Performing Britishness (and Jewishness) in Contemporary British Jewish music

• In Event: Exhibiting Jewishness in Cultural Performances: Between the Local and the Global

Abstract

The European Jewish folk music revival, with its large proportion of non-Jewish practitioners, has too often been dogged by questions of authenticity and appropriation. This paper argues that such debates obscure the role that local urban narratives play in constructions of contemporary British klezmer and Sephardi music. To explore these processes, I will concentrate on the work and associated imagery of several UK-based bands, who between them frame a range of different perspectives on Jewishness and the material city environment. The loosening in recent years of direct ethnic ties between musicians and the Jewish music they play means that secular British Jewish music in a twenty-first century context is most fruitfully understood as a fluid relationship between place, history and collective musical identity. Within this relationship, several narrative positions emerge: a sense of the accidental collective with klezmer music as one component of a UK-based world music party; music as structuring a bridge between a non-specific ‘elsewhere’ of history and a contemporary London aesthetics of belonging; and a self-consciously post-nationalist seam that plays around the edges of cultural appropriation. In their articulation of Jewishness as one ingredient (among several) of musical cosmopolitanism, all these bands, in different ways, move the musical signifier ‘Jewish’ from an assumed ethnic connection to a dynamic relationship within the UK’s heterogeneous cultural soundscape. Jewishness in music thus shifts from identity-based activism to an available urban artistic resource. Finally, I argue that in the absence of a continuous and rooted ‘lived tradition’ of Jewish folk music in today’s Europe (a result of migration and destruction), attention to these processes becomes ever more important: they represent the channels through which a now transnational music is tethered to a sense of place, and thus made meaningful within globalized networks of production and consumption.

Author

• Phil Alexander, University of Glasgow