relation to non-jewish domestic workers involved in the campaign, or in relation to the employers the staff was eager to center6.
but underlying all this was an unspoken identification, by JFREJ’s paid staff, with their peers who could afford to hire domestic workers rather than their supposed comrades who worked in the industry and did not share their salaried employment security (which was of course provisional – though if memory serves, it was the one (generally unacknowledged) former domestic worker on staff whose job was cut in a round of layoffs a few years into the campaign7. and once your focus is on organizing employers, it’s at best inconvenient to direct attention to habitually-overlooked forms of workplace violence they, their family members, or their friends and peers may be quietly looking away from (and are likely to be more actively complicit in).
another element, coming into play specifically in relation to sexual violence and exploitation, may well have been the simultaneous efforts of the then-Executive-Director to silence organizers and cultural workers who had been talking about the abusive patterns of a friend of hers – whose steady progress towards an even more prominent presence as a ‘radical’ jewish cultural worker was made possible by active interventions by influential buddies like her, rather than any form of motion towards accountability (which to my knowledge has still not taken place, partly because of the success of these silencing interventions).
but lest this all appear to be a product of a particular set of staffers, i should say that almost two decades later, after several complete turnovers of staff, a similar silence met the revelation that a founding backer of the organization had carried out at least one sexual assault. his name was quietly removed from JFREJ’s major fundraising gala, but with no public acknowledgement of the reason. i only know this to be indiscreet about because i was asked at the time about name-changing rituals in the yiddish tradition – the question posed by an unpaid para-staff member8 rather than someone official (a typical move there and elsewhere to preserve deniability); the answer vanishing into the silence.
i go into this level of detail precisely because JFREJ is not unusual in any way, except perhaps for its lip service to a political orientation that should push against everything i’ve just described. its practice, however, is what matters – and it is precisely in line with the still-dominant community norms of decorous silence that pepi litman’s performances and recordings call out.
litman names, as we could expect from a yiddish traditional singer of her generation, the specific exposure of domestic workers to sexual violence and exploitation, but she does not stop there. “…Eyn Makhzerl” makes a parallel between economic and sexual exploitation; “Oylem Habe” acknowledges transactional sex as potentially positive in economic and non-economic ways, clearly distinguishing it from sexual exploitation. and, in a song not included in jeanette lewicki’s program, litman takes aim at the forms of sexual violence that take place in exactly the kinds of polite domestic (but not labor) contexts where it is most often condoned or forgiven (when it’s not actively defended or concealed in the ways i’ve just laid out).
“Giter Brider Nisht Gekhapt” [Slow Down, Good Brother9] presents a familar figure: the young man who visits a girl and “hoybt on krikhn mit di hent” [starts creeping with his hands]. here, in litman’s repertoire, he is placed alongside other sources of sexual violence in the middle-class home. this is a direct rejection of the usual approach to this type of assault, which separates it from the versions directed at domestic workers either to dismiss it (as ‘milder’; as justified by a hypothetical goal of marriage; as ‘unintended’; as a minor gaffe by a ‘nice guy’ whose reputation shouldn’t suffer because of it; etc) or to dismiss them (explicitly or implicitly, because the bodily autonomy of domestic workers, of working women, matters less than that of women of their employers’ class).
juxtaposing “Giter Brider…” with songs like “…Eyn Makhzerl” and “…Heylikn Havdole” invites comparisons between directly physical assaults and less immediate forms of coercion and exploitation, and between the acknowledged authority of a rebbe or gabe and the less-often-named social power of a young man over a young woman. but with a song like “Oylem Habe” in the mix, litman invokes a different kind of connection: the likelihood that today’s parlor creeper is tomorrow’s rapist employer. which, obvious as it is, is still rarely pointed out – especially from the stages where popular singers perform, in yiddish or in english.
litman goes further, though: she names a remedy.
giter brider nisht gekhapt, khapn iz nit git
az du vest khapn, vel ikh klopn – klopn biz in blit
slow down good brother, grabbing isn’t good
if you grab, i’ll hit – hit you till you’re bloody
and again, the justaposition transforms the message. what could be a reinforcement of the norms of parlor decorum becomes something quite different when it can be heard as applying to the women in other songs. if the right response to “krikhn mit di hent” is direct, immediate, physical consequences, what should happen in these other cases, whether the more obviously brutal versions or the more subtle ones? pepi litman doesn’t give an answer aloud, but hints that she agrees with celia x, with rosa lee ingram, with joann little, with marissa alexander, with bresha meadows, that the women she sings about are all selves with a right to direct, immediate, physical defense.
how to love khazones and hate the rabbinate
finally, it’s important to talk about the music – the melodies – of pepi litman’s songs. the words are important, but she was neither an essayist nor a vort-kontsert artist (as far as i know – i’d be thrilled to learn that she did recitation/elocution/vort-kontsert recitals!).
what strikes me, listening to litman’s repertoire, is how deep it is in the specific sounds and styles of khazones – liturgical and paraliturgical singing10. many of her songs i’ve already named dip into that musical territory, or the adjacent zone of lern-nigunim [study-melodies]. i’m not enough of an ethnomusicologist to be able to say whether any are clearly tied to the particular melodies of the women’s vernacular invocation traditions that we now lump together (under the name of one of the major genres) as tkhines – but i’d be shocked if there weren’t connections to be found there as well. and then there’s litman’s “Yismeykhu” [they shall rejoice].
this song has at its core the shabes-evening prayer of the same name, whose text praises the day of rest and those who observe it, sung as it stands, with its unadorned earworm of a melody that lends itself to singing along. this straightforward bit of khazones is introduced by a few yiddish verses set to the same melody, which satirize (in a gentler tone than her songs about sexual exploitation) hasidic rebbes’ pretentions to spiritual virtuosity and wonder-working powers:
…zen maan rebn iz a moyre / fin im tsi hern soydes-haftoyre
…dus iz nit pasik der proster oylem – vi kimen zey nur dertsi
ober ikh in maan rebn in der laymediker goylem, zingen mir ale yismekhi
…to see my rebbe is fearful / to hear from him the secrets of the scriptures
…this is not fit for the common crowd – how could they even approach it
but me and my rebbe and the clay golem, we all sing “yismekhi”
presenting a traditional piece of liturgy with this framing does some fascinating work. to understand it, though, we need to think about who litman’s audience was.
she performed for urban yiddish-speakers: people who had left the rural towns where most yiddish jews lived in the 19th century (whether for a nearly city or a distant metropolis, or, often, first one then the other). as economist yannay spitzer has shown, very few who weren’t directly affected migrated because of pogroms or other forms of state (or state-supported/tolerated) violence, which was a sporadic and geographically limited threat. one of the main actual driving forces was economic, with the decline of the agricultural economy that most yiddish jews in the shtetlakh were part of and the expansion of industrial work in eastern and central european cities.
the other, less easy to quantify but likely at least as important, was theocracy. i mentioned it above already, but it’s worth going into some detail. shtetl communities were tightly controlled by the rabbinate, in close partnership with their wealthiest members, who formed a self-contained caste of “laytn” [fine folks] who would not marry their children to those of less elevated yikhes [bloodline]. the laytn, and the rabbinate in particular, served both as subcontractors for state power (choosing whose children – never their own – would be conscripted for military service, often never to return; turning in those who sought to organize against autocracy or read books the state forbade; etc) and as unaccountable authorities over everyday life (banning and burning non-religious yiddish literature; witholding ritual divorces to keep women tied to absent or abusive husbands; directing the shunning and other informal sanctions that kept critics and dissenters in line; etc). as it expanded in the 19th century, hasidism – like the parallel populist revival movements in christianity at the same time (the Second Great Awakening in the u.s., for example) – challenged the position of previous religious authorities, but only to offer an alternative version of the same structure, tightened to center on the directly hereditary authority of the rebbe rather than the looser traditional format.
cities offered freedom from this system of theocratic rule, in both its traditional and hasidic forms, especially for women. as more forms of industry expanded, in particular the textile and garment trades (which were more open to women workers), it became more possible to leave the shtetl – often returning regularly to visit family and friends (making them, in turn, more able to imagine leaving), but building a life outside the reach of the laytn.
this mass escape from theocracy made possible the emergence and flourishing of yiddish theater (from operettas to vaudeville to modernist drama to the cabaret-chantant forms that the Broderzingers and litman epitomized), of yiddish literature (from the “shund” [trashy popular fiction] of shomer to the avant-gardism of perets markish), of liberatory movements (from the state-oriented socialist cultural nationalism of the Bund to the border-defying labor and self-defense organizing of yiddish anarchists) – of yiddish culture as we know and cherish it. within this blossoming, popular songs like “Rumenye, Rumenye” celebrated the parts of the yiddish world where theocracy had the least tight grip, and the musical genres and dances of those areas, the bulgarish/bulgár in particular, became popular across yidishland, as ethnomusicologist/historian/musician/dancer zev feldman has documented.
litman’s listeners, whether in lemberg/lviv, ades/odesa, karlsbad, or new york city, were escapees from the shtetl theocracy and their children who had grown up outside it. traditionally observant jews, hasidic and otherwise, would not attend a performance by a woman singer (especially for a gender-mixed audience), or visit the secular theater at all – they were only a potential audience to the extent that they were deliberately resisting the dictates of whichever religious authority they recognized. the adherents of modernizing religious movements – hungarian neolog, german reform, and other heirs of the maskilim [religious enlighteners] – may have formed a part of her audience in the few regions where they had a meaningful presence, but (as movements committed to linguistic assimilation to their dominant local nation-states) they had little support among yiddish speakers. at a performance of litman’s, the seats, cafe tables, or barstools were filled with those who – regardless of their ritual practice, which we can safely assume varied from none to extensive – had stepped away from rabbinic authority, and no longer placed it at the center of their jewishness.
a song like “Yismeykhu” allowed litman’s audience, whether at a concert or (for those who could afford a victrola or phonograph) at home with the 78rpm recordings she made, to experience the pleasure of hearing (and perhaps singing along with) the traditional prayer, with its lovely melody carried by litman’s clear and expert performance – without having to concede any power or authority to the theocratic system it was embedded in. the gently mocking preamble establishes enough distance for a listener to relax into enjoyment, while remaining safely held outside the reach of that system. to my ear, this is what is happening in many of litman’s songs: material from the religious tradition (whether a full prayer, a melody, or a stylistic approach) transformed from the echo of a material threat into a source of deep pleasure by its framing and use.
litman, in this way, gives her audience back the joy that theocracy prevents its targets and survivors from touching in even its most beautiful creations – precisely by not ceding a shred of legitimacy to the framework they grew up inside. what she does is the opposite of the fetishization of “ancestral tradition” that many current progressive and radical jewish circles prioritize, which lets an embrace of yiddish culture feed an uncritical (at best) relationship to the religious tradition.11 they preach RETVRN; litman offers liberatory transformation.
- i’ve heard, from singer/scholar vivi lachs, that there’s a tradition of holding the havdole candle at the length you want your future lover’s cock to be. ↩︎
- yes, there are earlier religious songs sung by men in yiddish. they’re mainly part of hasidism’s populist turn towards everyday language (and towards accessible versions of previously esoteric religious practices) that the movement used to shore up support for its even more aggressively hierarchical form of community organization, in which the heads of hereditary dynasties wielded – and still wield – vast personal authority over their generally impoverished clientele, backed by other members of an endogamous ruling caste defined by the “yikhes” [bloodline] that accompanies and justifies accumulated generational wealth and social prestige. ↩︎
- and, of course, the positions that combine the two – which is easy to do within the basic premises of a religious outlook. take, for example, michael “tikkun olam” lerner y”sh, who included in the founding conference of his multifaith Network of Spiritual Progressives a session on sexuality to debate the question: “Are there forms of sexuality between consenting adults that are not acceptable from the standpoint of a progressive religious or spiritual community? Must sex, for example, be covenantal and not merely recreational – and what exactly should be the dimensions of such a covenant?” a more relevant question might be at what point debating the ‘acceptability’ of sex for pleasure crosses the line between mere conservative homophobia and exterminationist queerhating. but even more relevant is lerner’s career-long pattern of rape apologism and sexual harassment and assault. ↩︎
- as some organizers, including JFREJ members, predicted before its passage. the organization did not create a strategy towards adressing this ostentatiously likely result, beyond ‘moral suasion’ appeals to the goodwill of employers. ↩︎
- domestic and agricultural workers, being largely women of color, immigrants, and black folks, have been explicitly excluded from almost all u.s. labor protections for as long as such protections have existed. ↩︎
- many of them affiliated with a synagogue that had recently refused to allow JFREJ to continue to hold its annual fundraising gala in their space because the organization’s newly-adopted mild anti-Occupation stance was incompatible with its aggressive zionism. ↩︎
- and a few years before the entire staff was laid off because the ED who had brought in substantial initial foundation funding for the campaign concealed the timeline for it running out from the board. ↩︎
- i can’t remember who i got this phrasing from, years ago. i find it’s a useful framework for thinking about the handful of members deputized by the staff of 501c organizations (NGOs, to folks outside the u.s.) to act on their behalf – often serving as mouthpieces for things paid staff can’t say to rank-and-filers without facing consequences, as fig-leaves of “member participation” in staff-controlled decisionmaking and strategizing, as informants about rank-and-file discontent, and as channels for marginalizing critical voices within the organization. i’ve been in that role, as well as being targeted by others in it; its institutionalized presence in every 501c group i’ve been involved in is part of why i no longer work in those kinds of organizations. ↩︎
- this isn’t exactly a translation; it’s the english title i’ve seen attached to the song, that i’ve kept for recognizability and because the yiddish title doesn’t translate well. ↩︎
- the musicality of a lot of yiddish traditional singing, and the popular and theater song genres that draw on it, is similar to khazones. the conventional explanation claims this is simply because liturgical music is the key source of yiddish music’s particularity, but this doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. we know the liturgical and paraliturgical repertoires of the yiddish world are full of melodies taken from nonjewish musical traditions of eastern europe: “Royz, Royz” and “S’iz Nito Keyn Nekhtn” are well-known examples (with hasidic roots) in the current veltlekh repertoire. and we know that other jewish communities’ liturgical music share their musicality and structures with the nonjewish musics of their regions – most obviously in the use of regionally-specific maqam systems in mizrahi liturgical practice from syria to the maghreb. at the very least, influence flows in both ways, but where we can clearly document the direction of the motion, the liturgical and paraliturgical music follows rather than leads. ↩︎
- perhaps most obvious in discussions about women’s vernacular ritual practice. from feldmestn to tkhines to opshprekherins’ lead-pouring, these widespread practices were rejected by the rabbinate – suppressed when possible, coopted when necessary (as in the publication of canon-creating tkhine compilations assembled by men to replace women’s orally transmitted and improvised versions), and in a pinch tolerated in individuals declared to be extraordinary exceptions. despite this history, they are often currently portrayed as part of the rabbinic tradition that sought their destruction, rather than forming a cultural constellation that maintained autonomy from rabbinic authority, existed in direct opposition to it (illustrating through their prevalence how thin acceptance of that authority was, as the speed of mass migration from the shtetlakh confirmed when it became an accessible possibility), and survived only through the steadfastness of their resistance to it. ↩︎