Join Der Nister for a book talk with author Jeremiah Lockwood followed by a concert with Judith Berkson and Lockwood.

Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era (UC Press, 2024) is an ethnographic study of young singers in the contemporary Brooklyn Hasidic community who base their aesthetic explorations of the culturally intimate space of prayer on the gramophone-era cantorial golden age. Jeremiah Lockwood proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to disrupt the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their conservative community, defying institutional authority and pushing at normative boundaries of sacred and secular. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, golden age cantorial music offers aspiring Hasidic singers a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority are aligned.

Judith Berkson and Jeremiah Lockwood have joined forces to develop a new music series that will present the best and brightest of contemporary artists delving into the archive of Jewish spiritual music. Through recording projects and multi-media presentations, Lockwood and Berkson will present the work of artists engaged in personal culture making projects. Drawing on decades of experience in music production, archival research, and composition, Berkson and Lockwood bring their unique and radical perspectives on the khazones tradition to the forefront in their promotion of new communities devoted to creativity, celebration of outsider voices, and heritage reclamation.

Tickets are 18 dollars. Be sure to park either on Spring, or on Hill. Get them here.

Judith Berkson is a mezzo-soprano, pianist and composer living in Los Angeles, California. She received a BM in voice from the New England Conservatory and received her MA in composition from Wesleyan University. She is currently pursuing a doctorate as a performer/composer at CalArts. Judith has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, Wet Ink, Yarn/Wire and City Opera and has presented work at Picasso Museum Malaga, Roulette, Le Poisson Rouge, Joe’s Pub, The Stone, Barbès and the 92 Street Y. She has received a Six Points Fellowship, a Jerome Foundation grant, Meet The Composer grant, New Music USA funding and support from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her solo album Oylam (ECM Records) was described as “Standards and Schubert and liturgical music, swing and chilly silences, a beautiful Satie-like piece to open and close the record” by the New York Times. Her latest work, the chamber opera Partial Memories premiered at the NODO Festival in Ostrava, Czechia in June 2022. It was dedicated to forgotten female artists Janet Sobel and Mary Gartside and featured the Ostravská Banda.

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar, singer, guitarist and composer. He holds a PhD from Stanford University in Education and Jewish Studies, where his dissertation fieldwork focused on young Chassidic cantors in Brooklyn and is currently a Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. His musical career began with years of playing guitar with blues musician Carolina Slim, and in synagogue singing with his grandfather Cantor Jacob Konigsberg. Lockwood is founder and frontman of The Sway Machinery, a group whose music the New Yorker has described as “unclassifiable and uplifting.” Lockwood has also recorded 14 albums, toured internationally, and been the recipient of numerous academic honors including the Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award and the YIVO Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music and Theater.