JOSHUA JACOBSON ORAL HISTORY

LYNN YANIS:This is Lynn Yanis, and today is March 21st, 2014, and I'm here at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts with Professor Joshua Jacobson.  We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Professor Jacobson, do I have your permission to record this interview?

JOSHUA JACOBSON:Only if you call me Josh.  Yes, you do.

LY:  Excellent.  Josh, can you begin by telling me what you know about your family and the background of your family?

JJ:  My grandparents on both sides came to this country -- my father's parents 1:00came from what was Lithuania, I think.  It was northeast Poland.  And my mother's family come from somewhere in Russia.  And they both arrived around the turn of the century.

LY:  Did they come to the Boston area?

JJ:  My father's father was a rabbi, and he had studied in Radun and was a student of Chofetz Chaim, a famous rabbi.  And he sent him to America to bring Yiddishkayt to the heathens in America.  I know my father was born in Salem, Massachusetts, where his father was a rabbi at that time.  But then -- so, I'm not sure exactly where he was when he first came to America.  But he was in Salem and then moved to Roxbury, where he spent most of his life.  And he found that being a rabbi wasn't such good business, because he would tell people you 2:00have to be shomer Shabbos [Jew who observes Shabbos].  And people would say, But I can't do it, I have to work.  And he was very unpopular, because the bale-batim [leaders] -- can I use such expressions in this?

LY:  Please.

JJ:  Yeah, the bale-batim in his synagogues told him, You can't make these demands.  And he said, "But I have to, because I'm an Orthodox rabbi."  So, he -- apparently, he was fired from a number of shuls where he was rabbi.  So, he started a catering business, and he was the mesader-kidushn.  He was the rabbi who would arrange marriages, who would perform the wedding ceremonies.  And his wife started to do the cooking, and eventually that developed into -- I think they were the largest kosher catering in Boston at the time, in the 1950s -- by the early 1950s.  Late '40s to early '50s.  They were called the Aperion Plaza Caterers.  And to this day, I'll get people who come up to me and say, You 3:00know, your grandfather married me -- meaning that he was the one who did the ceremony.  Yeah, so that was his trajectory.  He ended up -- after my grandmother died, he wanted to go to die in Jerusalem.  And in 1956, I think it was, he moved to Jerusalem.  So, I was born in '48.  I barely knew him.  And he was the last of my grandparents to stay alive, and he died in 1958 and was buried in Jerusalem.  My mother's parents I barely knew at all.  They -- I believe they first came to Hyde Park, a suburb of Boston, or a part of Boston, but then moved to New Haven, where my mother was born and grew up.  And they -- 4:00he -- my grandfather, apparently, was part of a brick business in Russia.  And there are some bricks, apparently, that had his stamp on them.  I'm a little bit hazy about the details of that.  But I also was told that he was one of the unfortunate young men who was drafted into the czar's army.  I'm sure you know about this, the conscription on the Jews of Russia at the time.  And we have a photograph of him in army uniform with a saber, actually, and he deserted and came to America.  And he -- had he not done so, I would not be here today, or I would be a different person, however you want to take that.

LY:  Do you know how he deserted?  How he made his way out and across the ocean?

JJ:  I don't.  I don't.

LY:  How did your parents meet?

JJ:  Okay, so my father was an artist.  And at a young age, he decided that this was what he wanted to do.  And it's kind of the "My Name is Asher Lev" story, although he -- as soon as the book came out, he says, "This was not me!  This was not me!"  But I think he was protesting too much.  But from Roxbury, he would often -- on a Shabbos, he would walk to the Museum of Fine Arts and could get in for free and enjoy that.  And his father just couldn't understand why his youngest son was wasting time with this foolishness.  But he went to MassArt, which was then the Mass. School of Art.  It's now the Mass. College of Art, and he studied there for four years.  In fact, his graduating project, like a senior thesis, was a portrait of his father, "Portrait of the Rabbi," 6:00it's called.  It's hanging in my living room now.  I think I sent a picture of it so you can show it in this video.  It's an astounding piece.  And then, after that, he wanted to continue his studies, and he wanted to continue at Yale.  And he was accepted to Yale Art School.  And he didn't have a degree, so he would eventually get his bachelor in fine arts from Yale.  And they had to arrange for him to stay with a nice kosher family in New Haven, and guess who the daughter was (laughs) in that kosher family?  The woman who'd become my mother, yeah.

LY:  Would this have been around 1940?

JJ:  No, it would -- let's see.  He was born in 1916, so he would be twenty-something at that point.  So, late '30s, I guess.  Yeah, maybe it was 1940, but -- that period, yep.

LY:  So, they met in New Haven.

JJ:  Yes.

LY:  And how did they make their way back up to Boston, where you were born?

JJ:  They made the decision that they wanted to live in Boston.  My father thought that he could make his career better there than in New Haven, I guess, although after they were married, they lived for a couple of months in Miami Beach, believe it or not.  And my father was doing work -- doing murals for some of the hotels.  My wife and I went down about, I don't know, ten years ago to the South Beach, and sure enough, in one of the -- these beautiful Deco hotels, which is now protected, they confirmed that his mural was there, but it was covered by some other covering, which they couldn't take off.  But they showed me -- they had a photograph of it, to show what was underneath this covering, 'cause they can't remove it because of the -- because it's protected 8:00by the government.

LY:  Do you recall what the subject matter was?

JJ:  No.  (laughter) No.  But I have a picture of it someplace, yeah.

LY:  How interesting.

JJ:  Yeah, yeah.

LY:  So, can you tell me, then, the -- in the household that you were born into, who was in the household and where was the house?  What was it like -- an apartment?

JJ:  Well, my parents were living with my grandfather, with my grandparents in Roxbury until just before I was born.  They had a few other places, and my father was a starving artist, and it was hard for them to make ends meet.  They went -- my brother was born -- I have an older brother who was born in 1942.  And then, in '43, I think it was, my father was drafted and went off to fight in 9:00Europe.  And came back to this little boy who hardly knew his father.  And then, in '47 or thereabouts, they went off to Nova Scotia on a trip, and my father was painting and my older brother went along.  They came back and bought a house that they couldn't afford, but the family gave them some money.  A huge Victorian house on the border of Brighton and Brookline.  And that's where I was born.  That's where they lived when I was born, in a snowstorm on a -- (laughs) on a Friday in January of 1948.  So, that's the house I grew up in.  And my father died in that house, and my mother lived there until she had to go 10:00into a nursing home.  So, they held onto that for a long, long time.

LY:  Do you remember the house very well?

JJ:  Vividly.

LY:  Can you tell me what it was like?  Was it very big?

JJ:  Yes.  It was huge.  There were two separate apartments in the house that they rented out for some income.  I got nightmares in that house because of all the dark shadows and corners in it.  And I remember, I would go to visit my friends in -- and they lived in apartments.  And it was a little embarrassing that I had this big house (laughs) that I lived in.  I felt, oh, in so many ways, abnormal.  Abnormal.  I mean, I lived in a big house.  My friends lived in apartments.  My family was, first of all, Jewish, and I went to public 11:00school, and that was strange.  And then, to be in an Orthodox family, that put me apart from so many other people.  And my father was an artist.  And my mother worked, as a decorator, as an interior decorator.  And that was just so out of synch with families at that time.  And my -- I realized my parents also felt out of synch.  I mean, I didn't realize this until later, because in the artistic circle in which they hung out -- and they were also very liberal, politically -- you're an Orthodox Jew, that just doesn't fit with liberal politics and doesn't fit with being an artist.  And in the Orthodox Jewish community in which they hung out, "You're an artist?  What kind of work is that for a nice Jewish boy?"  So, they felt betwixt and between.  And then, at -- 12:00certain point in my life, I realized I had the same conundrum.  And my son, who's now thirty-six years old, realized at some point in his life, he had the same conundrum of being betwixt and between and not fitting in perfectly in either world.  But maybe that's creative, isn't it?

LY:  For your parents, both being artistic and expressive, were those among the values that they -- that you were raised with?  Or were you, well --

JJ:  Yes.  (laughter) Absolutely.  I mean, my father would joke around, "Oh, you want to be a musician?  Couldn't you go into something serious like the visual arts?"  (laughs) And he would always kid me that way.  Also, he went to Yale, I went to Harvard, so we would have a very lighthearted banter about those 13:00things.  My brother is a real intellectual, and he first went to school to become an anthropologist.  And later, gave that up because he got married and they had a child right away, and he realized he couldn't feed his children on anthropology.  So, he started to work for -- I think it was Travelers Insurance Company.  And then, they sent him to get a degree in computer science.  This is when they still had those huge machines that took up a whole room -- whereas I -- I had -- I liked to draw and I did some of that as a child.  Actually, my son is a very good visual artist, and got to work with my father when he was still alive.  They would go into the studio together.  But then, I went into music, and so I was the one, in a sense, who followed in my father's footsteps.  And also, my father did a lot of what would be called Jewish art, I 14:00guess, whether it was working in the synagogue, or his paintings that had biblical themes.  And I also went into -- bridged Judaism and music, in my case, and brought them together in my work.  So, we had similar trajectories in that sense.

LY:  When you think back to your childhood in that big house, what -- were there specific ways that the arts and Judaism were practiced together?

JJ:  Well, the walls were full of my father's paintings.  And it might have been the Passover seder in the context of the Holocaust, which is something else.  Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones, in the context of the Holocaust, 15:00what was going on in Europe at that time.  Jacob wrestling with the angel.  I mean, these were the paintings that I was surrounded with as a child, as well as discussions that went on.  And there was always -- seems there was always company at our Shabbos table, and there were -- we would always sing zmires, table -- Shabbos table songs at our house.  And when we were washing dishes Friday night, after dinner, we would sing zmires or -- and there were some Yiddish songs and some songs from the liturgy that the whole family would sing together.  So, I mean, I -- that singing was -- very important part of my early childhood.

LY:  Did everyone sing?

JJ:  Yeah.

LY:  Your brother --

JJ:  Not so well, but -- (laughs) but that's okay.  You know, I hate it when I find people who say -- I say, "Well, come sing with us!"  And, "Oh, no.  And 16:00when I was in the third grade, the music teacher told me to sit in the back row and be quiet."  Oh!  That's a bad music teacher.  Everybody has a voice, and everybody should -- all right, don't sing in my auditioned choir, (laughs) okay?  But come on, if we're just having fun and singing as a community thing to do -- it's too bad, 'cause people get traumatized by those kind of bad teachers.  That's off-topic.  Where were we?

LY:  It's very much on-topic, it -- how do you inculcate a love of music and of art, particularly in the face of other parts of the world that aren't as loving and accepting?  So, where your parents were sort of betwixt and between in Jewish circles, they still found a way.  And I'm interested in how you found a way.

JJ:  They -- I mean, this was their life.  This -- I mean, especially for my father.  This was his life of bringing together these two parts of his life, what he got from his father in terms of what Judaism was, which was a religion to be celebrated, to be lived, not to be suffered through.  And I don't know if there's any genetic explanation for where his art came from, but it certainly bubbled up in him.  For me, the music was very important.  I liked -- as a child, I liked to sing.  They tell me that I liked to listen to recordings of Beethoven.  I don't remember that part, but it -- certainly possible.  As a pre-teen, I -- they made me take piano lessons, and I hated them.  And I made 18:00them let me quit, which I regretted years later.  But I wanted to play the guitar.  And by then, it was the '60s and we had to do that.  And I didn't want to take classical guitar, although they made me do a little bit of that.  I wanted to play folk guitar.  I just wanted to strum chords, which I did.  And I liked singing songs.  And that was the time when the songs from Israel were being imported into this country.  And this is how we expressed our love of Israel.  And I loved listening to recordings, and just by ear, picking up the songs from the recordings and learning them by ear and figuring out the chords and how to accompany myself, starting in the late '50s.  And I would sing -- I went to summer camp for nine years, to Camp Yavneh, which is a Zionist 19:00summer camp run by what was then Hebrew Teachers College, now it's Hebrew College in Boston.  The camp itself was in New Hampshire, in Northwood, New Hampshire.  And that, also, just solidified my connections to Israel and the Hebrew language.  Yiddish wasn't part of that culture.  I mean, that's the culture war we can talk about later, but -- and I would take out my guitar and sing -- many occasions.  And also, there, sometime around 1959, 1960, I wanted somebody to sing songs with.  I don't know, there was talent night at camp or something, and somebody said, "Yeah, there's another guy who plays guitar and sings in the bunk."  "What's his name?"  "Josh."  "No, that's me," I said.  "No, there's another guy named Josh."  So, I met a young man by the name of Josh Kevel whose father was a rabbi at Temple Reyim in Newton.  And he also 20:00played guitar, and he also sang a lot of the same songs.  Well, we hooked up, and for the next, I don't know, fifteen, twenty years, we were a kind of professional duet.  And we had gigs all around the area.  We sang folk songs, both of us with our guitars, folk songs from all around the world, most especially from Israel, but all around the world.  And we would work out these arrangements, just by ear.  And that's what I loved.  I loved doing it.  And the direction of my career changed -- it took a right turn.  Not a reverse, but a right turn.  I was around -- I think I was fourteen years old, so 1962, when there was a new counselor.  New music counselor at Camp Yavneh.  Up until then, when they tried to get me to participate in the musical activities -- they 21:00had a choir -- I said, yeah, right, a choir.  I'm making much better harmony with my buddy and my guitar than this so-called choir.  I didn't want -- so, Stanley Sperber was the new music counselor at Camp Yavneh.  And he started a choir, and I watched the rehearsal, and I said, (gasps) "I want to do that."  'Cause they were singing, I mean, real music.  They were singing four-part music, and I remember one of the pieces was "Hallelujah" by Louis Lewandowski.  And I said, "Wow, I didn't know you could do that," which was crazy because I had listened to all kinds of music.  So, anyway, Stanley took me under his wing, I sang in his choir summer after summer, and eventually he gave me music lessons and I would go visit him.  He was a -- by then, I think he was a graduate student in musicology at Columbia University.  And he had started a 22:00choir called -- at first, they were called the Massad Choir, because they had gotten their start in Camp Massad, and they decided to meet during the year -- until they got a call from the director of Camp Massad and said, "You can't use our name."  "Well, what shall we call ourselves?"  And the director or somebody from the camp said, "Call yourselves Zamir."  And so, they did.  That choir had started in 1960.  Stanley started the choir, and they called themselves "Zamir."  And that was the kind of music that they were bringing to Camp Yavneh at the time.  And as I was getting to the end of my high school years, I'd never sung in choir in high school.  I said "That's what I want to do."  So, I said, "Okay, I'd better be a music major."  (laughs) So, I started 23:00freshman year at Harvard, and they gave me the test to get into the freshman music theory course, which I flunked miserably.  I didn't have the piano chops, I couldn't read music well enough, (laughs) and so -- I still remember the professor, Luise Vosgerchian, said, "You go study for year, and we'll see if we can start you in the sophomore year."  So, I took other courses in my freshman year.  And I went and I took piano lessons and I worked hard.  So, sophomore year, I took the same test, and I sat at the piano keyboard and they put a Bach chorale up there.  And I went -- no, that's not right -- at a speed that was certainly not acceptable.  But for some reason, she took pity on me and she said, "Well, if we're going to let you in the program, I guess we're gonna have to let you in now.  Okay."  And there I was, surrounded by prodigies.  I 24:00mean, one year ahead of me was Robert Levin, who now is the worldwide expert on Mozart.  He teaches at Harvard.  And even then, he knew every piece that Mozart had written, and he could tell you what the Köchel number was, and I remember he composed little -- he set the student handbook to music as an oratorio.  It -- yeah, it was crazy.  John Adams, the great composer, the great composer, was in my class.  It was so intimidating.  But I went through, and I still remember, at one of the -- at one point, this same professor, Luise Vosgerchian, said to us, "If there is any doubt whatsoever in your mind about becoming a professional musician, don't do it!"  I was full of doubt, but I did it.  I did it.  And I graduated with a B.A. in music, with honors.  I wrote 25:00my senior thesis on -- I forget the exact title, but it seemed to me that starting in -- around the 1930s, there was a new trend in composing Jewish liturgical music, at least in America, relying less on the Germanic style and incorporating more of the techniques of Bartok and Stravinsky, those European composers who had successfully melded folk elements with traditional harmony.  And so, composers of synagogue music were doing that.  So, I wrote my thesis on that, and the question came up:  who would be my thesis advisor?  And they decided A. Tillman Merritt would be my thesis advisor.  You couldn't get more Yankee than A. Tillman Merritt.  Later, I found out that he was also the thesis 26:00advisor for another Jewish musician at Harvard who had graduated exactly thirty years before I did, Leonard Bernstein.  And I dug up Bernstein's thesis while I was working on mine, the original copy, which they had in the library, full of A. Tillman Merritt's red ink.  (laughs) Including, like, "What's a young man like you -- you don't have any right to make statements like this."  Anyway, Merritt proved to be perfect, because things that I would assume people would know about Jewish music, he didn't know anything about, whether it's the synagogue music, the modes, the nusach [Hebrew: melody], so I really had to explain myself from scratch.  And so, that worked out.

LY:  When you first started heading to Harvard, what did you think you would be doing?

JJ:  I wanted to study music.  I wanted to be just like Stanley.  I wanted to be a choral conductor.  And so, the first thing is to major in music.  And 27:00then, afterwards, I would study conducting.  And while at Harvard, I sang in the glee club at Harvard.  So, I had that intense choral experience.  And I tried to think, Well, how a I going to make my living as a choral conductor?  And I realized the best way for me to do it -- and I saw the model at Harvard and at other universities -- I should become a professor and I'll conduct a college chorus, and then I can do other things on the side.  Lynn, I was very lucky.  I was very lucky -- I was able to do that.

LY:  It's extraordinary how early you found your work.  And then, I believe that shortly after or at the time of graduation, you were invited by Stanley to start up -- can you talk about how things fell into place for you?

JJ:  Sure.  So, I graduated Harvard in 1969, and I was -- I applied to and was accepted to the New England Conservatory to get a master's in choral conducting.  And I studied with Lorna Cooke deVaron, who's a wonderful teacher and even more so a wonderful conductor.  And back then, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra wanted to do a work with chorus, this was the chorus that sang with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the student chorus at New England Conservatory.  So, I had these amazing, amazing opportunities to not only sing great music, but sing behind one of the best orchestras in the world with guest conductors -- as well as Seiji Ozawa, who was the regular conductor -- from all around the world.  Oh my God, it was fabulous.  Later on, Lorna would tell me -- she said, "They didn't want to accept you into New England Conservatory."  I 29:00didn't know that much about conducting at that point.  I had studied, basically, musicology at Harvard, music history.  And I had watched my conductor, and I remember my audition, I guess I didn't do that well.  She said, "But I saw something in you that said this boy is going to be a conductor.  So, I let you in."  So, around that time, during my senior year at Harvard, Stanley wrote to me or called me -- there was no email back in those days -- and said, "In New York, we're trying to encourage the establishment of Zamir chorales in other cities.  Would you like to start one in Boston?"  Would I?  And I had already done something like that with friends.  We had gotten together and sung some of the summer music during the year.  So, they helped us out in terms of repertoire and library, and I got together friends, 30:00mostly friends from camp, as the core of this group.  And especially two friends, Jerry Halperin and Lou Garber, both of whom were students at Boston University at the time.  And Lou, who has since passed away -- I mean, tragically, at a very young age, was very gregarious.  He would go into the girls' dormitories and say, "Hey!  We're starting a choir!"  (laughs) And he was able to get BU Hillel House as the place where we could have rehearsals.  Before Joe Polak came along as the rabbi, there was nothing -- not much going on at B.U. Hillel House, and they were very happy to have -- and at that time, just about everybody who joined the choir was a college student.  Couple in graduate 31:00school.  Most of them were undergraduates.  And we had, I don't know, thirty, forty people the first -- we didn't audition the first year.  Anybody who wanted to come could sing.  We did our first concert in January of 1970.  We started the choir in the fall of '69.  It was for what was then called the New England Jewish Music Forum.  And they had a series of concerts every year, of Jewish music, and they had heard about the choir.  No, they hadn't heard about the choir.  They heard that I had composed some Jewish music that was contemporary, and they said, "We'd like to perform this as part of this concert we're doing."  And I said, "Oh, that's great, 'cause I have a choir, and we could do it," and came together.  So, now I'm going to back up and tell you another story.  In the summer of 1968, I had two huge experiences.  The 32:00beginning of the summer was my first trip to Israel.  And I remember landing in Israel, and my first impression was (gasps) this is just like Camp Yavneh.  After a while, I realized what Camp Yavneh was trying to do was to create the experience of being in Israel.  And so, I guess they were very successful.  So, 1968, I mean, think about that in terms of the history.  That was a big year to be in Israel, and I had some great experiences, including -- I took my guitar with me, and a friend of the family had some good connections and sent me around the country, entertaining the troops, from the Golan Heights to the Suez Canal.  I was singing at a concert at the Suez Canal, and this was during the War of Attrition, after the '67 war.  And you could see the Egyptian troops on 33:00the other side of the canal, and I was entertaining the Israeli troops.  And I was just getting to the end, to my best number, "Yerushalayim shel zahav [Hebrew: Jerusalem of gold]," when we heard (explosion sound) and the person who was my handler grabbed me -- I'm still holding my guitar -- grabbed me and said, "Get into the bunker!  They've started an incident, shooting incident," which would happen from time to time.  "Okay."  Meanwhile, I'm scared out of my mind.  (laughs) And then he says -- he puts me in the bunker and he says, "Here, take this gun.  (laughs) If I'm not the person who opens the door, use it!"  A gun!  I was not a member of the NRA, so -- and I'm down in the bunker and I'm hearing the shooting, the shooting.  Fortunately, when it ended, the person who opened the door was my army escort.  And I remember coming out, and they -- no lights could be turned on.  And I'd never seen stars like that in my 34:00life, in the middle of the desert with no lights on.  And they took me into the mess hall and we had a meal, and I still remember that was the best meal I've ever had in my -- I'm sure it was horrible army food.  And then, they had to drive the jeep back to the base where I was staying, with the lights off on the jeep.  Anyway, it just -- some things I remember.  So, that was my month or two in Israel, and then I came back to a month-long seminar camp in Jewish arts, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, not too far from here, run by Cantor Ray Smolover.  He did one in the summer of '67 and one in the summer of '68.  It was for college-age students who were interested in the Jewish arts of different types.  They had dance, they had literature, they had theater.  They had 35:00visual arts and they had music.  Isaac Bashevis Singer was there the summer I was there, just to give you the caliber.  Yehudi Wyner and his father Lazar Weiner, Sam Adler.  The summer before, they had had -- the Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim was there.  I mean, this was great.  And we were encouraged to compose Jewish music.  And during the year after that summer, I wrote a Havdalah service.  It was called a "Rock Havdalah."  The first part was kind of folk-rock and the second part was, I don't know, more like blues-jazz.  And the -- Cantor Ray Smolover, who ran the camp, published it.  He ran his own little publishing company.  And he and his son had written a couple of rock 36:00services.  So, he was about to publish and record his Shabbat morning service and he said, "This is great.  This'll be on the same recording, and I'll publish it."  And I was dating his daughter at the time, and that didn't hurt.  So, it was -- anyway, it was my Rock Havdalah that they wanted to perform at the Jewish Music Forum.  And we did, with my kind of fledgling choir.  And we did a whole program.  So, we did some other pieces, too.  Not very well.  Not very well, I realize in retrospect.  But what the heck?  It was a start.

LY:  What were some of the sources that you were drawing on in composing your first piece of Jewish music?

JJ:  Well, I conceived of it in two parts.  I think there was going to be a third part, which I never got around to, but two -- there was an intro, which 37:00was riffing on the idea of Eliyahu hanavi [Hebrew: Elijah the Prophet], whom we evoke at Havdalah time.  And there was a song that was made popular by an Israeli rock group, folk rock group called "HaHalonot HaGvohim," "The High Windows."  They were kind of a Mamas and Papas style, if you remember that band, group.  And they had a song about, "Where are all our ancestors?"  And I took one of the phrases from that, and that really became what I developed into a whole piece about Eliyahu bringing peace and how we love Shabbat as a taste of the peace of the world to come, and this nostalgic idea of saying farewell to Shabbat.  And then, the second half was gonna be blues, a bluesy farewell to 38:00Shabbat.  And I used, as the basic musical material, the traditional nusach, the traditional melody for chanting the Havdalah, (singing) "Hinei el yeshuati [Hebrew: Behold, God is my savior]."  But I did it with these blues chords.  (singing wordlessly) And with that inflection.  And to this -- one of the things I'm talking about, in fact, on Sunday is this very strong overlap between the blues and Eastern European khazones [Jewish liturgical music] and the kind of modes that both have in common and the improvisation and the krekhts, the sighing, and the rhythm, the rhythmic aspects.  And I guess I glimpsed some of that then.  Yeah, so those were the sources, and I had a piano part.  We did it with drums, we had an improvised flute that went -- jazz flute that went with it.  So, that was fun.  I don't -- I really don't compose.  I do a lot of 39:00arranging for choir.  I take existing material and I create it into a form that can be performed by a choir.  But back then, I had the chutzpah to think that I could compose.

LY:  It's interesting how many of the themes that have remained in your work through your life --

JJ:  Yeah.

LY:  -- were right there.

JJ:  This is a really good therapy session.  (laughter) How much do you charge?  Yeah, but now that -- even those pieces weren't totally original.  They used some sort of traditional material.

LY:  What's original?

JJ:  Yeah.

LY:  I'd be interested in hearing some about language or -- you're pulling from a lot of the Hebrew melodies and traditions.  Where did the Yiddishkayt fit in, 40:00if it did?

JJ:  By Yiddishkayt you mean Yiddish culture, Yiddish language?

LY:  Yes.

JJ:  Yeah.  Well, as you know, there was this idea back then that -- the Zionist idea that we had to abandon the Yiddish language and the Yiddish culture and the Yiddish songs.  That -- maybe that's what we had in Hebrew school, but that's -- that wasn't what we had in my home.  Growing up, my parents -- Yiddish was their first language in both cases, although they grew up speaking English, as well, 'cause they both grew up in America.  At home, Yiddish was the language they would speak when they didn't want us, my brother and myself, to understand what they were saying.  "Red nisht far di kinder [Don't say that in front of the children]."  These are the words they understood.  "Di kinder shlofn [The children are sleeping]."  Those -- but we sang Yiddish songs in the 41:00house, some -- and I heard Yiddish, certainly, spoken.  And then, in my folk-singing, I enjoyed singing some Yiddish songs and we had all the Theodore Bikel records in the house -- who was, in many respects a role model for my performance.  And then, with the choir, that was going to be part of the repertoire.  And, in some cases, we had ready-made arrangements.  In some cases, I made my own arrangements.  And so, a lot of the Yiddish that I learned was through the lyrics of these songs, the folk songs and the popular songs.  And the songs that I thought were folk songs turned out to be songs from the 42:00Yiddish theater, whether it's "Rozhinkes mit mandlen [Raisins and almonds]," or whatever, yeah.  And then you learned -- there was actually a composer attached to that.  It's not anonymous.

LY:  We'll come back, but moving well ahead into the future, so much of the music is now, if I understand correctly -- has the Ashkenazic pronunciation, which is -- so, there seems to me to be a parallel with Yiddish, where there was a turning the back on one set of pronunciations. 

JJ:  Um-hm.

LY:  And how does that play out in the liturgical music?

JJ:  Well, when you say one set of pronunciations, there are so many different ways of pronouncing Yiddish, which I had to deal with when I was doing music from the Yiddish theater and learning, ah, that's not YIVO Yiddish, right?  That's not Lithuanian Yiddish.  That's Hungarian or Romanian Yiddish, because 43:00Avrom Goldfadn, was the father of Yiddish theater, came from there.  And so, that tradition continued of singing Yiddish in that pronunciation.  So, you had to learn, depending on what kind of piece you were doing -- would be a different pronunciation.  And then, in terms of the pronunciation of Hebrew, look, as I studied music and musicology, I -- we learned what's called authentic performance practice, or the acronym Historically Informed Performance Practice, HIPP.  Historically Informed Performance Practice.  So, if you're performing Bach, how many singers did Bach have?  And the top parts were sung by boys, not by women.  And what kind of instruments played?  So, if you're doing that piece today, if you're doing it with a big choir of women and men, and if you're using modern violins, it's not authentic, which may be okay, but you have to 44:00understand that it's not authentic.  And it's worthwhile, first of all, delving into what it originally sounded like, and then you go ahead and do what you're gonna do.  So, it's the same thing for me when I'm performing (makes air quotes) Jewish music, whatever that is.  So, if we're doing the "Avodat hakodesh," the "Sacred Service" by Ernest Bloch, written in 1933 and commissioned from Temple Emmanu-el in San Francisco -- so, Bloch composed this with the Ashkenazi pronunciation in mind.  So, when we performed that, we used that pronunciation.  Or the music of Sholom Secunda, or the music of Louis Lewandowski in Berlin.  Actually, I tried to experiment with the German pronunciation of Hebrew, which is a little bit different.  Couldn't get it to come out perfectly right, so we just use a kind of vanilla (laughs) ashkenozes 45:00[Ashkenazi pronunciation] for that, whereas if we're doing music by Israeli composers, we'll use the Sephardic pronunciation.  We've done some Yemeni pieces, and I try to use the authentic Yemeni pronunciation of Hebrew in those cases.  So, I mean, that's what it comes down to for me, trying to reproduce the way the composer heard the music, the way it was originally done.  Is that what you were asking?

LY:  Yes, yes.

JJ:  Yeah.

LY:  It's very interesting.  So, then, you -- so, you founded the Zamir Chorale, and at that time, you were still in graduate school.  What happened next?

JJ:  So, I was in graduate school, and we all -- we were all expected to have our own laboratory choirs.  And for most of my fellow students, it was a church choir that they had.  And I have to say -- well, I'll backtrack a little bit -- before I started Zamir, I was conducting a couple of synagogue choirs.  It was 46:00torture.  These were volunteer (laughs) singers.  And, oh, God, I just dreaded going to rehearsals, 'cause -- oh, I hope nobody's watching this video who was in that choir at that time, but it was difficult.  And I kept thinking, This is what I want to do with rest of my life?  Anyway, they had their church choirs and I had Zamir, and that was my -- I mean, it was a community chorus, in essence.  That's really the model for this kind of group.  And the second year, we held auditions for the first time, and it was difficult, 'cause some of the people who were in the choir we had to say goodbye to.  And I did my graduation recital in the spring of 1971 for my master's degree with Zamir.  And my teachers came to the concert.  It was in Sanders Theater at Harvard, and 47:00we did some fairly sophisticated -- I think we did a movement from the Bloch "Sacred Service," some music by Mordecai Seter, who was definitely influenced by Stravinsky.  So, there was some sophisticated music on the program, and we had really grown very quickly in that second year.  I also remember a review that was written in -- it was a paper called "Genesis 2," which was part of the Jewish Renewal movement.  I mean, this was in the days of -- subsequent to the television program "Roots" and the book, where everybody was looking to their roots back then.  And Jewish pride was very strong after the 1967 war in Israel and the whole hippie movement, looking for alternative ways of expressing your Jewishness.  And everybody was fed up with the Jewish newspaper in Boston, "The 48:00Jewish Advocate."  I shouldn't say anything bad about that for the record, but -- so, a group of people started an alternative Jewish newspaper called "Genesis 2," and it was run by students and young people, and there was a review of some concert we did.  And the reviewer wrote that "it's not just enough to perform Jewish music.  You have to do it with excellence."  And I think I felt the same way myself, but that really resonated with me, and that's been my mantra ever since.  I don't want to just be a choir that does Jewish music.  I want to be on the same level as the really good community choirs in Boston.  And I think it stems from a childhood inferiority complex.  I want to show that there's Jewish choral music just as good -- I mean, not only the performance 49:00standard but the repertoire itself -- and most choirs -- a school choir, they're doing their Christmas concert, and "you can't do all Christian music.  You have to do some Jewish music."  "But I don't know any Jewish music."  "Well, find some!"  "Oh, well, this publisher sent me this piece.  It's a pretty stupid dreidel piece.  I think it's really terrible, but I'll do it anyway, because I have to do it."  That's the worst thing you can possibly do, because then the Jewish kids are even more ashamed of their own heritage, 'cause you get all this wonderful Christmas music, and then there's a stupid dreidel piece.  So, one of the things that I do in my career is to -- I write articles, I publish music, I put stuff on YouTube, I do workshops for my colleagues, for my non-Jewish colleagues who are looking for or don't know yet that they're looking for good Jewish choral repertoire to do with their groups.  And I've seen the results at 50:00choral directors' conventions, when some of the honors choirs are doing music that I had introduced.  And that's a real -- very gratifying for me, to see -- to feel that -- 'cause it's one thing to sing Jewish music for Jewish audiences.  But a big part of what I do is to take it beyond the imaginary ghetto walls and make sure that this becomes mainstreamed.

LY:  How do you find peace between what you -- you started off talking about people who've had that awful experience in third grade of being told they should be listeners --

JJ:  Yeah.

LY:  -- not singers.  And building a choir and a career that's about excellence in music, how do you find the -- that balance?

JJ:  Well, we need people in the audience.  (laughter) So, we need the listeners.  But also, I mean, let's make a distinction between sitting around 51:00the campfire and singing songs, or in somebody's living room, or in shul, or whatever it is, and everybody just having the fun of singing.  Or, at the ballpark, the National Anthem, whatever it is.  And the idea that when you pay money to hear a performance, you want to hear the very best.  Now, having said that, I don't always practice what I preach.  (laughs) Because I go to shul (laughs) and I listen to the singing in the shul and the people who lead the singing and I think, Oh, my God, this -- how can I sit through this?  And the worst part about it is it doesn't bother anybody else.  Well, except for a few other people.  But I'll tell you the story.  I started, with the help of 52:00another person from my shul -- once a month, we have a choral davening, on Friday night, where the entire congregation becomes the choir.  When you come in the door, you get a book with the musical notes, choral arrangements of the entire service.  And we have some ringers, people who have practiced it who are going to be there, so that if you can't read music, sing along.  Or, even if you can't, just try to harmonize.  Or sing the melody, 'cause most cases, they're melodies that are known to everybody, and sing harmony.  The first time we did this, we had, I think, 150 people -- showed up.  We had set seats for thirty or something like that.  'Cause clearly, there's a lot of people who felt the same way, that there might be a middle ground between not wanting to be 53:00performed at in shul, but to have a participatory service, but to have it on a somewhat higher level, musical level.  We've evened out at more like forty people, but we still do it once a month, and it's something that I enjoy.  Anyway, forget how we got off on that tangent.

LY:  Well, it brings us to the question of: so, where's -- where do you see the future of Jewish music heading?

JJ:  Ah, I don't know, and I'm not in a position to -- well, look, when we say Jewish music, part of my talk tonight at the synagogue is gonna be to say what the heck do we mean by Jewish music?  And I think in recent years, the last couple of decades, there's been an explosion of so many different kinds of what we might call Jewish music.  There was the choral revival that I was a part of 54:00and that's continuing.  There was the klezmer revival in the 1970s.  And my friend Hankus Netsky, who I'm sure has been here many times, was one of the great movers and shakers in that movement.  The spreading of Israeli songs, these communal songs, even before there was a State of Israel -- part of what I studied was -- and I've seen these -- there was this -- there was a body of song that was approved by the establishment in the Yishuv, in pre-state Israel.  They called it Palestine back then.  And these songs were used to inculcate, to create the new Jew, to set the image of what the new Jew was going to be.  And these were the songs that would be taught to the children in school, that would 55:00be sung by the soldiers.  And they were exported to the Diaspora.  They were printed on the back of postcards, which were sent out all over the Diaspora, as well as in songbooks, recordings.  And, as I mentioned, these were the songs of my childhood.  So, that was another important revival, if you will, of the folksong genre, the popular song genre.  And in recent years, what isn't there?  There's all kinds of fusion.  I mean, there's Jewish acapella groups on every campus.  There's Jewish reggae, there's Jewish rock-and-roll, there's -- I mean, I think almost every genre of music now has its Jewish part, participant.  So, I think that's healthy.  I think that's healthy.  So, in 56:00terms of the future of Jewish music, I mean, there's -- what's the future of Jews?  I like to say what is Jewish music?  It's music that is used by Jews more than by other people, and therefore becomes associated with Jews more than with other people.  So, the melody for "Hatikvah," for example, started off as a -- I mean, it was a farmer's song from -- was it Moravia?  Somewhere around there.  "Carul cu boi [Romanian: Ox cart]."  And then, a farmer in pre-state Israel, in Rishon LeZion, decided he would sing Imber's poem to that melody.  Now, in America, certainly, more people think of that melody as being Jewish music than of being Eastern European Bulgarian music.  So, it's that association that becomes the important -- so, whoever, whatever Jews are in the 57:00future, it's gonna be whatever music that they use to express their Jewishness that will be considered Jewish music.  And as long as there are people who want to express themselves, that aspect of their identity -- and music is a very important part of -- or means of -- what we call identity negotiation.  I am an American, I'm a Jew, I'm a Democrat.  There are so many different parts of my identity.  And we use music in many ways to validate those identities.  Or, even in a negative sense.  If I go to a party and people are singing Christmas carols and I don't sing them, by my not singing, I'm making a statement.  I had a friend who -- in the late '60s, when he would go to a ballgame and everybody 58:00would stand up to sing the National Anthem, he made a point of sitting down and not singing, as -- protesting the policies of the Johnson and Nixon administrations at that time.  Vietnam era.  So, we express ourselves in music.  We express our identity, whether it's political, ethnic, religious.

LY:  Do you feel that that is true in any more specific ways about Jews than about other peoples negotiating their identities?

JJ: I don't know that much about other people and how they negotiate their identities.  I think Jews -- some Jews, it's more of an issue than others, than other people.  I mean, look, there are some Jews who are totally assimilated and never set foot in synagogue and never sing Jewish music or don't know what 59:00it is.  And so, it's not an issue for them.  But for Jews who do have this multiple identity, at least dual identity, yeah.  It is an issue.  And is it the same for Italian Americans?  I don't know.  Catholic Americans?  (laughs) I mean, where should we make that intersection?

LY:  Well, in the '80s and '90s, you went to Europe, specifically to Poland, is that right?

JJ:  Yeah, 1999.  So, I had done some research and found that the name of our choir, "Zamir," wasn't just naming it after the bird of song or the verse from the Song of Songs, that the time of singing -- "eitz hazamir higiyah," "the time of singing is coming," which is what the people in New York thought was the -- 60:00turns out that in 1899, a choir was formed in the city of Lodz or Łódź, Poland.  L-O-D-Z, Lodz, Poland, called HaZamir.  And this was a choir of people who were also negotiating their identities as modern Polish Jews.  And, I mean, it's a long story, and fortunately, I was able to read the autobiography of the first conductor of that choir, Joseph Rumshinsky, in Yiddish, in a book that I got here, at the Yiddish Book Center, when it was still a warehouse.  And I still quote from that wonderful chapter about the beginning of that choir.  So, it turns out, after the choir was founded in Lodz, Poland, in 1899, the -- there was one in Warsaw, branch in Warsaw, and then all over Eastern Europe, they spread to Western Europe.  I've found HaZamir choirs in Australia, 61:00in Mexico, in Sweden, in the United States.  And this was Yiddish culture, basically.  And then, Yiddish culture dies out, the Holocaust does its work, and most of these choirs died out.  Then I realized what we were doing was resuscitating this tradition.  We're not starting something from new, even though our focus wasn't primarily the Yiddish, although I also found out that -- I mean, one of the first -- the big hit song of the first HaZamir choir at their first concert in Lodz was "Al mishmar hayarden [Hebrew: Watch on the Jordan]," which was a Zionist song from what was then Palestine.  So, it was a mixture then, it's a mixture now.  And they also sang with the Lodz Philharmonic, they sang Beethoven's Ninth, they got a great review in the -- they were known as one of the best choirs, if not the best choir in the city, and it's -- yeah, they 62:00were Jewish, but they were also the best choir.  What a model that was.  So, we decided in 1999 that we would celebrate the centenary of the founding of the first modern Jewish secular choir by returning to Lodz, Poland.  And we planned for a couple of years.  We planned this amazing trip, which took us to Warsaw.  We performed at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw.  We went to Lodz.  The mayor of Lodz welcomed us and gave us some documents that they found from the original choir to take home with us.  Wow.  A beautiful ceremony at the city hall.  We went into the -- I get choked up just thinking about this.  We went into the cemetery in Lodz.  The Jewish cemeteries in Europe, many of them are in shambles.  But in a sense, you go to the beautifully groomed cemeteries 63:00in America -- maybe that's not what it should look like.  This looked like a place where there are dead people.  And so, we sang in the Lodz cemetery.  And I told my singers, "We are now giving voice to those whose voices were silenced by the Nazis and their collaborators."  And I had learned a lullaby, "Makh tsu di eygelekh [Close your little eyes]" by David Beigelman that was written in the Lodz ghetto to comfort the children.  This is during the Nazi period.  And I said, "We're gonna sing this in the ghetto."  And I purposely did not teach it to the choir in advance.  I taught it to them on the bus trip on the way to the cemetery so it would be the first time they ever sang it.  We had a film crew 64:00with us for that whole trip, and there was a documentary made of the trip.  It was taken over by PBS, it's been shown all over the country on PBS stations.  I don't know if you can incorporate that into this, but anyway.  So, we had a film crew with us.  We're singing this lullaby and a blue butterfly comes along, settles on my shoulder while I'm conducting, and then goes over to the woman who's singing the solo and sits on her shoulder while she's singing.  We have this on the video.  If you ever believed in reincarnation, in -- that spirits somehow were there, I mean, there it was.  There it was.  So, we sang in Lodz.  We went to Krakow.  We piggybacked on the amazing Jewish culture 65:00festival that they have every summer in Krakow.  Wow.  And all these Polish people who came to hear and dance to Jewish music -- we sang in historic synagogues.  We sang in Auschwitz.  That was a wow.  Singing "By the Rivers of Babylon, We Sat Down and Wept," in Hebrew, a setting by Salamone Rossi, in Auschwitz.  That's on the film, and it's one of the worst performances we've ever done of that piece 'cause everybody's crying while they're singing.  We went to Terezín, outside of Prague, the Terezín concentration camp, and we sang there.  We brought some of the music that was composed in Terezín.  And again, bringing back the music that was -- of the people whose voices were silenced.  We sang in the secret attic where they had done concerts in 66:00Terezín.  We sang in Prague, in these beautiful synagogues that have now been restored in Prague.  The Spanish synagogue, oh, my God.  So beautiful.  And then, we ended up in Vienna.  We sang in the synagogue of the great cantor, Salomon Sulzer, the Seitenstettengasse Temple.  We sang in beautiful churches, also, wherever we went.  And we had audiences.  I remember in the Spanish synagogue in Prague, (laughs) in the audience was an American couple from Newton, Massachusetts, who had never heard of us, never heard of us, but there they were at the concert.  So, that was a powerful trip, because we connected with our roots, and I didn't want it to be a trip about the Holocaust.  For me, it's about reviving -- not giving Hitler the victory.  Reviving this wonderful culture that existed before the Holocaust and make sure that it is alive today.

LY:  Would you mind singing just a moment from that Salamone Rossi piece?

JJ:  Well, it's a choral piece, so it would -- (laughs) you wouldn't hear anything if I just -- I'll -- all right, (singing) "Al naharot bavel [Hebrew: By the rivers of Babylon]."  That's the bass part, from the beginning.  And it's beautiful, because the word "naharot" means "rivers" or "streams."  (makes wave motion with hand) And so, you have this streaming line that comes out.

LY:  Beautiful.  You had a professorship through Fulbright in Yugoslavia.  How did that connect with the story?

JJ:  Well, it connects with a different back story.  I was conducting -- I've 68:00been many times to Israel and many times to their Israel Festival and to the choral festival called the "Zimriya."  It's an international choral festival.  I've been there a number of times with my choir.  It's a great experience.  You meet choirs from around the world.  Originally, it was just a Jewish choir festival, now it's a truly international choir festival.  And goodness, I forget what year it was, but I was -- that year, I was one of the workshop conductors at the festival.  And so, I had a number of choirs who were singing with me, and what we did was, we rehearsed for a week or so -- pieces that I had selected with this choir from Israel and this choir from France and this choir from Yugoslavia, as it was then called.  Well, the Yugoslavians had so much fun with me they wanted me to come to Belgrade, to work with them.  And this was a 69:00choir called the Baruch Brothers choir.  I hope they still exist.  They actually existed a few years before the first Jewish choir, the HaZamir choir in Lodz.  They were a -- they were originally called the Serbian Jewish Singing Society, I think, and they were -- the idea was to get together Jews and Serbs to sing together and to socialize together.  And then, I think it was in the Holocaust, there was a family called Baruch and they were brothers, and they decided to rename the choir after them at that point.  Most of the singers in the choir are not Jewish.  They didn't have many Jews left in Yugoslavia at that point, after the Holocaust.  But they had a great time in Israel, they really enjoyed singing with me, so they arranged -- they tried to bring me to Belgrade and they went through channels and they got -- Fulbright.  I don't know, they applied, I applied.  At any rate, so I spent a month there, not only 70:00working with their choir, but I went around to different colleges and gave lectures, guest conducting, and had a great time.  Had a great time in Yugoslavia.  And I remember, the -- my host, [Alexander Vuyish?], who was the conductor of that choir, was telling me about the tensions between the Serbs and the Croats, and he didn't know what was gonna happen.  Well, we saw what happened.

LY:  Right.

JJ:  Yeah.

LY:  I believe you met your wife through the choir?

JJ:  Yes, yeah.

LY:  Can you tell us about that?

JJ:  Well, I mentioned one of my partners in founding the choir was Lou Garber.  And Lou got his cousin, Ronda, to sing in the choir.  And Lou made it known that Ronda would like to go out with me.  I think that's how it went, 71:00anyway.  Ronda will probably have a different story.  (laughter) And I said, "That's great."  And he came back and said, "No, you have to call her."  (laughs) So, I called her and she said yes.  So, we dated for two or three years, off and on.  And many of the times, it was a lot of people hanging out together.  It was myself and Ronda, Lou and his girlfriend, Jerry and his girlfriend.  And we would go out and have a great time together.  So, it was helpful for them to have -- (laughs) to have a date for Ronda or a date for me, depending on how you look at it, so that we could all be together.  And it was only after a couple years that we realized that we really liked each other.  It wasn't just that we were kind of forced into this.  We really liked each other, and that it would be good for us to establish our relationship on a permanent 72:00basis, yeah.  So, yeah, we're a Zamir couple.  The first Zamir couple, actually.  There have been many others who met their spouses in the choir.

LY:  And then, you had your son, Ben?

JJ:  Yes.

LY:  So, was he the first Zamir baby?

JJ:  There were -- he may be the first baby of a couple who met in Zamir, although I should say -- Ronda likes to tell the story of when -- she knew me when we were, I think -- I was fifteen, she was thirteen or something, and I was doing some musical project with USY that she was involved in, and -- but there were babies -- certainly babies of some of the older members of the choir back then.  But, yes, Ben grew up as the Zamir mascot in many -- in many way -- when he was Benji, right.  And people see him now and they say, Oh!  My God, I 73:00remember you when you were like that, ant-high to a -- knee-high to a grasshopper.  (laughs)

LY:  And how did his upbringing differ from yours in -- the music in the household, the Jewishness in the household sound very similar.  But it was a different generation, obviously.

JJ:  Right, right, some twenty-six years difference.  Yes, he grew up in a household that also had this kind of double pull between traditional Judaism and artistry, music, liberal -- between traditional Judaism and liberal politics, which I don't think have to have any conflict.  It all depends on how you read it.  That's how I read it.  And Ronda and I were of the hippie generation.  I 74:00don't think I want to say anything more than that, but -- so, he was growing up in a non-conventional household in many ways, which certainly influenced him.  He started off in the Schechter School, and we realized that that was not the place for him.  There was just not enough structure, and there weren't enough shomer Shabbos families, that he felt that he was going to be the odd boy out.  So, we transferred him to Maimonides and, oh, my God, a little bit too much structure, and -- because he had an artistic bent, he had a non-conformist, unconventional bent.  So, he was a round peg being jammed into a square hole.  And so, I think in the ninth or tenth grade, he -- we all realized, no, that's 75:00not the right place for you, so it -- he went to public school, Newton North.  Meanwhile, he was going to Camp Yavneh and having all those wonderful bonding experiences.  And he was going to Prozdor at that point and also had a private tutor for Jewish studies, and after high school did his gap year in Israel, and they warned us -- they had an orientation for the parents.  "We want to warn you that a lot of these kids come back and -- wanting to make aliyah."  "Ha-ha-ha."  Well, that's what happened.  (laughs) Our son came back and he was -- started his freshman year at Carnegie Mellon and it wasn't Jewish enough, and it wasn't -- didn't have enough Israeli connections.  So, he transferred to B.U., Boston University, after saying he would apply to anyplace outside of Boston.  He didn't want to go to college in Boston.  (laughs) And he moved back into our empty nest for a while and then spent, I think, a junior year in 76:00Israel and then a semester abroad, and then, shortly after graduating college, he made aliyah.  And in America, he was hesitant to date, because what if he fell in love with a woman who didn't want to make aliyah?  That would be a conflict.  But fortunately, he met a lovely young woman in Israel.  He was going to the -- he would -- he was living in Jerusalem at the time, but would often spend Shabbat at the Carlebach Moshav.  So, Shlomo Carlebach was this wonderful hippie rabbi.  There's some controversy now about his relationships with young women, but let's not get into that side of it, because he did such a -- call it a mitzvah [good deed], turning people on to Judaism, finding what he would call "my hipelekh," (laughter) my little hippie.  And he went out to San Francisco and he started the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco, because 77:00he wanted to show the Jewish dropouts that there was spirituality in Judaism, because they didn't find it in their Conservative temple or in their Orthodox or Ref-- anywhere.  They didn't find any spirituality in Judaism.  It was rigid, it was -- it had no relevance to their lives.  It was foundation Judaism.  And he showed them this neo-Hassidic Judaism, and so many people got turned on to Judaism with what he was doing.  And he was able to -- this relates to what you were talking about before -- to combine the hippie culture with Jewish spirituality and take that part of khsides [Hasidism] and kabbalah.  And after a few years, he said, "All right, we're all moving to Israel."  And he moved the whole House of Love and Prayer, eventually settling in a moshav [farming commune in Israel] called "Mevo Modi'im."  And so, that's where my son would go 78:00to spend Shabbat there, with all these aging hippies, and this wonderful spiritual experience.  And there was one family that would always invite the young people for Friday night dinner.  And that's where he met the woman who would become his wife.  And their wedding was in Israel.  It was December thirtieth.  It's about seven years ago.  And the first night after the wedding, the first night of sheve-brokhes [reception given by the newlyweds on the first Friday evening after their wedding], he wanted it to be at the moshav.  So, he and Shira went back, they stayed in somebody's house, and they arranged for home hospitality for any of us -- and so, Ronda and I went and we stayed in somebody else's home, went to Friday night services there.  And I had been to some Carlebach services.  And -- didn't work for me.  I felt like people were playacting, going through the motions without really making the connection.  Well, it was like when Saul became St. Paul.  I had my (gasps) -- 79:00my moment where I became converted to Carlebachism.  I saw how it can work when everybody in the room is into it.  And the people who are leading it had beautiful voices, and harmonizing.  I mean, some of his hippies had been music students, and their children, who were fabulous musicians, and people were dancing and singing and drumming and carried away.  And it was infectious.  You just couldn't help it.  This was the real thing.  I was at the source.  Carlebach was dead, but his spirit was there in that room.  That was huge for me.

LY:  Yeah, and that your son brought you to that --

JJ:  Yes.

LY:  -- is fascinating.

JJ:  Yes.

LY:  Yeah.

JJ:  Yeah.

LY:  And now you're a grandpa.

JJ:  Now I am a grandpa, yeah.  It's a whole 'nother kind of love.  80:00(laughter) Yeah.

LY:  Do you have -- well, you've given us a lot of time.  You must be feeling a little tired, so I want to make sure we talk about anything that you may want to be sure that we talk about.  Is there anything else that you want to --

JJ:  I think we covered a lot of the things that I had suggested in the questionnaire.

LY:  We did.

JJ:  Yeah.

LY:  When we talk about your grandchild, that makes me want to ask you if you have any advice about living a good life, a full life, a satisfying, artistic, Jewish life?

JJ:  I've been very lucky in my life.  People really wouldn't have to pay me to do these things, (laughter) 'cause I love doing them.  I didn't want most people to hear that.  (laughter) I get paid to do what I love to do.  How many people can say that?  And I was very lucky: right after I got my master's 81:00degree, I stumbled into part-time teaching at Northeastern University, which became immediately a full-time teaching job.  I get to conduct some wonderful students.  I've been there for forty-two years, in the same job, but it's different every year, 'cause I have different students, I have different repertoire, different courses that I teach.  And not every day is happy as -- but for the most part, I realize how great that is.  How lucky -- we've lived or visited in different parts of the country, in different parts of the world, and I realize when we come back to Newton, Massachusetts, how lucky we are to live there, in a fairly intellectual community.  I mean, we belong to an Orthodox synagogue, but it's op-- maybe it's not fully open Orthodoxy, but it's as close as we can get at this point.  And I have a lot of complaints about it, 82:00but when we go away and come back, I say, "Yeah, this is good."  People say to me, So, how's everything?  And sometimes, I'm honest, and I say, "I don't like that expression."  So many things in my microcosm are wonderful.  I love my teaching, I love my home life, I love my family.  I love my conducting.  I'm surrounded by beautiful music.  And I realize that I'm making a difference in people's lives, in my students, my singers, my audiences.  That is so wonderful.  And then, I look at the world around me and I see how dangerous it is.  And I see so many things crumbling.  And I realize how lucky I was to be born where I was and when I was.  And I just got to appreciate every day.  And 83:00I had a scare a year ago.  I was diagnosed with cancer, prostate cancer, and had to go through that mind-blowing experience of what's going on inside my body that I didn't know.  Had surgery, was successful.  And (knocks wood) I'm healthy now, and I hope to continue to be for a long time, and that's another -- (gasps) how fortunate I am, to be in Boston with some of the best hospitals and the best doctors in the world, and get it diagnosed in time.  So, to be able to do what you love to do, to follow your spirit, and to do something that makes the world a better place for some people -- doesn't get much better than that.  84:00I mean, it could.  I could be paid more, but -- (laughter) the weather could be better, but --

LY:  Weather.

JJ:  Yeah.  Can't do anything about that.

LY:  We like to ask people if they have a favorite Yiddish expression or word.  Growing up in a Yiddish-speaking household, did you?  Do you now?

JJ:  "Gornisht helfn."  (laugher) That means, "Doesn't matter what you do.  (laughter) Nothing can help.  Nothing can help."  Maybe that's too negative a one. 

LY:  That's --

JJ:  "Abi gezunt [As long as you're well]."  "Abi gezunt" is a nice one.  I mean, the great lines that I learned from my songs, also, which is, of course, the -- a famous song -- made famous by Molly Picon.  "Abi gezunt."  "Be good, be good."  "Doesn't matter if" -- it's a great song.  "Doesn't matter if you have nothing in your pockets.  You got your health, everything's good.  85:00Everything's good."  You -- and you learn to see the world in perspective.

LY:  Thank you so much --

JJ:  My pleasure.

LY:  -- personally and on behalf of the Yiddish Book Center, I really want to thank you.  This has been wonderful.

JJ:  It was fun for me, too.

LY:  Thank you.

JJ:  Okay.

[END OF INTERVIEW]