Conference Agenda

In 1930s and 40s Shanghai, jazz cabarets emerged as the premier nightlife entertainment venues in the city. These cabarets were headlined by sing-song girls (genu 歌女), women who performed on stage with the band before socializing and drinking with the patrons. Historians of modern China have detailed how Chinese sing-song girls became models of the liberated modern woman with their public singing and dancing (Farrer and Field 2015; Jones 2001; Wang 2021).

Chinese women were not, however, the only women to feature as sing-song girls. My examination of personal records, newspaper reports, and travel guides reveals that Jewish women from Austria, Germany, and Russia increasingly joined their Chinese counterparts on stage throughout the 1930s. With jazz cabarets at the peak of their popularity, these newly arrived Jewish refugee women found ample opportunities for employment as sing-song girls. I argue that interactions between Chinese and Jewish sing-song girls allowed them to develop a transcultural understanding that was crucial to navigating the Shanghai cabaret scene. The most successful sing-song girls learned to sing popular songs in both English and Chinese, allowing them to attract the widest range of patrons. These women also became multicultural fashion icons, showcasing the latest Western clothing trends and hairstyles one day and modeling colorful Chinese qipaos the next.

Responding to studies of courtesans’ gendered musical performances (Feldman and Gordon 2006; Zheng 2013) and to histories of transcultural gendered encounters in Shanghai (Cho 2016; Yang 2022), I investigate how sing-song girls enacted agency despite their performances being tailored to the male gaze. From the Chinese perspective, the liberated voices and bodies of sing-song girls challenged the traditional Confucian image of a modest, domestic woman. In Jewish refugee communities, sing-song girls often became the primary breadwinners in their families, provoking anxieties about normative Western gender roles. By focusing on the shared experiences of Chinese and Jewish sing-song girls, this paper illustrates how music-making spaces like the Shanghai cabarets fostered transnational discourse about modern womanhood in the mid-twentieth century.

In 2019–20, Yiddish singers Geoff Berner and Daniel Kahn both released albums addressing the global resurgence of antisemitism and the far right: Berner’s Grand Hotel Cosmopolis, and Kahn’s The Fourth Unternational, in collaboration with Psoy Korolenko. These artists embrace Diasporism, an Ashkenazi Jewish identity and practice embracing diaspora as “a place we might join with others who value this history of dispersion [and] who stand in opposition to nationalism and the nation state” (Kaye/Kantrowitz 2007). Inspired by the Bundist movement from late-19^th century Eastern Europe, Diasporism has more recently become popular among young left-wing diasporic Jews struggling to articulate a secular Jewish identity unaffiliated with Israel (Bergen 2021). Diasporists have been at the forefront of intersectional activism against far-right threats of violence in recent years, and Berner and Kahn’s albums actively engage in this spirit.

In this paper, I examine Berner and Kahn’s repertoires, with special focus on two songs: Berner’s “Grand Hotel Cosmopolis” (2019) and Kahn’s “The Jew in You” (2020). Within albums that focus on resistance, these songs sketch broadly utopian views of the future and imagine societies modeled on diasporism as an alternative to nationalism, attained voluntarily with a party-like atmosphere (Berner), or necessitated by catastrophe (Kahn). Berner and Kahn’s songs embrace concepts of diasporic resistance to the domination of the territorial nation-state—concepts that emerged with the advent of Diaspora Studies in the 1990s as a response to globalization (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993, 2002; Clifford 1994). Through lyrical analysis, I argue that these songs now deploy these theoretical concepts in order to inspire praxis that may challenge chauvinistic nationalism as it has become more entrenched in the post-2016 era. In a stance not without scholarly precedent (Marienstras 1975; Safran 1991), these songs make diasporic Jewishness the indexical case of difference within the nation-state. I argue that these songs can be heard as manifestos for a strategically essentialist model of Jewishness as diasporic Other, one that repurposes the hybridity of diaspora in order to foster intersectional alliances against the far right.

Among the musical salonnières of post-Napoleonic Berlin, few had the ability to attract celebrity like Amalie Beer. Actress Karoline Bauer recalled performances from Paganini, Schröder-Devrient, and naturally the “son of the house,” Giacomo Meyerbeer. In 1816, salon attendee Friederike Liman praised evenings at the Beer home, “where good-natured Jewish liberality reigns supreme.” While many of the Jewish women who hosted or frequented salons would be baptized as Christians, Beer remained a committed Jew throughout her life. In fact, the same home where she regularly entertained was also host to a popular yet controversial Sabbath service known as the Beer Temple, one of the first attempts to align Jewish worship more closely with the surrounding German culture. How, this paper asks, might the aesthetics of the musical salon have shaped the contours of early Jewish Reform?

Traditionally, historical treatments of Berlin’s Jewish salons portrayed them as opportunities for women to shed their religious ties, or as a reflection of broader trends within the Jewish community like assimilation and conversion (Hertz 1988, Lowenstein 1994). I find, however, that such an assessment overlooks the role of the salon within the emergence of what Maria-Baader (2006) describes as bourgeois Judaism, a “culture of religiosity” tied to the feminine domestic sphere. I extend this line of thought by investigating the points of contact and exchange between the Beer Temple and the salon of Amalie Beer, drawing from the growing musicological literature surrounding Beer’s contemporary Sara Levy (Cypess 2018).

Though the organ, choir, and chorales characteristic of the Beer Temple are commonly framed as adaptations of contemporary Lutheran practice, I argue that the Temple was equally marked by its parallels with the salon—not only its domestic location, but its visual trappings, sociability, gender politics, and musical functions. To demonstrate this connection, I compare the social and physical features of both spaces as assembled through extant documentary evidence, highlighting the shared role of music as a unifying instrument of Bildung, the moralized pursuit of self-cultivation. Through this work, I theorize the salon as a physical and conceptual space within which are encoded specific values, practices, and aesthetics.