Chazzanus, Aesthetics and Non-Conformity with Jeremiah Lockwood

In this talk, scholar and musician Jeremiah Lockwood will discuss the role of cantors as stars of mass media in the early 20th century and the ways in which new outlets for performance allowed people with outsider identities to perform roles of sacred authority. Combining storytelling, deep listening to old records, and conversation, this event will offer a provocative and pleasurable entry into the world of early 20th century Jewish American musical life and its echoes into the present day.

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies and ethnomusicology. His work embraces archival and ethnographic research methods to explore 19th, 20th and 21st century Jewish liturgical music as a locus for understanding lived experience in contexts of political and social change. Jeremiah's career as scholar and musician engages with issues arising from peering into the archive and imagining the power of “lost” forms of expression to articulate keenly felt needs in the present. He successfully defended his dissertation in the Stanford University Graduate School of Education Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies in 2021, and is currently a 2022-23 Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Jeremiah was the 2019-20 recipient of the YIVO Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music and Theater, the 2020 AJS Women's Caucus innovative scholarship award and the 2021 Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award. His writing has been published in Religion and American Culture, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Germanica, and In geveb, as well as in popular publications such as Tablet and the Forward.