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Kef! Kef! Kef! Musical Transculturation and Cultural Translation from Latin America: The Rise of a Jewish Argentine Party Band in the Americas

Mon, December 17, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Harborview 1 Ballroom

Abstract

In 2009 the Orquesta Kef, a Jewish Argentine party band, was invited to perform at the “Fiesta Hanukkah” celebration at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. After assembling a U.S. tour that included an appearance at an NBA halftime show as well as other performances in Mexico and Central America, the Orquesta Kef was forced to abandon their plans after the request for P-3 visas was denied. Deemed to represent a “fusion,” rather than a “traditional” aesthetic of a “group of persons”—the then evidentiary standard to meet the burden of “culturally unique,” according to the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(15)(P)(iii) (2006)—the ensemble’s repertory of songs based on melodies and rhythms drawn from a variety of Jewish and Latin American sources was dismissed from representing a singular Jewish subjectivity or cultural form. Although the Kef case led to important amendments to P-3 visa legislation in the U.S. in 2012, the case continues to call into question the audibility of Jewish collectivities from Latin America and the history of Jewish immigration throughout the Americas. In this paper then, I argue that tensions between Jewish embodiment and Jewish cultural production in Jewish music and sound studies research are served by critical engagement with the processes of localization of cultural forms through musical practices of transculturation and cultural translation. Rather than presuming Jewishness in music based on a set of formal characteristics, I address the performance of Jewishness as a set of personal and collective values and performance practices. While discussing the origins of Argentina’s best-known Jewish party band and ethnographic anecdotes from fieldwork conducted primarily from 2010 to 2014, I examine how transcultural processes of Jewish musical engagement take root in the Americas, highlighting tensions in sounding and hearing Jewishness in music.

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