Wedding Music and Jewish Identity in Postwar New York City
If you attended a typical American Jewish wedding in the 1950s, you might have noticed some
new “rituals,” such as a photographer buzzing around the rabbi, a floral wedding canopy, or
“kosher style” catering. But while weddings transformed and modernized, one thing remained
certain: if the wedding was Jewish, you danced the hora. American Jews abandoned many
traditional wedding rituals, but they held on to Jewish wedding music as an essential expression
of their Jewish identity. Jewish music and dance underwent significant changes during the
postwar period, yet they remain an immovable feature of Jewish weddings to this day. In this
talk, musicologist Uri Schreter will explore the evolution of Jewish wedding music in early
postwar New York and explain the relationship between the weddings’ diverse musical
repertoires, such as klezmer, Israeli folk song, swing, and Latin ballroom dances.
Uri Schreter is an interdisciplinary musicologist, composer, keyboardist, and filmmaker. He is
currently pursuing a PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University, where he researches
Jewish music during the early postwar period. Prior to Harvard, he studied at Tel Aviv
University, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in composition and musicology, and a
Master’s degree in modern European history. His scholarship has been supported by the
American Musicological Society, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research. Outside of academia, Uri has collaborated with numerous artists
in Jewish culture and beyond, including Mike Burstyn, Anthony Russell, and Judy Bressler.
Photo credit: Metz-Greene-Stone Family Papers, American Jewish Historical Society, P-587, Box 15.
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