Reviewed Elsewhere: Sarah M. Ross, A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States.
Sarah M. Ross. A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States.
Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2016. 264 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-61168-959-4; $40.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-61168-960-0; $34.99 (ebook), ISBN 978-1-61168-961-7.
It is widely acknowledged that the feminist revolution that began in the United States in the 1960s relied heavily on music to spread its messages of empowerment and social equality. Alongside their male counterparts, female folksingers and proponents of "women's music" used their art to advance their social and political agendas. The concurrent rise of a significant corpus of feminist Jewish music is an area that has received scant attention from ethnographers, historians and musicologists, perhaps because a study that deals with the intersection of feminism, Judaism and music requires specialized knowledge that reaches across disciplinary boundaries.
Sarah M. Ross's new book, A Season of Singing: Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States, thus fills a significant gap in the literature on these subjects. Ross, a professor of Jewish music in the Center for Jewish Music at Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media in Germany, brings methods from ethnography and ethnomusicology, including extensive interviews from fieldwork as well as text-based literary and musicological studies, to bear on her subject. What emerges is a rich, detailed and highly accessible picture of the women and men who reshaped Jewish ritual, spirituality and identity through their music during this progressive and volatile period in the United States.
... The introduction, describing the wide-ranging social, political and religious movements that gave rise to the feminist Jewish music scene in the United States and allowed it to thrive, provides essential context for the rest of the volume. ...
Chapter One surveys the biographies and core influences of the singer-songwriters (most often they are both) who were "pioneers of feminist Jewish songwriting in the United States," and who sought "through the power of their music to unite men and women in synagogue worship" (pp. 37–38). ...
In Chapter Two, Ross builds on the idea of the feminist Jewish music scene, exploring the networks of communication, publication, concertizing and communal musicmaking that have allowed feminist Jewish music to flourish. ...
Chapter Three deals with the texts that form the basis of feminist Jewish music, while Chapter Four treats the music itself. It is not surprising that many of the texts set by Jewish feminist singer-songwriters evoke and reframe the stories of women from the Bible and Jewish history. ... These reinterpretations ... form a "women's Torah" that complements or contradicts the traditional narratives. ... Throughout this chapter, the importance of ritual innovation is underscored as both a driving force and a product of feminist Jewish music.
In the final chapter, Ross discusses the musical components of the corpus of songs at the heart of her study. Many of the singer-songwriters are involved with rewriting Jewish liturgy, which means not only changing texts and adding meaningful rituals that resonate with the aims of the feminist project, but also balancing traditional and modern musical tropes. Ross aims to "present the variety of musical materials that have been borrowed and adapted from sources inside and outside Judaism . . . linked with various musical parameters and performance tools such as song leading, chanting, and singing in harmony" (p. 172)....
One curious aspect of Ross's book is her brief statement, at the end of the book, about the methodology of her fieldwork and the ways in which she handled her own presence within the communities that she studied. Acknowledging the complexities of maintaining an objective stance as a researcher, she concludes that she was able to do so in part because of the need to identify herself as a scholar and earn the trust of her informants as such. As I read through the book, however, I wondered repeatedly about the assumptions that Ross brought to her project. She seems to accept a number of the principal tenets of the community she was studying, rather than viewing them through an objective lens. ... disentangling objective ethnography from socio-religious advocacy in this book is no simple task. ...
Notwithstanding these reservations, Sarah M. Ross's A Season of Singing constitutes a formidable contribution to our understanding of the role of music in contemporary Jewish America. It presents a wealth of information from interviews, fieldwork, musical and cultural networks, and literary and musical analysis. As the first study to deal in a comprehensive way with feminist Jewish singer-songwriters, it lays the groundwork for the rise of a new and important area of research.
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