Publications
“To see what lovely Japanese our young people can be: American Jewish Community Performance, Racial Appropriation, and Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado, 1885-1939,” The Opera Quarterly (March 2024): 1-29.
Abstract: While prior scholarship recognizes African American, Indigenous, and Asian community performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, scholars have conspicuously overlooked this operetta’s manifestation in American Jewish community spaces. Analysis of archival findings, press coverage, photographs, and memoirs uncover a multigenerational American Jewish investment in this work, in spite of its reliance on yellowface minstrelsy and traditions of racial appropriation. The meeting of Orientalist material consumption practices, the racially appropriative American entertainment industry, and Jewish pushes for social acculturation conditioned the earliest American Jewish encounters with the operetta. Subsequently, American Jewish communities deployed The Mikado as part of Jewish holiday celebrations, fundraisers, immigrant children’s educational activities, and entertainments for the elderly with the objective of demonstrating the compatibility of American culture and Jewish values to their constituents, and highlighting their contributions to broader American society. This investigation flows from musicologist Sindhumathi Revuluri’s insight that exoticist performances ultimately tell us more about the people who put them on than the people they presumably portray. In addition to contributing a missing chapter on American Jewish participation in yellowface, this article also recognizes the value of taking amateur performance seriously in the disciplines of historical musicology, opera history, and Jewish studies.
“Emma Goldman, An Anarchist at the Opera,” American Jewish History 106, no. 2 (2022): 113-142
Abstract: Radical anarchist Emma Goldman loved opera’s music and narratives as much as she disdained the genre as an implement of bourgeois self-indulgence. These realities led her to pen opinion editorials, lecture notes, transcriptions, and a memoir reflecting opera’s local and global performances, composers, and singers. Situated at a moment when the genre teetered precariously between the popular culture of the nineteenth century and the high culture of the twentieth century, Goldman saw within opera opportunities to advance her political agenda and self-fashion her historical narrative. Close reading of Goldman’s writings about opera confirms her enduring commitment to anarchist principles, despite apparent contradictions between high culture and anarchism. By contributing to a growing body of scholarship that investigates how and why opera has served as a productive medium for enacting social transformation, this article intervenes in historical discourses that still accept musical high culture as antithetical to the values of the American German and Yiddish anarchist movements.
“I’d Rather [Sound] Blue: Listening to Agency, Hybridity, and Intersectionality in the Vocal Recordings of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand,” Journal of the Society for American Music 16, no. 1 (2022)
Abstract: This article locates intersectionality, agency, and hybridity within the singing voices of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand by comparing recordings of “I’d Rather Be Blue,” “Second Hand Rose,” and “My Man” from the surviving Vitaphone reels of Brice’s My Man (1928) with the audio from the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) of Streisand’s Funny Girl (1968). Brice and Streisand’s virtuosic stylized vocal performances communicate particular classed, gendered, geographic, and racialized identities for audience consumption. This project aims to restore the sonic and aural to a body of scholarship on these performers that heretofore has focused primarily on the physical and visual. An untapped inroad for analysis lies in the sonic space between these two women, one of whom attempts to posthumously portray the other. By practicing close listening on these recordings and taking seriously the Jewish right to hybrid musical expression within and beyond twentieth-century America, we can move past the essentializing discourses of the American racial binary to which Jews pose a definitional challenge, and open up further avenues for thinking about Jewish sonic difference generationally and contextually.