Can Jewish culture survive?: Musicians demand artistic participation from community

Theodore Bikel and DJ So-Called sent a joint message to the Jewish community: If you want Jewish culture to survive, you have to know your s--t. Not just the artists, but the community at large. Because in a vital community, there is no passive audience, only participants.

"If you want good Jewish culture, you've got to make good stuff," said So-Called, a young Canadian who fuses hip-hop and classic Yiddish recordings. Bikel had recorded a collaboration with the DJ earlier in the day.

Bikel loudly agreed when So-Called said, "If people don't care, maybe it's because [the creators] don't know their s--t."

That sentiment became a refrain as three generations of Jewish musicians united on stage Monday night, March 21, at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco to mull over the state of the art and the health of the culture. As part of this year's Jewish Music Festival, four musicians and one professor — Naomi Seidman of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley — tried to tease out the complex predicament of contemporary Jewish culture.

The focus was firmly on Bikel, the man world-famous for playing Tevye. A reverential air from the audience and panel alike occasionally threatened to turn the evening into a lovefest, but Bikel's verbal darts — delivered with that seductive, smooth baritone — kept the evening sharp.

"As the man who holds the record for the number of performances of 'Fiddler,' I can say that 'Fiddler' is a substitute for Jewish culture. Too many of us pay others to Jew for us."

Bikel seemed to express the sentiments of everyone on the panel when he bemoaned the effect of audio-visual media on Jewish culture at large. "We have turned into a society of spectators," he said. "A synagogue demands participants." The group all strongly agreed with Bikel that Jews must take secular Jewish culture as seriously as religious life. In fact, Bikel proposed the creation of a secular ba'alat tshuvah, a movement of fervent lovers of the Jewish arts and history.

Hankus Netsky, founder of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, framed the issue historically. After the effects of the Shoah, communism and assimilation, U.S. Jews are engaged in a process of reconstruction, he said. Sixty years after the Holocaust, that reconstruction still has many phases that are operating simultaneously. And some of that rebuilding suffers as a result of the invisibility of Yiddish and Ashkenazi cultural history.

Netsky related his alarm after reading about a Jewish culture summer camp where the curriculum consisted of keeping kosher, saying prayers and learning Western classical music. Where was the klezmer?

The younger members of the panel, So-Called (real name Josh Dolgin) and local singer/composer Jewlia Eisenberg, complained that too much of an emphasis on revival results in recreation rather than creation, and Jewish music has to continue evolving to remain connected with the world at large. Netsky replied that you can't have one without the other.

Despite the scrappiness of the old and young members of the panel, notes of sadness and fear entered into the conversation. Seidman remarked at the beginning of the exchange that she often felt that only Jews older than her were "real" Jews, and that her identity was tied into a sense of loss and inauthenticity. While Jewish meaning used to be part of daily actions and rituals on Shabbat, she said, many Jews today derive a kind of Jewish meaning from attending arts events like a Jewish film or music festival — essentially dipping into a form of packaged Judaism as a consumer, rather than as a participant.

An audience member — about 50 people attended — reinforced this point during the Q-and-A. Stating her concern that Judaism is on the brink of extinction unless synagogue life can turn the tide of assimilation, she asked, "How is Jewish art going to emerge if we are just spectators?"

Bikel answered, bringing the panel full circle — back to individual responsibility within the larger culture. "You have to work as a Jew, just like you have to work as a human being."