New Perspectives in Canadian Jewish Music
Chair(s): Emily Richmond Pollock (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Jeremiah Lockwood (Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Michigan)
While the United States continues to play an outsized role in the popular imagination of North American Jewish musical life, Jewish contributions to music-making and musicking have also flourished across Canada. Despite extensive Jewish involvement in the Canadian music industry, the breadth of this narrative is just beginning to be realized in scholarly discourse. Building on recent research on Canadian Jewish culture (see Margolis 2023) and in dialogue with a forthcoming issue of Canadian Jewish Studies dedicated to music and sound, this panel presents three case studies that investigate Canadian Jewish music from a diversity of genres, locales, and time periods. Collectively, these case studies decenter the United States in evaluations of North American Jewish music culture, while emphasizing the breadth, richness, and significance of Canadian Jewish music history.
The first paper reframes the story of the famous Colonial Tavern (1947-1978), one of Toronto’s first desegregated Jazz venues, as a narrative about Jews in music management. Drawing on newspaper clippings, oral histories, and familial memoirs, this study centers as its protagonist the author’s great-grandfather, Mike (Myer) G. Lawrence, whose varied encounters with antisemitism before entering the music business motivated a deliberately anti-racist approach to his club’s operations. The second paper features a close listening to digitized reel-to-reel tapes of ethnomusicologist Ruth Rubin’s lecture-recitals in Montreal during the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Even as the audible audience reaction on the tapes provides evidence for the impact of Yiddish song within the Montreal community, the authors also probe how Montreal functions as both a distinctly Canadian locale and also as one node in a global Yiddish network that includes cities such as New York City, Paris, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, and Melbourne. The third paper examines the repertoires of Vancouver-based punk singer-songwriter and accordionist Geoff Berner in the 2000s, leading up to 2019's Grand Hotel Cosmopolis and its title track. It considers how these examples serve as his engagement with Diasporism, through which he seeks to speak to intersectional issues such as labour rights, police abolition, and antifascism.
Presentations of the Symposium
Putting His Story Back on the Record: Mike G. Lawrence’s Management of the Colonial Tavern as Canadian Jewish Music History
Samantha M. Cooper
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
From its opening in the late 1940s through its closure in the late 1970s, the Colonial Tavern at 201-203 Yonge Street garnered a reputation as one of the most famous jazz venues in Canada. Widely celebrated for its featuring of extraordinary talent and extraordinarily mediocre food, the Colonial was also one of the first clubs in Toronto to refuse to abide by segregation. In addition to white and Jewish musicians, African American and African Canadian entertainers graced its stage, including Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Howlin’ Wolf, and Oscar Peterson. While the Colonial Tavern has long gained a foothold in Canadian music history, its story has not yet been told as a product of the Canadian Jewish experience.
This paper retells the Colonial’s story as a Canadian Jewish story. Its protagonist is the author’s Great Grandfather Mike (Myer) G. Lawrence (1911-1979), an engineering graduate from the University of Toronto who became a businessman when he could not secure work in his chosen profession because of his Jewish heritage. Having experienced discrimination firsthand, Lawrence was determined that such punitive dealings on the basis of racial difference would not define his own business enterprises, an approach that paved the way for his establishing of the Colonial with his brothers-in-law, Goodwin (Goody) (1911-1982) and Harvey Lichtenberg (circa 1917-1995).
Drawing on press coverage and oral history interviews with Lawrence’s eldest daughter, Bonnie Lawrence Shear (1941-) and Lawrence’s son-in-law and the Colonial’s last manager Michael Lyons (1944-), as well as Lawrence Shear’s two memoirs, Dinner on Dunvegan (2020) and Things I Forgot to Tell You (2021), this paper adds new managerial, familial, and ethnographic dimensions to recent histories of Jews and Jazz that largely focus on acclaimed American and Israeli musicians (Hersch 2016, Lemish 2023, Gerber 2024). It also considers what it meant for a Jewish businessman to establish a performance space dedicated to community-building, intercultural exchange, and music-making in mid-twentieth century Toronto.
“How Do We Share It With The Generations?”: Investigating Ruth Rubin’s Lecture-Recitals at Montreal’s Jewish Public Library
Miriam Borden1, Zeke Levine2
1University of Toronto, 2New York University
Throughout her illustrious five-decade-long career, Ruth Rubin assumed many roles. As an ethnomusicologist, recording artist, lecturer, journalist, community organizer, mother, and wife, she dedicated her professional and personal life to preserving Yiddish language music. Originating in Montreal’s Yiddishist environment and marked by that city’s distinctive cultural imprint, Ruth Rubin evolved into a folklorist and quickly established herself as an authority on Yiddish folk song. Montreal was a valuable site for Rubin’s fieldwork, and assumed even deeper significance in her later years as a site of return. Beginning in the late 1970s, Rubin delivered a series of lecture-recitals on the topic of Yiddish folk song at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal, a vital center of gravity for the city’s Yiddish speaking community.
In this article, we perform a close listening to three extant recordings of these lecture-recitals, spanning from 1978 to 1991. We argue that in these Montreal recordings, Rubin offers the most developed assessment of her role as a folklorist—by the late 1970s, she had solidified a self-image of the Yiddish folklorist as a bridge between generations, projecting this identity through her performance practice. In addition to questions of the role of Yiddish folk song in intergenerational cultural transmission, the rich sonic data provided by the recordings invites and guides an analysis of the the international character of Yiddish, the shifting symbolism of the language in the second half of the twentieth century, and the relationship between Yiddish and English in Montreal.
“The Nationalists Wish We Didn’t Exist”: The Diasporist Songs of Geoff Berner
Nathan Friedman
University of Chicago
Canadian singer-songwriter and accordionist Geoff Berner emerged from the Vancouver punk scene in the early 2000s and has been closely affiliated with the green and eco-socialist movements in British Columbia. In the twenty years following the release of his first album, Berner gradually became more musically engaged with his Jewish roots, first incorporating klezmer influences, then adopting songs from the Yiddish folk song repertoire. Much of his early Jewish-influenced material is satirical in nature, but he eventually aligned his use of this material to his political activism. This process culminated in the 2019 album Grand Hotel Cosmopolis, which explicitly harnesses early 20th century Yiddish songs to address the global resurgence of antisemitism and the far right in the post-2016 era.
In this paper, I examine Berner’s repertoire, with special focus on Grand Hotel Cosmopolis and its title track as the culmination of his engagement with the burgeoning Diasporist movement (Kaye/Kantrowitz 2007). Like many Diasporists, Berner seeks to draw parallels between Jewish oppression in pre-WWII Europe and that of other groups facing similar issues today. I show how he draws explicit connections in his use of Yiddish protest songs that he adapts in order to connect them to such causes as labour rights, police abolition, and antifascism. I also trace his increasing usage of the Yiddish language as an example of the kind of postvernacular (Shandler 2006) self-Othering that Diasporism embraces, as well as creating a kind of bridge across the temporal rift (Glaser 2014) dividing a Jewish past and intersectional present.
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