What Exactly is Jewish Music?

The first year I served as executive director of the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival — which would later become Neranenah, a Hebrew word meaning, “let’s come together and sing” — I took Ben Sidran out to dinner before his performance.

It was our first time meeting, and bringing Ben in that first year felt essential. His book, “There Was a Fire: Jews, Music, and the American Dream,” was one of the main reasons I wanted the job in the first place. It helped me feel that there was something worth saying that hadn’t quite been said yet.

At the time, the festival’s working definition of “Jewish music” often seemed to mean little more than “music made by someone Jewish.” That never fully satisfied me. So, bringing in Ben — someone who was living inside the same question I was — felt like the right place to begin. At dinner that night, a band started playing “All the Things You Are.” Ben stopped mid-sentence, listened for a moment, and said, “Now that’s some Jewish music.”

I knew he didn’t just mean that Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein wrote it. He meant the music itself — the emotional shape of it. The tune begins in F minor and ends in A-flat major. Minor to major. Sad to happy. Oy to joy.

Growing up, most “Jewish music” classes I encountered were basically a teacher standing at the front of the room saying, “Bob Dylan is Jewish,” then playing a Bob Dylan song. Then: “Carole King is Jewish,” followed by a Carole King song. And so on for 45 minutes. People always seemed to enjoy it, but I’d leave wondering: OK, this person happened to be Jewish — but what’s Jewish about the art?

So, I started asking people: What is Jewish music?

I heard every possible answer. Anything in Hebrew. Anything from Israel. Music based on the Torah. George Gershwin. Leonard Cohen. A Jew playing music.

Each answer contained some truth, but none felt complete.

In fact, the definition, “a Jew playing music,” became disturbing when I learned that the Nazis used essentially the same logic. In 1930s Germany, Jewish musicians were restricted to Jewish-run record labels, and whatever they recorded was classified as “Jewish music,” regardless of genre or content, which tells us nothing about the music itself — only about the people doing the labeling.

What fascinated me more were the moments when Jewishness seemed to live not in biography alone, but in feeling.

George Wein once gave me a two-word answer to the question of Jewish music: Cole Porter. That stunned me. Porter wasn’t Jewish. But Wein’s point was that Porter was writing for Broadway audiences heavily shaped by Jewish immigrant culture — audiences whose ears were tuned to a particular mix of wit, sentiment, and longing. Porter even told Richard Rodgers that the secret to writing hit songs was to “write Jewish tunes.”

Whether one sees that as insight, absorption, or something more complicated, Wein’s larger point stayed with me: Jewish music is not always about the identity of the composer. Sometimes it’s about the emotional language the music is speaking.

That helped lead me to a realization: Jewish music is not a genre. Klezmer is a genre. Cantorial music is a genre. But “Jewish music,” at least as I’ve come to understand it, is more like a cultural thread running through countless genres, often without announcing itself.

That’s why one of Ben Sidran’s stories has stayed with me so powerfully. Albert Von Tilzer, the Jewish writer of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” had never been to a baseball game but was inspired to write the song after reading about it in a New York Yiddish newspaper.

Ben saw that not simply as a novelty, but as something deeply revealing: a Jewish immigrant writing a song not just about baseball, but about wanting in. Wanting to belong. “Take me out.” Let me be part of this. Let me join the crowd.

That helped lead me to a realization: Jewish music is not a genre. Klezmer is a genre. Cantorial music is a genre. But ‘Jewish music,’ at least as I’ve come to understand it, is more like a cultural thread running through countless genres, often without announcing itself.

That longing runs through so much American music written by Jewish songwriters.

Irving Berlin, a Jewish immigrant who fled pogroms, wrote “White Christmas” not as memory, but as dream: “I’m dreaming…” Yip Harburg, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, wrote the words to “Over the Rainbow,” turning a specifically Jewish ache into something universal. Again and again, these writers transformed longing into song, and song into belonging.

That, to me, is one of the deepest Jewish contributions to American music: not a genre, but a sensibility. A way of taking sorrow and turning it toward hope. A move from exile toward home. From minor to major. From oy to joy.

I’ve spent years asking what Jewish music is, and at this point I’m less interested in arriving at a final answer than I am in asking more and better questions.

Eventually, I stopped trying to define the festival too narrowly and changed its name altogether: Neranenah. Let’s come together and sing. Not a category. A gathering.

And that spirit is still very much alive. On May 7, Neranenah will present current Broadway star Julie Benko in concert — a beautiful opportunity to gather, listen, and celebrate the many ways Jewish culture and great music continue to meet, evolve, and sing forward together. If this question — what is Jewish music? — continues to open outward rather than close down, that kind of evening feels to me like part of the answer.