A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Golden Ages 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.

About the Author

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. He is currently a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Both his music performance and scholarship gravitate toward the Jewish liturgical music and Yiddish expressive culture of the early twentieth century, and the reverberations of this cultural moment in present day communities. Lockwood’s research considers the work of cantors as arbiters of social, intellectual, and aesthetic change in times of crisis and cultural transformation. Jeremiah received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2021. Jeremiah was a 2022–23 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Fellow, where he conducted research on the khaznte phenomenon of gramophone-era women performers of cantorial music and composed a new piece of music responding to this fecund moment in Jewish musical history. Jeremiah has recorded more than a dozen albums over a music career that spans decades with his band The Sway Machinery and other projects.

Reviews

"In Golden Ages, Jeremiah Lockwood opens a window into the closed circle of Orthodox cantors seeking personal fulfillment and communal connection through a sometimes tense revival of classic cantorial recordings. His deep involvement with his collaborators enriches a study that has implications beyond Jewish life to broader issues of contemporary American spiritual expression and the ethnomusicology of religion."—Mark Slobin, author of Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate

"Lockwood has an unparalleled ear for the intermingled dynamics of loss, creativity, and continuity. His special domain is Jews and their music, but his study speaks clearly to larger processes of cultural rescue and their limits."—Jonathan Boyarin, author of Yeshiva Days: Learning on the Lower East Side