Mish Mash: Mickey Katz and the Afterlife of Klezmer

• In Event: Borscht Airs: Situating Mickey Katz in American Jewish Musical Comedy

Abstract

Did klezmer die after World War Two? The grand narrative of the 1970s “klezmer revival” would certainly lead us to think so. But the popularity of bandleader and entertainer Mickey Katz (1909-1985) during the 1950s suggests a different narrative: klezmer, and more broadly, Yiddish musical entertainment, was alive and well. Contrary to strong held beliefs in the “postvernacular” mode of Yiddish after the Holocaust, Katz’s performances demonstrated that Yiddish and Yiddish musical idioms were still part of a viable, growing culture. Despite the rapid dwindling of the Yiddish-speaking population, his “Yinglish” appealed to a wide swath of the American Jewish community. In this paper, I demonstrate how Katz employed a linguistic and musical code-switching by cleverly weaving together Yiddish and klezmer with various genres of American popular music. By analyzing his music and its reception, I show that its popularity relied on varying levels of fluency in Yiddish culture, and that it fulfilled an important role in American Jewish communal life that was once held by klezmer. While far from “pure” klezmer, Katz’s unique “mish mash” created a space that retained klezmer in the popular sphere and allowed it to grow and evolve.

Author

• Uri Schreter, Harvard University