Jewish Identities

Klára Móricz

University of California Press, 2008, 468 p.

A study of the concept of Jewish identity through music

This book features an important contribution to the controversy on the history of musical modernity.

The writor studies the concepts of the Jewish identity, rebuilding our comprehension of « Jewish music », as a growth of utopian ideologies, nationalism, racism. This book is an important work on the history of European musical modernity.

Klára Móricz examines the concepts of the Jewish identity and reorganizes the ideas about “Jewish music” in the 20th century through three case studies :, the Jewish Russian composers of the two first decades of the 20th century ; the Swiss American Ernest Bloch ; and finally, Arnold Schoenberg. By examining these composers in the context of the appearing Jewish nationalism, from the spread racial theories and the utopian tendencies to modernist art and politics of the 20th century, Móricz describes a trail going from paradigmatic nationalist techniques to an abstract notion of Judaism, passing by hypthesis on unvoluntary racial presence.

Purchase the book

You may also like

Launch of the Mémoire Radiophonique Juive program (Jewish Radio Memory)

Initiated by the European Institute of Jewish Music in 2019, the Mémoire Radiophonique Juive (MRJ) (Jewish Radio Memory) program makes…

Musique et musiciens de bal – Isaac Strauss au service de Napoléon III

This book by Laure Schnapper, a musicologist specializing in music in France in the 19th century, allows us to discover…

Foundation ILMC

Created in 2014, the ILMC Foundation aims to protect and enhance the musical heritage written in concentration camps and other…

Silent Tears – The Last Yiddish Tango

Set to music by a Grammy-nominated (Yiddish Glory) and award-winning team of musicians, the songs on the album tell the…