FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!
THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM PRESENTS
Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations
Exhibition: August 4, 2011 – Ongoing
San Francisco, CA, August 8, 2011 – After making a splash with music fans last year, Black
Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations returns by popular demand to the
Contemporary Jewish Museum. Yiddish jive?! Cab Calloway was the king. “If I Were a Rich Man”
remade into a gospel reverie?! The Temptations did it in 1969. Based on a 2010 compilation album
put out by the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, Black Sabbath is a musical journey through
a unique slice of recording history – the Black-Jewish musical encounter from the 1930s to the 60s.
In contrast to the oft-told story of how Jewish songwriters and publishers of Tin Pan Alley and
Broadway transformed Black spirituals, blues, and jazz into the Great American Songbook, scant
attention has been paid to the secret history of the many Black responses to Jewish music, life, and
culture. In the exhibition, visitors learn how Black artists treated Jewish music as a resource for
African-American identity, history, and politics from Johnny Mathis singing “Kol Nidre” to Aretha
Franklin doing a 60s take on “Swanee.”
In a nightclub setting that evokes the 1940s, visitors can browse extensive playlists including some
rare and unusual recordings and can access more in depth information as well as vintage videos on
iPads. An ongoing slideshow of album covers and images is projected on the wall of the Museum’s
soaring Yud Gallery.
“A single find birthed the idea behind this entire collection,” says David Katznelson, President of
Birdman Recording Group and one of the four record collecting dumpster divers that founded the
Idelsohn Society. “It was a 7” version of “Kol Nidre” by Johnny Mathis, backed by the Percy Faith
Orchestra. The second we heard his belting version of this Aramaic prayer intoned at the beginning
of Yom Kippur, we had to know more.”
What Katznelson and his Idelsohn Society colleagues Josh Kun, Roger Bennett, and Courtney Holt
found was a treasure trove of recordings by various artists that revealed a significant Black
involvement with Jewish music and cast a new light on the history of 20th Century American popular
music, which as Kun, Associate Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School at the
University of Southern California, says “…is hard to imagine without all the social and political
push and pull between Black and Jewish artists, without all the kinship and without all the alienation,
without all the imitation and without all the mutual understanding, appreciation and solidarity.”
In the 60s, Black artists like jazz and soul singer Marlena Shaw found particular resonance between
post-Holocaust Jewish songs that expressed the desire for a promised land and the Black civil rights
movement. Shaw proved that the question posed in Yiddish song king Leo Fuld’s “Where Can I
1 of 7
Go?” / “Vu Ahin Zol Ikn Geyn?” (based on a song Fuld heard performed by a survivor of the
Warsaw Ghetto in a Paris nightclub) was not just a Jewish question, but a Black one.
The Oscar-winning theme to the movie Exodus about the founding of Israel was covered by scores
of Black artists – Jimmy Scott, Ray Charles, Lionel Hampton – who often saw the birth of Israel as a
victory for the oppressed. Lena Horne’s incisive 1963 rant against civil rights abuses “Now!” was
composed to the otherwise joyous tune of “Hava Nagila.”
Old Testament stories were reborn as black spirituals as well. The song “Eli Eli,” based on King
David’s lament in the 22nd Psalm, became a staple for left-leaning progressives like Paul Robeson
and a must-cover for Black artists like Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters. For Waters, the song spoke
to a history of shared suffering. “It tells the tragic history of the Jews as much as one song can,” she
said, “and that history of their age-old grief and despair is so similar to that of my own people that I
felt I was telling the story of my own race too.”
Friendship and working relationships with Jews were the inspiration for several forays by Black
artists into Yiddish jive. Cab Calloway was probably the best-known “Afro-Yiddishist,” mixing his
own hepcat jive tongue-twisting with a constant flow of swinging Yiddishisms and spoofs on
cantorial pyrotechnics with songs like the 1939 “Utt Da Zay.” Calloway’s exposure to both Yiddish
and the rhythms of Jewish prayer were a result of his close friendship with his Odessa-born Jewish
manager Irving Mills.
Like Calloway, Slim Gaillard was a self-styled linguist who invented a language he called Vout,
borrowing scraps of Yiddish as its essential building blocks. Legend had it that Gaillard, a Detroit
native, had run bootleg booze for the local Jewish mob, the Purple Gang, before he headed into
vaudeville. Among his many titles like “Meshuganah Mambo” and “Matzoh Balls” is his hypnotic
1945 Yiddish-Vout meditation on the pleasures of Jewish food, "Dunkin’ Bagel".
The eight year (1964-1972) Broadway run of Fiddler on the Roof turned the show’s music into a mustcover songbook for just about everyone with a record deal. The jazz saxophone legend Cannonball
Adderley re-imagined the whole Fiddler opus as swinging jazz instrumentals in 1964. The
Temptations created a Fiddler medley in 1969 that was part gospel, part funk and part jazz. Songs of
shtetl nostalgia had become American pop standards with room for everybody.
These songs and more can be heard at the exhibition’s two listening stations. Each station features a
curated group of songs arranged around a particular theme. The “Heebie Jeebies” playlist focuses on
jive. The “Go Down Moses” playlist features spirituals and soul music inspired by the Old
Testament. Liner notes from the compilation of recordings can be accessed via a special Black
Sabbath application on the Museum’s iPads, and visitors can view vintage videos of performances
such as a 1966 TV appearance by Danny Kaye and Harry Belafonte singing “Hava Nagila” and
another in which Nina Simone sings the Israeli folk favorite “Eretz Zavat Chalav” in Hebrew. Still
images and album covers can be viewed as projections in the gallery.
About the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation
The Idelsohn Society is a critically-acclaimed all volunteer-run organization founded by Roger
Bennett, Josh Kun, David Katznelson and Courtney Holt, a core team from the music industry and
academia who passionately believe Jewish history is best told by the music we have loved and lost.
2 of 7
In order to incite a new conversation about the present, we must begin by listening anew to the past.
The Idelsohn Society curated the Museum’s 2008 exhibition Jews on Vinyl, an exhibition based on
their book And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have
Loved and Lost, which spans the history of Jewish recorded music from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Exhibition Sponsorship
Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish Relations is organized by the
Contemporary Jewish Museum with guest curators Roger Bennett, Courtney Holt, David
Katznelson, and Josh Kun of The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation.
The Koret and Taube Foundations are the lead supporters of the 2011/2012 exhibition season.
About the Contemporary Jewish Museum
With the opening of its new building on June 8, 2008, the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM)
ushered in a new chapter in its twenty-plus year history of engaging audiences and artists in
exploring contemporary perspectives on Jewish culture, history, art, and ideas. The new facility,
designed by internationally renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, is a lively center where people of
all ages and backgrounds can gather to experience art, share diverse perspectives, and engage in
hands-on activities. Inspired by the Hebrew phrase “L’Chaim” (To Life), the building is a physical
embodiment of the CJM’s mission to bring together tradition and innovation in an exploration of
the Jewish experience in the 21st century.
Major support for the Contemporary Jewish Museum comes from the Koret and Taube
Foundations, who are the Lead Supporters of the 2010/11 exhibition season. Additional major
support is provided by the Jim Joseph Foundation; The Wallace Foundation; Bernard Osher Jewish
Philanthropic Foundation of the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund; Bank of
America; Institute of Museum and Library Services; Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax
Fund; The Hearst Foundations; Terra Foundation for American Art; Walter and Elise Haas Fund;
The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; Osterweis Capital Management; The Skirball Foundation;
and Target. The Museum also receives major support from the Jewish Community Federation of
San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.
For media information or visuals visit our online press gallery or please contact:
Contemporary Jewish Museum
Nina Sazevich
Public Relations
415.752.2483
Nina911@pacbell.net
Daryl Carr
Director of Marketing & Communications
415.655.7834
dcarr@thecjm.org
3 of 7
Melanie Samay
Marketing & Communications Assistant
415.655.7833
msamay@thecjm.org
Online: www.thecjm.org/press
www.thecjm.org/imagegallery
General Information
The Museum is open daily (except Wednesday) 11 AM – 5 PM and Thursday, 1 – 8 PM. Museum
admission is $12.00 for adults, $10.00 for students and senior citizens with a valid ID, and $5 on
Thursdays after 5 PM. Youth 18 and under always get in free. For general information on the
Contemporary Jewish Museum, the public may visit the Museum’s Web site at thecjm.org or call
415.655.7800. The Contemporary Jewish Museum is located at 736 Mission Street (between 3rd & 4th
streets), San Francisco.
###
4 of 7