Where The Tunes Come From The Conservative Movement’s Musical DNA

Matthew Austerklein

The rise of genetic testing has led to incredible insights about the human family, often calling into question our narratives of cultural continuity and purity. For a hundred dollars, a person can unearth a hidden map of their inherited traits, long-lost relatives, and the ancient origins of their DNA from across the peoples and the nations of the world. Discovering that one is 2% this or 10% that can of course make good dinner conversation, but it can also lead to a radical reorientation toward the story of one’s life. Finding Your Roots, the long-running PBS series by Harvard professor and public historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., operates on this very principle by showing guests how their DNA often upends long-held beliefs about their race, history, and even family tree. Ultimately, this genealogical journey leads to more understanding, empathy, and a broader sense of interconnectedness.

The Conservative Movement—the youngest of the three major movements of American Judaism—has perhaps the most complex musical DNA because of its characteristic breadth and permeability. As a movement devoted to Jewish peoplehood, its musical expressions over time rarely evinced a conscious ideology which would restrict its polity in song. Yet its “Sacred Cluster” of values, as described by JTS Chancellor Emeritus Rabbi Dr. Ismar Schorsch, surely held sway over its musical outcomes. Devotion to Israel, Hebrew, scholarship, halakha, and klal yisrael were pegs which anchored the big tent of Conservative Judaism’s music culture and under which it cultivated Jewish life and celebrated God and Torah.¹ Within these values, a veritable host of musical stories and religious intuitions are bound, representing a complex musical DNA which encoded the embodied musical practices of Conservative Judaism.

To convey the soundscape of this sacred cluster as it is still heard, I will take for my inspiration the very rhythms of the Conservative Movement’s heartbeat: its synagogue melodies. Such antagonistic historical figures as the Jewish musicologist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn and the antisemitic German composer Richard Wagner could agree that the Jew’s most authentic national inheritance was the music of the synagogue.² While these shared assumptions derived from Romantic, post-Herderian assumptions about nationalism, land, and cultural authenticity, they nevertheless convey a timeless sentiment that a religious community’s sacred melodies lie at the very bedrock of its identity.

The stakes have always been high. “I cannot think of a single congregation that achieves meaningful tefillah in the absence of good music,” wrote Chancellor Emeritus Arnold Eisen, even as he acknowledged the perennial, intergenerational battle lines within the movement over the use of musical instruments, the abridgment of the liturgy, artistic vs. folk repertoire, service length, and Hebrew vs. English.³ Traditions and attitudes toward music can often be fundamentally defining for religious communities, and even between Conservative congregations, as musical forms and choices embody distinct social, cultural, and theological visions of the world. By examining the origins of the melodies of the Conservative Movement, we will thus come to know not only the diversity of its composition, but the fullness of its legacy and the surprising story of our interconnectedness.

In describing the core liturgical melodies of the Conservative Movement, I proceed with some caution. My knowledge is necessarily founded on my own learning within the movement’s institutions. Growing up within them in the 1980s and 1990s, I have been a participant in Conservative synagogues, youth groups, summer camps, and as a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary. I attended cantorial school at a time of flux between the cantorially-driven repertoire of the suburban synagogue, the late-century ascent of Carlebach services and yeshiva melodies, and the twenty-first century advance of Reform-style songleading and new, post-Carlebach melodies from Songleader Boot Camp (SLBC), Jewish Renewal, and Hadar/Rising Song. I absorbed much of it, and from my experience working in Conservative synagogues for the past two decades I am attempting to offer a window into the genesis and composers of its core repertoire.⁴

This effort will inevitably be incomplete. I am sure that I will leave out some tune that the reader will feel is an essential part of the Conservative canon. In such a case, I am consoled by the prospect that the aggrieved reader will write me with their musical din toire, and thereby I will learn more of the larger story of which we are both a part. To every reader, I offer the same assurance that I give to everyone in my congregation: I want you to know that all of your tunes are the right ones. Finally, I must thank my cantorial colleagues, who have fielded my ever-curious questions about the origins of our sacred melodies over the years, and who remain among the greatest living repositories of our Jewish musical heritage.⁵

I. A Portal into the Past: Mathilde Schechter and the First Conservative Hymnal

Our knowledge of the earliest days of music in the Conservative Movement is deeply indebted to the research of Rabbi Ḥazzan Dr. Geoffrey Goldberg, who documented nearly half of the melodies of the Conservative congregational repertoire, all of which were notated within the first half of the twentieth century.⁶ Despite Reform and Orthodoxy being known as the standard-bearers for modern communal singing genres like nigunim and songleading, Goldberg’s research demonstrates that the Conservative Movement was the initial and primary force behind the development of American Jewish congregational singing. Such practices were almost nonexistent in either Europe or America by 1900. Classical Reform was dominated by the organ and choir, and the “Golden Age” of star cantors consumed the East-European immigrant generation.⁷ Yet the children of this second group were without the same needs for shtetl nostalgia as their parents and went in search of a more American aesthetic. It was to this generation that the newly reorganized JTS would minister under the charismatic administration of Solomon Schechter, who not only organized congregational singing but also founded the instruction of ḥazzanut at the Seminary.⁸

One of the earliest collections of the budding Conservative Movement’s sacred music derived from the remarkable efforts of Solomon Schechter’s wife, Mathilde Roth Schechter (1857-1924). Upon arriving in the United States, Mathilde became a vocal proponent of congregational song. Speaking to the National Council of Jewish Women, she lamented the lack of participation in worship, proclaiming that “the professional choir is a mistake unless it leads the congregation’s singing.” As Goldberg writes:

Mathilde’s appeal led to the establishment in 1905 of the Choral Society for Ancient Hebrew Melodies. To encourage participation from the immigrant community, rehearsals were relocated to the Downtown Educational Alliance (established in 1899 to promote Americanization of the immigrant Jews). Several local cantors and musicians, including Simon Jacobson, ḥazzan of the Seminary synagogue, assisted in selecting melodies, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic. The project culminated in the publication in 1910 of Kol Rinnah: Hebrew Hymnal. Its objective was “to present traditional melodies of the synagogue and the home…[and] to further the spread of congregational singing.”⁹

Peering into Mathilde Schechter’s hymnal project, we can see that many melodies now current within the movement were already present in print at its inception. With English translations from Henrietta Szold and musical harmonizations from uptown music man Lewis Montefiore Isaacs, Mathilde Schechter presented a hymnal for exclusively-Hebrew liturgy that would reflect the needs of modern Jews, designed for home use and study rather than the synagogue. This Hebrew hymnal stood in effective contrast to American-Jewish hymnals Zimrath Yah (1886) and the Union Hymnal (1897), which were cultivated by the Reform Movement and relied heavily on organ accompaniment and vernacular English, making them of little use to America’s Orthodox and traditional communities.¹⁰ As reviewed in the Jewish press:

The Hebrew Hymnal aims to supply a long felt need. It is not intended to supersede the Jewish Hymnals now in use, which are calculated primarily for synagogal purposes. The editors of the present volume hope rather to furnish the Jewish home and schools with a collection of hymns which will prove serviceable for the members of the family, particularly for the young.

Unlike preceding hymnals where non-Jewish hymns and melodies have often been admitted, the editors have sought not to incorporate anything which would mar the distinctly Jewish character of the collection. Only masterpieces of Jewish religious poetry and music have been included and in each case only such melodies have been employed as have been sanctioned by tradition and are truly the products of the Jewish genius.¹¹

In preparing her Hebrew hymnal, Mathilde Schechter relied upon the musical precedents of the Jewish community in her longtime home of Great Britain. Kol Rinah Utfilah: The Voice of Prayer and Praise (1899), a comprehensive hymnal for the full, traditional Hebrew liturgy and the musical foundation of nusaḥ anglia (Anglo-Jewish synagogue tradition), was published just a few years before the Schechters’ departure from England to the United States. Also known as the “Blue Book,” it was modeled after the Anglican hymnal itself, and was intended to prepare Jewish families and schools with melody, harmony, and translations for both synagogue and home rituals.¹² Mathilde Schechter borrowed an almost identical name for her own Kol Rinnah publication, employing the strategy (and often the repertoire) of Anglo-Jewry for the traditional American synagogue.

The Anglo-Jewish inheritance of Solomon Schechter’s program for American Judaism has been well documented, but not yet with regard to its music.¹³ Understanding this “special relationship” between nusaḥ anglia and Conservative Jewish music forms a necessary groundwork for understanding the earliest foundations of Conservative song. The Schechters had imbibed Anglo-Jewish music and aesthetics over the course of their two decades in England; Mathilde Schechter’s hymnal shares ten melodies for Shabbat and Festivals with the Blue Book alone, comprising only a portion of a yet larger corpus of Anglo-Jewish melodies which continue to define the Conservative service.

Figure 1. Ashkenazi Melodies for Yigdal for Shabbat (Myer Leon) and for Festivals (traditional). Published in Mathilde Schechter, ed., Kol Rinnah (1910), 5-6. Public Domain.

Kol Rinnah begins with two traditional yigdal melodies for Shabbat and for Festivals, the former being of special Anglo-Jewish provenance (Fig. 1). Its composer was Myer Leon (1750-1797), the ḥazzan of the Great Synagogue of London, who also made his name as an English opera singer. His yigdal melody achieved widespread fame not only among British Jews, but among Christians as well. The Methodist Thomas Olivers attended the Great Synagogue in 1770, and, upon hearing the melody, determined to adapt it as a Christian hymn. The result was “The God of Abraham Praise,” attributed to “Leoni,” which is still sung throughout Anglican, Episcopal, and even Catholic churches across the world.¹⁴ Leon’s melody remains part of British synagogue custom and, in part owing to Mathilde Schechter herself, American synagogue custom as well.

Kol Rinnah also contained several melodies by Julius Mombach (1813-1880), choirmaster of the Great Synagogue and regarded as the definitive Anglo-Jewish composer of the nineteenth century.¹⁵ While his melodies have largely fallen into disuse in America, they remain in the weekly repertoire of British Masorti Judaism.¹⁶ The one American exception (published not in Kol Rinnah, but in the Blue Book) is Mombach’s psalmody-style Psalm 92 for Shabbat Minḥah.¹⁷ This melody was employed by early JTS-facilitated services led by Rabbi Israel Goldfarb, whose contributions will be discussed at length.¹⁸

The Anglo-Jewish tradition is also marked by the permeability of music between England’s longstanding Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities—a feature also shared by the similarly mixed faculty and patrons of the “Old Seminary.” This relationship continues today in the persistence of a number of Spanish & Portuguese (S&P) melodies in the Conservative service, evidenced early on in the Schechter hymnal’s inclusion of the Sephardic melodies for ‘az yashir moshe (No. 5) and eil nora ʿalila (No. 22). Other notable Sephardic additions which achieved ubiquity in the Conservative Movement are the major-key Psalm 29 for Friday night, an Italo-Sephardic melody from Livorno (Leghorn) written by the Jewish musician and peripatetic composer, Michele Bolaffi (1768–1842), and the Spanish-Portuguese Adon Olam based on the melody for the piyyut, todot eil.¹⁹

The Schechter hymnal also bears the significant mark of the German-Ashkenazic traditions, many also current among British Jews. Familiar melodies today include the pan-Ashkenazic melodies for adir hu (No. 18) and ḥad gadya (No. 20); less familiar are the ledavid baruch (No. 13) and ein keloheinu (No. 11[b]) from the Frankfurt tradition.²⁰ Two featured German melodies (Fig. 2) would also later be adapted into the full birkat hamazon: shir hamaʿalot (No. 15) and migdol yeshuʿot (No. 16).²¹

Figure 2. Western Ashkenazi melodies for Shir Hama‘alot (15) and Migdol Yeshu‘ot (16). Published in Mathilde Schechter, Kol Rinnah (1910), 34-35.

In addition to Anglo-Jewish repertoire, Mathilde Schechter’s hymnal also leaned on broadly popular German-Jewish choral music whose printed compendia had transformed the European synagogue in the nineteenth century. These especially included the works of nineteenth-century synagogue composers Louis Lewandowski (1821–1894) and Cantor Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890).²² Torah service melodies featured by Schechter included Sulzer’s hodo ʿal eretz (No. 8) and Lewandowski’s se’u sheʿarim (No. 9) and hashiveinu (No. 10), the former two of which remain in Conservative practice (the latter is almost exclusively sung by British Masorti Jews). The impact of Sulzer and Lewandowski, carried by their widely-known musical compendia and the former’s notoriety as the father of the modern cantorate, is far more extensive than even Schechter’s hymnal reveals. Sulzer became the model of the modern cantor as musician and clergyman, and his melodies for ein kamocha, vayehi binsoʿa, and ki mitzion have defined the Torah service for countless congregations, as well as va’anahnu qor’im from the aleinu prayer.²³ Lewandowski’s compositions, while only later established in American practice, are revered across the Jewish choral world. In addition to the tunes notated by Schechter, his melodies for tzaddiq katamar and Friday night qiddush are weekly standards in Conservative synagogues, and even his lecha adonai for the Torah processional is favored in Israel and among independent minyanim (Fig. 3).²⁴

Figure 3. “L’cho adonoi,” Louis Lewandowski, Kol Rinnah U’t’fillah (1882): 34 (No. 43). Public Domain.

Another popular tune included by Schechter was the famous Teutonic ein keloheinu (No. 11[a]). Thought by many today to be a German drinking song, it was originally a synagogue composition, written and published in Gesänge der Synagoge zu Braunschweig (1841) by the music director of that community, Julius Freudenthal (1805-1874). Through both the published music and oral transmission, it became widely popular among German Jews.²⁵

Surveying Mathilde Schechter’s contributions to Conservative synagogue music, we find several strata of Jewish musical traditions coalescing under her guidance, representing a new soundscape for the traditional synagogue in America. Employing strategies and melodies she learned in England, Schechter gathered British, German, and Spanish-Portuguese synagogue melodies together with harmonically-simplified choral masterworks from well-known cantorial compendia to form her curriculum for congregational song. A cultural contrast to the background of New York’s large population of Eastern-European immigrants, this repertoire would seem to reflect the Schechters’ own JTS-centered aesthetic program, emerging from its position as a traditionalist seminary applying novel (and often British) strategies toward the coalescing of a new, American flavor of traditional Judaism.

II. Rabbi/Ḥazzan Israel Goldfarb: Father of Congregational (and Conservative) Song

No figure looms larger over both the early development of Conservative Jewish music and its contemporary repertoire than Rabbi Israel Goldfarb (1879-1967). Goldfarb immigrated from Galicia to New York at age 14, going on to graduate from Columbia University and receive his musical training at the Institute for Musical Arts (the forerunner of the Juilliard School). He graduated JTS as a ḥazzan in 1902, continuing on to obtain rabbinic ordination. Goldfarb’s compositional voice first emerged in his student days, during which JTS faculty and students were active in outreach to the Jewish youth of New York. Modeled after a Christian revivalist movement, their Jewish Endeavor Society (JES) held special Shabbat minḥah services downtown for those who worked on Saturday mornings. Goldfarb, then studying ḥazzanut at JTS, conducted these services.²⁶ His ma tovu from this repertoire is still sung across the Ramah camps today (Fig. 4).

Figure 4. “Ma Tovu,” Israel Goldfarb; notated in Goldberg, Congregational Song (2019). Reprinted with permission.

Hired as Rabbi of the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn in 1905, Goldfarb went on to be a founding member of Schechter’s United Synagogue of America and collaborated with the budding Young Israel movement on the Lower East Side. His brothers and cousins also served as prayer leaders at Young Israel, and Goldfarb’s own melodies were frequently in use.²⁷ Throughout his career, Goldfarb provided music for the growing synagogues and institutions of first-generation traditional American Jewry, authoring widely popular books of melodies for choir and congregation together, including Friday Evening Melodies (1918), The Jewish Songster (1919), Song and Praise for Sabbath Eve (1920), and Synagogue Melodies for the High Holidays (1926). He was also recruited to the JTS faculty, where he taught ḥazzanut and synagogue melodies from 1920 to 1942. Thus over a forty-year period, Goldfarb’s musical talent touched Conservative congregations, cantors, choirs, and rabbis across the growing movement.

Today, many of Israel Goldfarb’s melodies remain a mainstay of the Conservative synagogue: vay’chulu and magen avot for Friday night; shomer yisrael for taḥanun; zochreinu l’chayyim and b’sefer chayyim (both in a minor key), yimlokh for the musaf kedushah (in a major key), and the march-like hayom t’amtzeinu for the High Holy Days.²⁸ Goldfarb’s success, as Geoffrey Goldberg points out, was conveyed not only through his influence across the movement but in his skillful adaptation of the Eastern-European aesthetic for a new generation:

The key to the success of Israel Goldfarb’s melodies was that he sought to retain the “warmth and impetuosity” of Eastern-European Synagogue song along with the “deliberate, orderly and dignified style...and classical structure” of the Western European Synagogue without “sacrificing much of the Jewish spirit for the sake of external beauty and harmonic form.²⁹

The most famous of Goldfarb’s compositions is surely shalom ‘aleichem, published in his book Friday Evening Melodies and often assumed to be of ancient provenance. In his mid-century correspondence with Ḥazzan Pinchas Spiro, Goldfarb confirmed that he wrote the melody on a bench in front of Low Memorial Library at Columbia University in 1918; by the time of his letter to Spiro in 1963, Goldfarb had observed that “many people came to believe that the song was handed down from Mt. Sinai by Moses.”³⁰ Reports of the melody’s far-flung peregrinations have come from across the world, including from one Jew in India who reported to Rabbi Morris Kertzer that the melody “came down by tradition from his ancestors.”³¹ Goldfarb’s original melody has been significantly changed by popular use, its alteration and anonymity a compliment to its having entered the oral heritage of world Jewry (Fig. 5).³²

Goldfarb’s contemporaries also created similar congregational melodies which endure within (and beyond) the Conservative Movement. His brother, Samuel Goldfarb, head of music at the Board of Jewish Education, authored the minor-key va’ani tefilati used on Festivals and High Holidays, and (with his brother, Israel) also the waltz-like kadesheinu bemitzvotecha for the Shabbat repetition of the amidah. The Young Israel movement, organized around “complete congregational singing,” employed music by both Goldfarbs. Conservative synagogues competed with the liberal Orthodox Young Israel for members, and many melodies from the latter movement are still extant in the Conservative repertoire. These include the bouncy halelu et adonai for Hallel, tzur yisra’el, an eil adon tune in a major key (now largely used for lecha dodi); na’aritzcha for Shabbat Musaf, and the widely-sung tune for bei ana rachetz, adapted from a cantorial recitative by Eastern European cantor-composer, Zeidel Rovner (1856-1943).³³

Figure 5. “Shalom Aleichem,” Israel Goldfarb, Friday Evening Melodies (1918). Public Domain.

But the downtown scene wasn’t the only crucible of congregational singing. Uptown, Mordechai Kaplan’s hand-picked cantor, Jacob Beimel, created his own “singing congregation” at the Jewish Center on West 86th Street which attracted cantors, presidents, and music directors to come and observe its successes.³⁴ Among his melodies are the major-key, fanfare-style vezot hatorah still in popular use today, as well as, argues Goldberg, the melody for shema that is most often attributed to Salomon Sulzer.³⁵ Beimel’s short-lived choir master, Abraham Binder, was the composer of the Shabbat morning mi chamocha (Fig. 6) in freygish mode (also known as Ahavah Rabah). Binder would join the HUC faculty in 1923 and become one of the major mid-century American advocates of Jewish music; his book championing his variety of biblical cantillation is still taught at HUC and is perhaps the predominant trope variation used in non-Orthodox American synagogues.³⁶

Figure 6. “Mi Chamocha,” A.W. Binder, Union Songster (1960). Public Domain.

This generative period of congregational song expressed the earliest ideological commitments of Conservative Judaism—preservation of tradition, attachment to Hebrew, and musical leadership supporting congregational singing. Pivoting away from the consuming star culture of the cantorial golden age, the melodies generated during the first decades of the twentieth century reflected a fusion of downtown, domesticated Eastern European sound and the uptown mix of German, Spanish-Portuguese, and Anglo-Jewish traditions embodied by JTS.

III. Musical Complexity and the Rise of the Conservative Cantorate

While American congregational song offered an initial component of the Conservative Jewish repertoire, it was not the only program of sacred music which rendered the commitments of Conservative Jews. The choral reforms of Rabbi Herman Rubenovitz, the 1908 JTS graduate who went on to make his name at Mishkan Tefila in Roxbury, Massachusetts, are a reminder of the early impulses which continued to animate Conservative Jews and lay the groundwork for the genesis of the Conservative cantorate. After several years serving in Kentucky, Rubenovitz came to Mishkan Tefila and found a decorumless traditional service which had largely been abandoned by the young, post-Orthodox generation.³⁷ Inspired by visits to the choral synagogues of Europe, Rubenovitz successfully advocated for the inclusion of organ and mixed choir. Membership grew rapidly, and Rubenovitz reflected that ”hallowed, traditional ritual of the synagogue was invested with a beauty and dignity which won the hearts of young and old.”³⁸

It was in this environment of traditional Jewish music with a trained European cantor, decorum, and high artistic merit that the young Mishkan Tefila member Leonard Bernstein fell in love not only with Judaism, but with music itself. Frequently attending Friday evening services conducted by European-trained Cantor Iszo Glickstein and music director Solomon Braslavsky, Bernstein found himself “crazed with choral music” under the spell of the cantor, choir, organ, and Braslavsky’s expert musical arrangements which, according to his sister, Shirley Bernstein, were textured with “the sounds of Giuseppe Verdi, Ernest Bloch, Modest Mussorgsky, Felix Mendelssohn, and Franz Schubert.”³⁹ Writing later to the Cantors Assembly in 1964 in honor of Braslavsky, Bernstein wrote:

Before I ever heard a concert, recital, or opera, before I had ever touched a piano, or knew that an organized musical life existed—before all these, I heard the music that Professor Braslavsky caused to be made at Temple Mishkan Tefila. I shall never forget that music, nor cease to be grateful for the power, conviction and atmosphere with which it was conveyed. I may have heard greater masterpieces performed since then, and under more impressive circumstances; but I have never been more deeply moved. Braslavsky’s music and music-making will always be with me, as a cherished memory and influence. Long life to him.⁴⁰

While chorally-led congregational song formed one pole of early Conservative music, the hybridity of Western decorum and harmony with traditional cantorial arts represented another. A founding synagogue of the United Synagogue of America, Mishkan Tefila’s musical program, among others, would come to represent the latter instinct within the unfolding movement—one which would be increasingly championed by its cantors.

To analyze the impact of cantors on the core repertoire of the Conservative Movement is to court a paradox. There is perhaps no more defining source of influence on Conservative synagogue music than its cantors, who have so often been the stewards, in both conservative and innovative ways, of its sacred soundscape. This was particularly true during the first twenty-five years of the Cantors Assembly (1947–1972) and the first two decades of the Cantors Institute (est. 1952). Attempting to refashion the cantorate for respectable, suburban Jewish communities and avoid some of the indignities of the Golden Age era, the CA recreated the Conservative cantor as an American clergyman and modern professional.⁴¹ Speaking to the Assembly in the year following the creation of the Cantors Assembly, its vice president (and future executive vice president of some forty years), Samuel Rosenbaum, described the roles of the cantorial professional at length as sheliaḥ tzibbur (prayer leader), educator, minister, musical connoisseur, and musically-creative talent.⁴² Working closely with the Department of Music of the United Synagogue of America, the emerging, organized Conservative cantorate became the major engine of shaping the movement’s music in the mid-to-late twentieth century.

From its founding, the Cantors Assembly set its musical program as a fusion of sophisticated sacred music and communal singing. Its first two publications were Rabotai Nevarech (1954), which included the popular melody for Birkat HaMazon used across the Conservative Movement today, and Zamru Lo (1955), a first of four collections of congregational melodies.⁴³ The culmination of fifteen years of cantorial conversations with the United Synagogue on improving the condition and repertoire of congregational singing, the Assembly published these two long-stewarded volumes under the editorship of Moshe Nathanson (1899-1981).⁴⁴ Born in Jerusalem, Nathanson was a beacon of Hebrew culture and Israeli song, spreading Zionism through music to an eager audience of young American Jews.⁴⁵

Nathanson’s contributions to Conservative song began with his Manginot Shireinu (1939), which helped to popularize a number of melodies still well-known today, including the Torah service’s av harachamim (adapted from a choral piece by Russian cantor Abraham Dunajewsky (1843–1911), the famous Ḥasidic-style yismeḥu (arranged by Nathanson), and the waltzy, minor “haleluhu betzilzelei shama” for Psalm 150.⁴⁶ But his perhaps most ubiquitous melody is the birkat hamazon tune itself, written by Nathanson at Camp Achva in the 1930s and which can be heard across Ashkenazic Jewry.⁴⁷ While the medley of tunes would evolve over time, the core is there in Rabotai Nevarech, including the opening melody, hazan et haolam (Fig. 7) which he originally adapted from his own tune for the avot (Fig. 8).⁴⁸

Nathanson’s contemporaries would also compose congregational songs that have withstood the test of time. One of the main faculty members of the Cantors Institute at JTS composed the bouncy, major meḥalkel ḥayyim melody known and used by Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews alike, although he composed it for children and was mortified at its spread

Figure 7. “Hazon es Ho-Olom,” Moshe Nathanson, Rabotai Nevarech (1954). Reprinted with permission.

Figure 8. “Ovos,” Moshe Nathanson, Zamru Lo (1955): 20. Reprinted with permission.

to the main service.⁴⁹ Similarly, lecha adonai for the Torah processional was composed originally by Cantor Gershon Ephros (1890–1978) in 1912 for the “children’s synagogue” of the Downtown Talmud Torah, but stuck for adult worshipers as well.⁵⁰ Ephros became a well-regarded leader among Conservative cantors, recognized also as the editor of an extensive six-volume cantorial anthology.⁵¹ Eric Mandell (1902–1988), longtime music director of Har Zion Temple in Philadelphia, composed the well-known ‘ahavat olam for Shabbat ma’ariv. The German-born Mandell, a survivor of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was also a lecturer, conductor, and musicologist, maintaining one of the world’s largest private libraries of Jewish music, now held at the University of Pennsylvania.⁵²

The paradox of the Conservative cantorate was that its immense creativity, manifested in hundreds, if not thousands of compositions, arrangements, and recordings of synagogue music, began to decline along with their primary engine: the synagogue choir. As Jewish mass culture shifted toward Orthodox popular music and songleading in the 1970s and 1980s, cantors were exercising their musical influence across the more domestic life of synagogue ministry, choosing (not unnobly) localism over mass culture. It was much harder for a cantorial recitative or a choral piece to “go viral” like a congregational melody, as the former required access to music notation and musically (and Jewishly) literate sacred singers and worshipers. Thus as Conservative Jewish culture began to cool from the original generative energy which created the suburban synagogues of the 1950s–1970s, typified by a middle-brow fusion of congregational song and elevated, modernized cantorial artistry, the cantorate’s once pervasive influence on synagogue melodies became more limited to only the most recognized and highly-published of cantorial voices. Much of the rest of the repertoire slowly declined for lack of choirs to realize it.

This cantorial pivot away from mass culture simultaneously highlights the immense local influence of cantors as composers and musical curators for individual synagogues. Like the hundreds of Jewish villages in medieval Germany, Conservative synagogues are often defined by highly-localized traditions bequeathed by their community’s lineage of cantors.⁵³ One could write an entire monograph on this phenomenon of idiosyncratic sacred repertoire, which often provides a synagogue with its sonic identity. To illustrate, I will offer the example of my own community, Congregation Anshai Torah in Plano, Texas. Anshai Torah has never had an ordained cantor prior to my service, and yet includes several idiosyncratic melodies which reflect a specific cantorial inheritance. It possesses a unique Torah service melody, deriving from one of its seasoned bar mitzvah tutors, Warren Rubin, who learned it growing up at Beth Sholom in Roslyn, New York from his childhood cantor, Morton Kula (1929–2011). So too, our synagogue’s particular High Holiday melody for vayehi binsoʿa ha’aron by Louis Lewandowksi came from the childhood of its founding rabbi and sheliaḥ tzibbur, Stefan Weinberg. He had grown up at a small Conservative synagogue in Bay City, Michigan led by German emigré Rabbi Joseph Kratzenstein, who used many German cantorial and choral compositions in his service. Thousands of such cantorial legacies, both old and new, course through the musical veins of Conservative synagogues, even in the absence of choirs and with the rise of new movements in Jewish music which leave their mark upon the repertoire.

Nevertheless, a number of more recent cantorial voices have contributed melodies that have reached movement-wide use. Cantor Meir Finkelstein, a prolific cantor-composer who also enjoyed a successful career as a Hollywood composer/arranger, served at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles from 1982 to 2000 and composed one of its defining melodies—ledor vador—which traveled throughout (and beyond) the Conservative Movement, its soaring melody making it popular with cantors and congregations alike.⁵⁴ Similarly, the melodies of Sol Zim, popularized through his many albums and publications, melded the harmonic and rhythmic foundations of late-twentieth-century rock and pop with neo-Ḥasidic and cantorial musical gestures. His responsive ledor vador between cantor and congregation, mimekomcha malkeinu from Shaḥarit, and peppy kad’sheinu b’mitzvotecha with Ḥasidic vocables traveled across movements; his ‘avinu shebashamayim, written in 1988, is the defining tune for this prayer far beyond the Conservative Movement, popularized in synagogues and concert halls all over the world. In more recent memory, past Cantors Assembly president Alisa Pomerantz-Boro composed a cantorial Modim (1998) with a haunting congregational refrain which achieved great respect and wide popularity. And Cantor Gerald Cohen, a prolific composer who has long served on the cantorial faculties of both JTS and HUC, wrote a Psalm 23 which is known and sung at funerals by cantors of all non-Orthodox movements.

It is perhaps no surprise that melodies composed by Conservative cantors which gained wide currency within Conservative synagogues have also transcended the movement itself. This is at once a testament to their spiritual utility and to the slowly advancing convergence of congregational repertoire across American Judaism (and particularly the non-Orthodox movements). This phenomenon will be discussed further below.

IV. Nusaḥ: Preservation and Redemption

But perhaps the most pervasive impact of cantors on the Conservative synagogue music is upon the musical ligaments which unite its sacred songs—the practice of nusaḥ (Ashkenazi prayer chant). Coalescing in the wake of the Shoah, the Cantors Assembly and its members considered themselves deeply obligated as the guardians of the European synagogue traditions whose practice and practitioners had been decimated by the Nazi genocide. With the founding of cantorial schools at HUC and JTS (both of whose faculty included serious practitioners of traditional ḥazzanut), the necessity emerged to create a “Nusaḥ America” which would preserve the synagogue soundscape of the old world while adapting it to American needs and taste. Exhorting his colleagues to restore modern cantorial recitative through pure and tasteful traditional motifs, Cantor Adolph Katchko spoke of the redemptive power of nusaḥ to activate the dormant spirituality of American Jews:

A beautiful voice and great talented singing are by themselves not sufficient to arouse a spark of religious emotion of which we just spoke. This could be done only by the Hazzan with the beautiful voice, but who also makes use of the correct nusach. The correct nusach—that is very important, because deep down even in the most reformed Jew there glimmer sparks of a nigun here and there of our traditional nusachs, which only the Hazzan who uses the correct nusach can once more revive.⁵⁵

Fealty to nusaḥ in the Conservative Movement thus came to represent one of the essential features of its aesthetic covenant. Conservative cantorial discourse dealt frequently with the problem-solving nusaḥ preservation and the evolution of the traditional synagogue.⁵⁶ Cantorial schools, publications, and conferences together cultivated a commanding historical narrative emphasizing a millennium of musical continuity from medieval Ashkenazic practice through modern prayer chant, particularly of the most ancient category of “misinai melodies” which dated to the inception of Ashkenazic culture.⁵⁷ This historical consciousness among cantors yielded in the movement a Frankelesque “positive-historical” orientation toward synagogue music—positive in the sense of fealty toward the normativity and preservation of traditional nusaḥ, but also a historical sensibility in studying its development rigorously in order to discover its essence. This led to the cultivation and spread of carefully curated, “American” nusaḥ traditions, particularly at JTS. Cantors learned the predominantly Lithuanian tradition of nusaḥ via compendia gathered by Cantors Institute and H.L. Miller Cantorial School faculty members Max Wohlberg and Charles Davidson (1929–2023), the latter of whom codified the tradition in print.⁵⁸

In addition to providing the source material for Conservative davening practice, Wohlberg’s approach also preserved many elements of Western Ashkenazi (“German”) tradition which were feared to soon be lost. JTS cantors thus learned to daven and teach the Shabbat pesukei dezimra in Adonai Malach (Jewish major) mode, as well as to preserve a Western Ashkenazic motif for the words eil ḥai veqayam on Friday night. One particularly widespread German practice in the movement is owed to a single cantor, Ḥazzan Dr. Brian Mayer. A scholar of German synagogue music and the last PhD in Jewish Music to be awarded by JTS, as a seminarian Mayer convinced not only his fellow cantorial students but his rabbinical colleagues of the merits of preserving the Frankfurt tradition of the weekday Torah service, using simplified variants of the High Holy Day trope.⁵⁹ That JTS class passed this tradition on to Ramah camps during the 1980s, leading to its establishment as one of the sacred music markers of the Conservative Movement.

One of the most notable nusaḥ educators, however, was not a seminary professor but a beloved cantor from Iowa. Ḥazzan Pinchas Spiro served Tifereth Israel Synagogue in Des Moines from 1973–1995, and in 1990 was commissioned by the Cantors Assembly to create educational materials for its Ba’al T’fillah Institute, strengthening the knowledge of lay leaders and young cantors alike by documenting a basic form of the complete nusaḥ on recording and via “musical siddur,” which included Hebrew, English, and music notation of every prayer. These materials have become not only the foundational repertoire of Conservative lay leaders, but the go-to resource for rabbinical nusaḥ education and even cantorial education as well.⁶⁰ Spiro’s immense project, now available online (learn.cantors.org), resounds today as the unintentional stamma of Conservative nusaḥ—a largely anonymous musical grammar which has become a dominant voice within the oral tradition of contemporary nusaḥ practitioners, both within and beyond the movement.

V. Israel, Zionism, and Synagogue Melody

The Conservative synagogue has long provided a home for Hebrew, Zionism, and the influx of Israeli culture into American Judaism. This was also strongly conveyed in the Ramah camping movement, whose intensive Hebrew curriculum, Israeli staff, and all-Hebrew adaptations of Broadway musicals have long anchored its Zionist ethos.⁶¹ Israeli repertoire formed its own section in the official USY Bencher, B’kol Echad (1986) edited by Cantor Jeffrey Shiovitz, and represented a large percentage of its short songs (pp. 77–101), many of which are used during Conservative hakafot on Simchat Torah.⁶² Israeli tunes which entered the synagogue service were largely drawn from the liturgy-heavy selections of Israel’s annual Ḥasidic Song Festival (1969–1992), including Yedid Nefesh by Ehud & Sarah Zweig (1970), Ḥemdat Yamim by Shlomo Carlebach (1971); Or Chadash by Reuven Sirotkin (1973); Al HaNissim by Dov Frimer (1974); Lechu N’Ran’na by Reuven Sirotkin (1974); Adon Olam by Uzi Ḥitman (winner, 1976); Oseh Shalom by Nurit Hirsch (winner, 1977); and Malchut’cha by Reuven Sirotkin (1978).⁶³ In the wake of the Six-Day War, a new wave of Jewish pride swept American Jewry, and Israeli festivals provided a sonic anchor for growing with the spirituality and culture of the resilient and proudly Jewish country. And of course, the boilerplate Conservative service has incorporated the Israeli wedding song, Erev Shel Shoshanim by Yosef Hadar and Moshe Dor, as the standard “mimkomo” for the Shabbat musaf qedushah. Though Conservative cantors have long objected over its divergence from both the liturgical text and traditional nusaḥ, this Israeli song had become firmly lodged in the Conservative service, carried by the Zionist spirit of the movement.

VI. Rabbis

Although its early history is suffused by choral, congregational, and cantorial contributions, the repertoire of Conservative Judaism was also enriched by the musical creativity of its rabbis. Israeli-born Rabbi Moshe Pomerantz (1934–2024) wrote the ahavah rabbah melody currently used across the movement, composed when he was only nineteen years old, for a liturgical music contest at Camp Ramah in Connecticut (Fig. 9).⁶⁴ The melody has been simplified somewhat by folk use over the years, with the “avinu malkeinu” portion of the tune being replicated for the opening words.

Figure 9. Manuscript of “Ahavah Rabbah,” Moshe Pomerantz (1953). Reprinted with permission.

Rabbi Moshe Rothblum, rabbi emeritus of Adat Ari El (Valley Village, California) was another prolific composer in the Conservative rabbinate, serving as a music and drama director for Ramah camps in Ojai and Wisconsin and directing musicals at his home synagogue for forty-five years. It was at the beginning of this long career in Jewish music that he wrote the famous Friday night v’shamru in 1968 for a Hebrew play at Camp Ramah, Wisconsin. And more contemporarily, Rabbi Menachem Creditor wrote the song ‘olam ḥesed yibaneh as a response to 9/11, and his evocative anthem (based on Psalm 89:3) has achieved widespread popularity far beyond the walls of the Conservative synagogue. While the traditional roles of rabbi and cantor usually invested the latter with exclusive authority over synagogue music, the extension of the Conservative cantorate into broad realms of pulpit ministry has been similarly met with rising rabbinic leadership in music, particularly via summer camps and the rise of Jewish folk music.

VII. The Ḥasidic Nigun: Shlomo Carlebach, Orthodox Pop, and the Independent Minyan⁶⁵

The ascent of the nigun in Conservative worship can be seen from many different angles: the rise of Chabad Ḥasidism; the post-WWII growth in access to recordings and documentation of Ḥasidic melodies, the impact of the American folk movement; and the influence of a new generation of Orthodox composers and pop stars, including Ben Zion Shenker, Mordechai Ben David (MBD), and especially Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.⁶⁶ Inspired by Carlebach’s signature melodies and ecstatic Friday night service, the entire Carlebach Kabbalat Shabbat repertoire took the Ramah summer camps by storm over the second half of the twentieth century, becoming its standard “nusaḥ” by the turn of the millennium. Other Carlebach melodies beyond Friday night in the Conservative service include his hakol yoducha,ʿod yishama (used for eil adon), veha’eir eineinu, veshamru (used for mimekomcha in Shabbat Shacharit), and major-key oseh shalom, among many others.⁶⁷

The rise of nigunim also reflected the adoption of a neo-Ḥasidic approach to liturgical music in Conservative spaces. Accessible melodies, sung either to words or Ḥasidic vocables, were the new currency of synagogue song and could easily be untethered from the prayers for which they were originally composed. Shifting away from a culture of written notation to oral transmission, neo-Ḥasidic technique involved building a community’s melody repertoire of nigunim via worship, recordings, and non-synagogue experiences like text study sessions, table singing, song circles, and concerts. Within an effervescent culture of new melodies across the traditional liturgy, a skilled prayer leader could facilitate kavannah by choosing from their palette of nigunim, creating opportunities for participation, novelty, and impromptu harmony.

Although diverging in significant ways from the strictures and uses of the nigun among Ḥasidism, this “neo-Ḥasidic” use of nigun serves a particular need within the social and spiritual challenges affecting modern Jews.⁶⁸ The nigun sensitively connects the lonely, sovereign self to a temporary, radiant network of living, human voices. It is a music of equity—a prophetic form which by its very structure eschews hierarchy and emphasizes the vocal equality of all worshipers before God.⁶⁹ It is also the music of therapy, surfacing through trance-like melodies the emotions which lie within each individual soul. Yet unlike much of the songleading world, the world of the nigun is more thickly cloaked in Ashkenazi culture, and, sonically, in the Jewish particularism typical of the Conservative synagogue.

Further Ḥasidic melodies found their way into the Conservative service during the Carlebach period via oral transmission, audio recordings, and published collections. The movement’s most famous yedid nefesh is itself a mashup of two Ḥasidic tunes. Its origin often labeled as “Pursa,” the melody appears in a Velvel Pasternak collection of Ḥasidic melodies, and likely refers to the community of Pursov, a Ḥasidic court close to Warsaw which was wiped out by the Holocaust. This melody is, perhaps, the only part of the community that remains.⁷⁰ Typically appended to the end of this yedid nefesh is a wordless Chabad melody known as nigun gaʿaguim. Both nigunim were broadly accessible to those who possessed Pasternak’s books; the mashup is understandable, if obscure as to its origins within the Conservative Movement.

Another Conservative melody notated in Velvel Pasternak’s Ḥasidic collections is the second paragraph of the ʿaleinu (ʿal kein nekaveh lecha), whose melody derives from a Hasidic tune used for menuḥa vesimḥa and haneirot halalu (Fig. 10).⁷¹

Figure 10. “Hanéros Halolu,” Songs of the Hassidim, ed. Pasternak (1968). Public Domain.

Such Ḥasidic nigunim and “Carlebach-style” services arose in tandem with the growth of Conservative Movement institutions in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly the Ramah camping movement and Solomon Schechter day schools. These institutions cultivated their own repertoires of communal song, often against the preferences and pieties of the movement’s cantors.⁷² Conservative rabbinical and cantorial students frequently attended synagogues and minyanim that adopted Carlebach tunes and other Ḥasidic melodies, including the Carlebach Shul, B’nai Jeshurun, and Kehilat Hadar (est. 2001) in New York City, and Kedem, the Leader Minyan, and Shira Chadasha (est. 2002) in Jerusalem.⁷³ Some of these institutions produced their own CDs, which were coveted items among emerging Conservative Jewish leaders eager to enhance the spirit of their worship.

Twenty-first century Conservative liturgical music has been especially transformed by the culture of independent minyanim (2000–present). Founded by empowered Jews from both yeshiva and day school backgrounds (with many rabbis among them), minyanim presented a halakhically normative and musically empowering environment for communal song. The repertoire of the minyanim initially included Carlebach, yeshiva repertoire, Orthodox pop songs by hit composers like Moshe Laufer, MBD, and Abie Rotenburg, and melodies from artists like Simply Tzfat whose albums brought together devotional tunes from across the Ḥasidic world.⁷⁴

Recent generations of Conservative rabbis have often longed for the minyan’s ethos of equity and communal emotion to successfully bridge into the more hierarchical environment of the synagogue. Conservative clergy, and increasingly Jews beyond the Conservative Movement, have leaned on the musical successes and repertoire of the Hadar Institute, led in music over the last decade by its bard and inspiration, Joey Weisenberg. Making his way throughout the movement’s institutions as a frequent concert artist and musician-in-residence, Joey’s heimish teaching, unique compositional voice, and charismatic musicianship have led to a broad impact on American Jewish music writ large.⁷⁵ This culminated in 2016 with the founding of the Rising Song Institute (www.risingsong.org), which serves as a successful catalyst and record label for emerging Jewish artists and the practice of traditionally-oriented communal Jewish music. Now co-anchored by rabbi, composer, and skilled session musician Deborah Sacks Mintz, Rising Song presents an ever-flowing stream of communal song via Bandcamp and YouTube, as well as fellowships and in-person learning opportunities which have created a network of musicians and prayer leaders, many of whom serve in the Conservative Movement.

The musical ethos of the independent minyan and Rising Song, together with a broad range of Ḥasidic and neo-Ḥasidic melodies, has by now entered the mainstream of the Conservative cantorate, rabbinate, and synagogue. Rather than recounting the full repertoire here, I refer the interested reader to Shira Chadasha: Music of the Independent Minyan (Cantors Assembly, 2016), which brings together a thorough picture of the standard repertoire of the independent minyan movement in its first two decades. That the Cantors Assembly published this volume is itself a testament to the transformation of the Conservative Movement. Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, executive director of the Hadar Institute, first characterized the volume as “like Amtrak publishing a guide to airline travel.”⁷⁶ Yet this was in many ways a return to the original publishing strategy of the Assembly from sixty years prior, fulfilling its original role in the Conservative Movement as advocates for both sophisticated sacred artistry and congregational song.⁷⁷

VIII. Jewish Renewal—From Camp Ramah to Chanting Services

Also included in the Cantors Assembly’s Shira Chadasha volume, and somewhat obscured by its title, is a significant collection of Conservative music from the Jewish Renewal Movement. Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi (1924–2014), one of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe’s first shluchim (emissaries), was often invited to Ramah camps to try his novel program of spirituality, song, and even English davening. He led campers in sewing their own multicolored tallitot and encouraged egalitarian use of tallit and tefillin in the early sixties, decades before women’s ordination in the movement.⁷⁸ The movement that “Reb Zalman” founded considered itself the “Research & Development” sector of Jewish spirituality, experimenting widely with ecstatic and traditional davening and with eastern devotional forms like yoga, chant, and meditation.⁷⁹ Once considered a fringe movement, practices and musical repertoire developed within Jewish Renewal are now recognizable across the Conservative Movement, particularly those with chanting services or mindfulness centers.

Some of the transfer of Renewal repertoire in America is due not only to the rise in yoga and meditation across the late twentieth century, but from experiences that offered Conservative clergy and laity exposure to Jewish Renewal music. The Davenen Leadership Training Institute (DLTI), co-created in 2000 by Reb Zalman’s students, Rabbi Marcia Prager, Rabbi Shawn Zevit, and JTS graduate Ḥazzan Jack Kessler, served as a two-year training program not only for Jewish Renewal students but also for Jewish prayer leaders of any denomination, including a number of Conservative rabbis, cantors, and lay musicians (including this author). Both Jewish Renewal and its affiliated clergy association, OHALAH, have considered themselves trans-denominational in nature, offering opportunities for spiritual seekers of all movements. Furthermore, two students of Ḥazzan Kessler, Cantors Jaclyn Chernett and Jalda Rebling, would go on to found the European Academy for Jewish Liturgy (est. 2007) which continues to impact Masorti Judaism by providing one-on-one online nusaḥ education and in-person retreats to European prayer leaders.

The influence of Jewish Renewal was also apparent in locations where Conservative Jews studied for communal leadership. Romemu, a Renewal synagogue founded by Rabbi David Ingber on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2006, quickly became a curiosity and sometime haven for many spirituality-craving JTS seminarians. In Israel, the Jewish Renewal community Nava Tehila, anchored by the compositions and touring ensemble of Daphna Rosenberg and Yoel Sykes, gained widespread popularity, particularly as musical rabbinical students from JTS and other seminaries were invited to serve on their musical team as “levites” during their Israel year. Thus in the twenty-first century, Jewish Renewal repertoire percolated through the JTS and Israel rabbinical and cantorial experience back into Conservative Movement schools and communities.

Renewal repertoire extant in the Conservative service includes a variety of melodies: chants by Shefa Gold for ashrei (Shira Chadasha 81), elohai neshamah (75), and ozi vezimrat yah (97); the meditative ein od by Peter Saltzman (69); a sufi chant originally by qawwali artist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and adapted for Psalm 150 (35), and many melodies by Nava Tehila, especially ʿoseh shalom with its clave rhythm and ecstatic chorus of “nay-nay-nay-nay.” Shared with the independent minyan repertoire is also the Christian hymn “Sanctuary” by Randy Scruggs & John Thompson (1982), which was adapted with Hebrew words across the early twenty-first century, either as a qedushah melody or a free-standing devotional.

The ethos and repertoire of Jewish Renewal and the independent minyan movement have now each approached normativity in Conservative music, including the movement’s experimental prayer conference Kol Tefillah, hosted at Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles. With innovations inspired by Renewal and Rising Song alike, ecstatic-meditative spirituality is an ever growing influence
within the emerging voices of the movement.⁸⁰

IX. Jewish Folk and the Road to Songleader Boot Camp

The Conservative interest in nigunim was also part of an adjacent, fundamental shift in American religion away from centralized authority and elite culture and toward community, folk music, and personal meaning. This was in no small part related to the American folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s, which also saw Israeli, Hebrew, and Yiddish folk songs take center stage as expressions of Jewish authenticity. Shlomo Carlebach himself was a significant part of this scene, along with Jewish folk singers like Theodore Bikel (1924–2015) and Chava Alberstein (1946–). In the Reform Movement, a more American-inflected folk sound could be heard among a host of new artists like Jeff Klepper & Daniel Friedlander (of Jewish folk group Kol B’Seder) and Debbie Friedman (1951–2011). Among a number of melodies, Klepper & Friedlander’s shalom rav and Friedman’s mi shebeirach have both gained currency in the Conservative Movement, while the latter’s havdalah melody now crosses every denominational line. This more Reform-coded repertoire was first opposed by the synagogue establishment, as its English language and American ethos stood in the face of their commitments to nusaḥ, Hebrew, and traditional Ashkenazi sound. Yet by the mid-1990s, cantors and synagogues were already far more open to the songleading style.⁸¹

A bridge figure in Conservative songleading during this period was Craig Taubman, whose “Friday Night Live” services at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, beginning in 1998, formed a new paradigm for Conservative worship experimenting with contemporary instrumental accompaniment. Taubman, who began composing and leading new Jewish music as a counselor at Ramah Ojai, has contributed many widely-known liturgical melodies to the Conservative Kabbalat Shabbat repertoire, including romemu, adonai sefatai tiftaḥ, hashkiveinu, and his jaunty, klezmeresque lecha dodi.⁸²

In the modern era, songleading—like nigunim from the Orthodox and chant from Renewal—has been mainstreamed from the Reform Movement into the Conservative Movement. This is partially due to the musical crucible of Songleader Boot Camp (SLBC), an annual conference launched in 2009 by Jewish singer-songwriter Rick Recht. Over the last ten years, SLBC has become a haven for not only new Jewish songleading talent but of the training of songleaders from Camp Ramah, as well as the reinvigoration of rabbis and cantors with prayerful energy and new repertoire. A key figure holding space for this emerging world of Conservative songleading is Rabbi Josh Warshawsky, whose upbeat melodies like mah rabu and hame’irah
have become a mainstay of ruaḥ in the Ramah Camps.

Figure 11. “Nigun Cholov Yisroel” for “El Adon,” Cantor Jacob “Milk” Sandler. Reprinted with permission.

As SLBC has grown as a home for songleading within (and beyond) the Conservative Movement, a new cohort of Conservative cantors has joined its ranks of participants, faculty, and composers, as with Cantor Jacob Sandler’s melody (Fig. 11).⁸³ It is a further testament to the bridge between these musical worlds that the Conservative Cantors Assembly (CA) and Reform American Conference of Cantors (ACC) are imminently co-publishing Rabbi Warshawsky’s first songbook. As the Conservative polity and leadership have transformed in the twenty-first century, so too have all the once-defining musical styles of all strands of American Judaism—nigunim, chant, and songleading—converged on the Conservative Movement, demonstrating the evolving musical spirit of klal yisrael.

X. Conclusion

Reflecting upon this broad genealogy of Conservative Jewish music, one sees a family marked by musical diversity and change. The movement’s present soundscape comprises a sacred cluster of Jewish music from across time and place: early-twentieth-century American congregational songs, British synagogue hymns, Spanish and Portuguese melodies, German and Lithuanian nusaḥ, cantorial synagogue masterworks, Ḥasidic nigunim, songleading tunes, meditative chant, Orthodox pop, choral music, and the localized repertoire of hundreds of individual synagogues. We are the founding voices of American congregational singing, and also heirs to the positive-historical effort to redeem traditional nusaḥ and to realize the spirituality of sophisticated religious music. Like our DNA itself, we contain multitudes.

This interconnectedness should only make us more devoted to the ideal of klal yisrael, “the unfractured totality of Jewish existence and the ultimate significance of every single Jew.”⁸⁴ What also becomes clear through this overview of our movement’s musical history is the great need to reach out to, include, and prioritize our next generation. As Chancellor Schorsch remarked, “despite all the dispersion, dichotomies and politicization that history has visited upon us, Jews remain united in a tenacious pilgrimage of universal import.” The path of that vital pilgrimage is paved with the melodies of our musical ancestors. We continue the journey by sharing the soundscape with our children, teaching them our songs and allowing their voices to lead us as well. Especially in our tumultuous era, this awareness of our musical past should strengthen us in this tenacity, as we weave our melodies to embrace each other, Torah, and the Holy One, bringing us faithfully into the future.

Ḥazzan Dr. Matthew Austerklein is the Cantor of Congregation Anshai Torah in Plano, Texas. A 2011 graduate of the H.L Miller Cantorial School, he recently defended his doctoral dissertation in Jewish Studies (magna cum laude) at Halle-Wittenberg University, entitled “The Professionalization of the Ashkenazic Cantor in East-Central Europe, 1500-1750.” Ḥazzan Dr. Austerklein has served on the faculty for several cantorial programs and has lectured on Jewish music for over forty synagogues, universities, seminaries, and Jewish institutions. He writes weekly at Beyond the Music (mattausterklein.substack.com), where he has published over 150 essays on Jewish music, arts, and culture.

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1. ¹ Ismar Schorsch, “The Sacred Cluster: The Core Values of Conservative Judaism,” Conservative Judaism 47, no. 3 (1995): 3–12.

2. ² Matthew Austerklein, “Jewishness in Music,” Beyond the Music, Substack, May 19, 2025, https://mattausterklein.substack.com/p/jewishness-in-music.

3. ³ See Arnold Eisen, “Tefillah and Synagogue,” Conservative Judaism Today and Tomorrow (Jewish Theological Seminary, 2014).

4. ⁴ For another overview of Conservative music in its broader American Jewish context, see Mark Kligman, “Contemporary Jewish Music in America,” American Jewish Yearbook 101 (2001): 125–128.

5. ⁵ My special thanks to Cantor Sam Weiss and Ḥazzan Dr. Brian Mayer, who read drafts of portions of this article and offered helpful feedback.

6. ⁶ Geoffrey Goldberg, “The Development of Congregational Song in the American Conservative Synagogue: 1900–1955,” Journal of Synagogue Music 49, no. 1 (2019): 35-88.

7. ⁷ Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 35.

8. ⁸ See also Neil W. Levin, “Music at JTS,” Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS Press, 2014), 719–792.

9. ⁹ Goldberg, 38.

10. ¹⁰ See Rachel Adelstein, “(Shabbat) Angels in America: Israel Goldfarb, ‘Shalom Aleichem,’ and the Search for Nusach America,” Music & Minorities 2 (2023), doi:10.52413/mm.2023.16.

11. ¹¹ “Books Received,” Reform Jewish Advocate (April 16, 1910), 394–395.

12. ¹² For a thorough study of the Voice of Prayer & Praise in its English context, see Danielle Padley, “From Ancient to Modern: Identifying Anglicanism in an Anglo-Jewish Hymnal,” Music & Letters 104, no. 1 (2022): 31–58.

13. ¹³ See, for example, Michael Panitz, “Judaism in the Queen’s English: The Anglican Context of Schechter’s “Catholic Israel” and Associated Terminology, Conservative Judaism 64, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 62–84.

14. ¹⁴ See Alexander Knapp, “The significance of Meier Leon’s “Yigdal” melody as a link between Jewish and Christian hymnody in eighteenth-century London,” Jewish Historical Studies 45 (2013): 79–102.

15. ¹⁵ Mathilde Schechter, Kol Rinnah, 28 (No. 12, “Adon Olam–Second Tune”): 56–57; (No. 23, “Ki Ono Amecho”).

16. ¹⁶ For the current repertoire of British Masorti melodies, visit https://masortiprayer.org.uk/.

17. ¹⁷ Francis Lyon Cohen, ed. The Voice of Prayer & Praise: A Handbook of Synagogue Music for Congregational Singing, 3rd edition (Lowe & Brydone, 1933), 98–99.

18. ¹⁸ See Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 40; this melody was still in use at Shabbat afternoon services at JTS until their discontinuation around the second decade of the twenty-first century, likely due to the dissipation of its Shabbat community via the increasingly common practice of rabbinical and cantorial students spending their weekends at student pulpits, often for the needed assurance of financial stability.

19. ¹⁹ HUC-Cincinnati Klau Library, Birnbaum Collection, Mus. Add. 11, Versetti posti in musi dal Prof Sig M. Bolaffi, dedicati al Sig A. Cracolo (1826); David Conway, “On Michele Bolaffi, an Itinerant Jewish Musician” (paper presented at the Jewish Historical Society of England, London, April 2008). For a notation of todot eil, see D.A. de Sola, The Ancient Melodies of the Liturgy of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews (Wessel & Co., 1857), 56. The tune is sung for Adon Olam in the Bordeaux Sephardic tradition, which may account for its frequent identification as “French Sephardic.” My thanks to Rev. Zachary Edinger for his assistance in sourcing this melody.

20. ²⁰ For the latter two documented as part of the Frankfurt tradition, see Isaac Mayer Japhet, Shirë Jeshurun (Kaufmann, 1881): 84 (No. 50); 140 (No. 85).

21. ²¹ German Jews had a tradition of using piyyut melodies for Psalm 126 (shir hama‘alot). See Naomi Cohn Zentner, “Resounding Ritual Time and Place: Psalm 126 in the German-Jewish Tradition,” Hebrew Studies 60 (2019): 223–254; this particular melody corresponds to the Western Ashkenazic piyyut “or panecha” for Shabbat Shekalim. My thanks to Rabbi Avi Bloomenstiel for this observation; For more on the melodies of Birkat HaMazon and their origins, see Eric Contzius, Grace After Meals: A Progressive Response, M.S.M. Thesis, Hebrew-Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (New York, 1995); Matthew Austerklein, “A Dallas Mystery Solved,” Beyond the Music, Substack (June 29, 2026): https://mattausterklein.substack.com/p/a-dallas-mystery-solved.

22. ²² See Judah M. Cohen, Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack (Indiana University Press, 2019).

23. ²³ Mistakes regarding the attribution of this last melody abound; Goldfarb published a simplified version of it in his Songster labeled as “traditional,” and Nathanson indicated the author as Sigmund Sabel (see note 48). For Sulzer’s notation, see Salomon Sulzer, Schir Zion (Kaufman, 1905), 55. My thanks to Cantor Sam Weiss for providing sources and clarification regarding this melody (private communication). On Sulzer’s symbolic role in the cantorate, see Jonathan L. Friedmann, “Sulzerism, Sulzermania, and the Shaping of the American Cantorate,” American Jewish History 101, no. 2 (April 2017): 287–306.

24. ²⁴ As pictured in Figure 3, see Louis Lewandowski, Kol Rinnah U’t’fillah (Bote & Bock, 1882), 34. On Lewandowski’s reception in America, see Judah M. Cohen, “Louis Lewandowski in America: A Case Study in Adaptation and Synagogue Music History,” American Jewish Archives Journal 75 (2023): 49–73.

25. ²⁵ See Amnon Seelig, “Hirsch Goldberg’s Compositions and the Music of the Braunschweig (Brunswick) Jewish Community in the 19th Century,” Master’s Thesis, University of Potsdam, 2008; Matthew Austerklein, “Not a German Drinking Song,” Beyond the Music, Substack (June 8, 2026), http://mattausterklein.substack.com/not-a-german-drinking-song.

26. ²⁶ Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 39; A similar strategy of Shabbat afternoon convenings was initiated in 1902 by Lily Montagu to develop and spread liberal Judaism in Great Britain. See Ellen M. Umansky, “Lily Montagu,” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, March 20, 2009, Jewish Women’s Archive https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/montagu-lily. The notation of “ma tovu” (Figure 4) is excerpted from Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 40.

27. ²⁷ Henry Michelman, “Israel Goldfarb (1879–1967): Rabbi, Cantor and Influential Composer.” The Synagogue Journal 1856–2006, no. 6.

28. ²⁸ These have all been gathered and identified by Goldberg. See “Congregational Song,” 46–52.

29. ²⁹ Goldberg, 52.

30. ³⁰ For this letter from Goldfarb and its larger context, see Pinchas Spiro, “Israel Goldfarb’s Shalom Aleichem,” Journal of Synagogue Music 16, no. 2 (1986): 38–46; for a full evaluation of Goldfarb’s melody within the context of American synagogue music, see Adelstein, “(Shabbat) Angels in America.”

31. ³¹ Henry Michelman, “The Journey of a Hebrew Melody: Rabbi Israel Goldfarb’s Shalom Aleichem,” Rayonot: A Journal of Ideas (Park Avenue Synagogue), http://www.jewishmusic-asjm.org/shalom-aleichem.html. Goldfarb’s “shalom aleichem” is also frequently borrowed in the Conservative service for v’eineinu tir’enah of the shaḥarit kedushah.

32. ³² In addition to slight rhythmic alterations, the structure of the song has altered from A-B-B-A to A-B-A-B in common use. See Adelstein, “(Shabbat) Angels in America” and Matthew Austerklein, “Composers Anonymous,” Beyond the Music, Substack (March 10, 2025),
    http://mattausterklein.substack.com/composers-anonymous.

33. ³³ Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 41–42, 80–85.

34. ³⁴ Goldberg, 42–45.

35. ³⁵ Goldberg, 45.

36. ³⁶ JTS, in contrast, largely taught Torah cantillation according to the Lithuanian variant documented by one of the Cantors Institute’s first faculty members, Solomon Rosowky (1878–1962). I have always thought of Binder’s trope as having notated a bar mitzvah boy experiencing a quick, adolescence-induced yodel during the tippeḥa. For the notation of “mi chamocha” see Union Songster: Songs and Prayers for Jewish Youth (CCAR, 1960): 295-296.

37. ³⁷ Michael R. Cohen, “The Travails of Early Jewish Theological Seminary Graduates: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Challenges of the Emergent Conservative Movement,” American Jewish Archives Journal, 63, no. 2 (2011): 6.

38. ³⁸ Cohen, “The Travails of Early Jewish Theological Seminary Graduates,” 7.

39. ³⁹ Shirley Bernstein, Making Music: Leonard Bernstein (Encyclopedia Brittanica Press, 1963): 20.

40. ⁴⁰ Cited in Jonathan Sarna, “Leonard Bernstein and the Boston Jewish Community of His Youth: The Influence of Solomon Braslavsky, Herman Rubenovitz, and Congregation Mishkan Tefila, Journal of the Society for American Music 3, no. 1 (2009): 35–46; see also Elizabeth A. Wells, ed., Leonard Bernstein in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

41. ⁴¹ On the Golden Age and its contrast to “respectability” of the Conservative synagogue, see Jeremiah Lockwood, “What Is the Cantorial ‘Golden Age’? Hefker Khazones (Wanton Cantorial Music) or ‘the Key to the Jewish Soul’?,” Cantors Assembly 75th Anniversary Journal, Matthew Austerklein, ed. (Cantors Assembly, 2022), 327–337; also Lockwood, Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era (University of California, 2024), https://www.ucpress.edu/books/golden-ages/paper.

42. ⁴² Samuel Rosenbaum, “The Musical Functions of the Cantor in the Synagogue,” in Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference-Convention and Department of Music of the United Synagogue of America (Cantors Assembly, 1954): 32.

43. ⁴³ New Cantors Assembly publications of congregational melodies restarted in the twenty-first century with Zamru Lo: The Next Generation: Shabbat (2004), High Holidays (2006), and Hallel, Shalosh Regalim, and Weekdays (2009); Ruach HaDarom: Anthology of Congregational Synagogue Melodies from Latin America (2015); and Shira Chadasha: The Music of the Independent Minyan (2016).

44. ⁴⁴ On the conversations among the United Synagogue and Conservative cantors on congregational singing in the 1940s and 1950s, see Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 85–88.

45. ⁴⁵ See Eli Sperling and Edwin Seroussi, “Mordecai and Judith Kaplan, Avraham Zvi Idelsohn, and Moshe Nathanson—Voices of Palestine” in Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America (University of Michigan Press, 2024), 103–136; Nathanson is also recognized by many scholars as the composer of the words to hava nagila.

46. ⁴⁶ For these and other Nathanson arrangements, including a popular anim zemirot tune by Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, see Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 58-60.

47. ⁴⁷ British Masorti Jews have their own variants of the birkat hamazon medley, particularly for the paragraphs nodeh lecha and bamarom yelamedu.

48. ⁴⁸ This avot (Ovos) tune partially excerpted above is notated in Zamru Lo: congregational melodies, prayers, zemirot, hymns, ed. Moshe Nathanson, vol. 2 (Cantors Assembly, 1955): 20. As of the publication of this article, it is still sung for Shabbat morning among the Conservative synagogues of Dallas, Texas; In Zamru Lo, Nathanson also published the opening to the well-known aleinu (vol. 1, p. 112), indicating its composer as Sigmund Sabel (1849-1924). For more on Sabel’s musical career, see Matthew Austerklein, “The Freemason’s Aleinu: Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth about an Old Melody,” Beyond the Music, Substack (July 13, 2026):
    https://mattausterklein.substack.com/p/the-freemasons-aleinu.

49. ⁴⁹ Those who search can find the composer’s name with some ease; out of deference to his wishes not to be associated with the melody, I have omitted his name here.

50. ⁵⁰ Goldberg, “Congregational Song,” 55.

51. ⁵¹ For a biography of Ephros, see Marsha Bryan Edelman, Rabbi Ario Hyams, and Ario S. Hyams, “A Guide to the Unpublished Musical Works of Gershon Ephros (1890–1978): An Annotated Bibliography: With Biographical Background and Personal Reminiscences by Rabbi Ario Hyams,” Musica Judaica 11, no. 1 (1989): 58–85. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23687669.

52. ⁵² See “Mandell German Jewish Music Collection,” Grayzel Digital Platform, June 18, 2026, https://grayzel.gratz.edu/digital-collection/mandell-german-jewish-music-collection.

53. ⁵³ Sometimes this phenomenon occurs as a choral piece remaining in a congregational form in the absence of a choir. This occurs frequently in British Masorti Judaism, where many originally choral compositions from the Blue Book, particularly by Louis Lewandowski and Julius Mombach, remain in weekly use as congregational tunes.

54. ⁵⁴ When this melody is played at Sinai Temple, congregants will put their arms over each other’s shoulders and sway, leaning into the prayer’s sentiment of intergenerational continuity and faith.

55. ⁵⁵ Adolph Katchko, “Changing Conceptions of Hazanut,” in Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference-Convention and Department of Music of the United Synagogue of America (Cantors Assembly, 1949): 8.

56. ⁵⁶ See Jonathan L. Friedmann, “From text to melody: the evolution of the term nusach ha-tefillah,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 20, no. 3 (2021): 339–360, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2020.1805905; For more on cantorial ideology regarding nusaḥ, see Joseph A. Levine, Rise and Be Seated: The Ups and Downs of Jewish Worship (Jason Aronson, 2001).

57. ⁵⁷ For a genealogy of this cantorial term, see Jonathan L. Friedmann, “Songs from Sinai: The Origins of a Musical Category,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 13 (2019): 28–42. For a general collection of Ashkenazi cantorial terminology, see Hanoch Avenary, “The Musical Vocabulary of Ashkenazi Ḥazzanim,” in Studies in Biblical and Jewish Folklore, Raphael Patai, Francis Lee Utley, and Dov Noy eds. (Indiana University Press, 1960), 187–198.

58. ⁵⁸ The JTS approach to nusaḥ via Wohlberg and Davidson can be found in Charles Davidson, Immunim III: Sefer Hadrakhah – An Annotated Guide and Commentary on the Application of Nusaḥ Hatefillah Beminhag Ashkenaz or the Liturgical Year, 3rd edition (Ashbourne Music Publishing, 2013). In the spirit of preservationism, the prolific composer Davidson (with hundreds of published works) composed a notable Tisha B’Av service employing old kinot melodies from poems that are now rarely sung. See Davidson, Ad Ana Bechiya Betziyon: A Ma’ariv Service for Tish’ah Beav (Ashbourne Music Publishing, 2012). For Davidson’s complete works, visit
    https://www.ashbournemusicpublishing.com/.

59. ⁵⁹ For documentation of this tradition, see Brian J. Mayer, “The origins and identification of the nusaḥ le-ḥol of Frankfurt am Main,” Journal of Synagogue Music 19, no. 1 (July 1989): 6–55.

60. ⁶⁰ Spiro’s books are more rarely used in formal cantorial education at JTS, where the nusaḥ curriculum has leaned on improvisation in the Wohlberg/Davidson tradition, together with written musical materials gathered by longtime nusaḥ pedagogue Joel Caplan and a host of individual cantorial coaches.

61. ⁶¹ On Hebrew at Ramah, see Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni, Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020), 82–110.

62. ⁶² See B’Kol Echad, 1st edition, Cantor Jeffrey Shiovitz, ed. (United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, 1986),108–114. For an oral history of B’Kol Echad, listen to Matthew Austerklein, “Don’t Forget to Bentsch: Talking ‘B’kol Echad’ with its editor, Cantor Jeffrey Shiovitz,” Beyond the Music, podcast audio, December 9, 2024. https://open.substack.com/pub/mattausterklein/p/dont-forget-to-bench.

63. ⁶³ For a full accounting of the festival, see Edwin Seroussi & Motti Regev, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel (University of California Press, 2004). One festival selection that was more adaptable within the Reform than the Conservative Movement was Tzvika Pik’s “Shema Yisrael,” winner of the festival in 1972. Its myriad repetitions likely disqualified it from use in Conservative synagogues, as well as the ubiquity of the traditional “Sulzer Shema.” On the likely attribution of the “Sulzer Shema” to Cantor Jacob Beimel, see Goldberg, 44-45.

64. ⁶⁴ Camp Ramah Connecticut flourished from 1953-1965, after which it moved to Palmer, Massachusetts and became Camp Ramah New England. My sincere thanks to Rabbi Pomerantz’s daughters, Cantor Raquel Pomerantz Gershon and
    Cantor Alisa-Pomerantz Boro, for sharing their father’s story and manuscript with me.

65. ⁶⁵ Parts of this section are adapted from my previous article, “The Sovereign Musical Self: Musical Leadership in the Conservative Movement,” Journal of Synagogue Music, 46, no. 1 (2021): 19–22.

66. ⁶⁶ Shenker is the composer of the evocative mizmor l’david (Psalm 23) often sung at Conservative funerals or for Yizkor, although its original context was se’udah shelishit. For a recent monograph on Shenker and the twentieth century in Ḥasidic music, see Gordon Dale, A Life in Music: Ben Zion Shenker and Hasidic Song in America, Yuval vol. 14 (Hebrew University, 2025), https://jewish-music.huji.ac.il/en/node/24900.

67. ⁶⁷ The allegations against Rabbi Carlebach of sexual impropriety have caused much pain to his alleged victims and deep soul-searching within the Jewish community, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement of the 2000s and 2010s. The above discussion of his impact within Conservative Jewish music is not meant to condone any improper or illegal behaviors, alleged or otherwise, relating to Rabbi Carlebach. For scholarship on this unfortunate side of Rabbi Carlebach’s career, see Sarah Imhoff, “Carlebach and the Unheard Stories,” American Jewish History 100, no. 4 (October 2016): 555–560; that journal issue is dedicated to evaluating Rabbi Carlebach’s legacy and contains other articles of note. For Carlebach’s complete repertoire, see Velvel Pasternak, ed., Shlomo Carlebach Anthology (Tara Publications, 2016).

68. ⁶⁸ On the distinctiveness of neo-Ḥasidic music, see Sam Weiss, “Carlebach, Neo-Hasidic Music, and Current Liturgical Practice,” Journal of Synagogue Music 34 (2009): 55–75; For an analysis of the Orthodox Ḥasidic practice of congregational singing, see Sam Weiss, “Congregational Singing in Hasidic Congregations,” Journal of Synagogue Music 30, no. 1 (2005): 96–101.

69. ⁶⁹ For further sociological and theological analysis, see Matthew Austerklein, “Musical Equity and Musical Hierarchy,” Beyond the Music, Substack (March 4, 2024): https://mattausterklein.substack.com/p/musical-equity-musical-hierarchy.

70. ⁷⁰ See Velvel Pasternak’s anthology Songs of the Chassidim, vol. 2 (Bloch, 1968). My thanks to Cantor Sam Weiss for this suggestion.

71. ⁷¹ Pasternak, Songs of the Chassidim, 87. This is also a well-known klezmer tune. See Harry Kandel, “Khevre, nit gezorgt” recorded July 23, 1926 on Kandel’s Orchestra, (Victor, 1927) vinyl LP, https://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/4W4BF3Q. My thanks to Cantor Jeff Warshauer and Cantor Sam Weiss for helping to identify this melody.

72. ⁷² One such melody is shehu note shamayim, which entered the Ramah camps by the 1970s. The song’s origins are still obscure; it is the author’s opinion that the most likely candidate is the Irish drinking song, “Son of a Gambolier,” which was used for “St. Nicholas Terrace,” a football fight song at City College of New York. More research is required to confirm such suspicions. Many cantors have composed alternatives to this ditty over the years, introduced into synagogues and Ramah camps with various levels of success. For more on this melody and the cantorial attitudes toward the Camp Ramah repertoire, see Joseph A. Levine, Rise and Be Seated, 112–116.

73. ⁷³ Jewish Renewal, a movement founded by Carlebach’s fellow Chabad shaliaḥ, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, also leaned heavily into Carlebach’s repertoire. Ḥazzan Jack Kessler (1944–2024), a JTS cantorial graduate and Dean of the ALEPH Cantorial Program, was himself a former backup musician for Carlebach. See section VIII below.

74. ⁷⁴ I am only a partial insider to this repertoire, having attended and led services at independent minyanim in the late 2000s and having sung on Joey Weisenberg’s first CD. The independent minyan repertoire is surely worthy of its own full musical and ethnographic analysis.

75. ⁷⁵ For Joey’s philosophy and approach to Jewish communal singing, see especially Joey Weisenberg, Building Singing Communities: Practical Guide to Unlocking the Power of Music in Jewish Prayer (Mechon Hadar, 2011); The Torah of Music: Reflections on a Tradition of Singing and Song (Hadar Press, 2017). Short teachings of Joey’s are now also available at Joey’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@joeyweisenberg.

76. ⁷⁶ See Matthew Austerklein, Foreword, Shira Chadasha: Music of the Independent Minyan, Jeffrey Shiovitz, ed. (Cantors Assembly, 2016).

77. ⁷⁷ A new volume of congregational song, Shirata, is forthcoming from the CA within the next twelve months.

78. ⁷⁸ For an interview with Reb Zalman on his time at Ramah, see William Berkowitz, “Two Dialogues with Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: The Hasidic Approach to Song and Its Application to Camp Ramah,” Journal of Synagogue Music 34 (2009): 137–141.

79. ⁷⁹ See Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Davening: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Prayer (Jewish Lights, 2012).

80. ⁸⁰ It is of note that as of the writing of this article, Romemu now holds office space at JTS. See www.romemu.org. Another emerging site of musical influence in the movement is Zamru, an experimental music and prayer program based at the Fuchsberg Center in Jerusalem. See
    https://fuchsbergcenter.org/zamru/.

81. ⁸¹ Debbie Friedman received a very generous and self-reflective reception when she first appeared at the Cantors Assembly Convention in 1995. For this fascinating moment, see “Composers Roundtable,” Proceedings of the Forty-Eighth Annual Convention of the Cantors Assembly (Cantors Assembly, 1995): 70–72, 76–79.

82. ⁸² This klezmeresque Taubman lecha dodi is based on a Russian street melody, “Tsyplyonok Zhareny” (Fried Chicken), a dark-humored ballad about the grim realities and terror of the Russian Civil War. Its refrain, “the chicken also wants to live,” became a protest against the oppression of the Red Terror and was later featured in Soviet-era cinema. The lyrics are further attributed to famous Jewish-Russian satirist Yakov Yadov, and borrows from melodic phrasing from klezmer and Yiddish theater. My thanks to Cantor Pavel Roytman for providing the colorful background of this melody.

83. ⁸³ Conservative-trained SLBC core faculty have included Rabbis Sharon Brous, Brad Horwitz, and Josh Warshawsky and Cantors Joanna Dulkin and Jacob “Milk” Sandler. Many Conservative clergy, seminarians, and musicians have also appeared as presenters. JTS also brings a yearly student contingent led by both rabbinical and cantorial faculty. My thanks to Cantors Dulkin and Sandler for their assistance in gathering this information.

84. ⁸⁴ Schorsch, “The Sacred Cluster.”