[LINK] "Tracking Jewish history through long lost LPs"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Simon Houpt has an interesting report on the work done in a sort of musical archeology done among American Jews.

A few years ago Roger Bennett, a well connected import from Liverpool, put up a website asking for pictures of bar mitzvahs from the late 1960s through the 80s.

He and a couple of co-curators commissioned some essays from people like Jonathan Safran Foer, and put it all together into a celebrationally kitschy book called Bar Mitzvah Disco. Around then, Bennett issued a call for ephemera from the summer camp experience, which became Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Island Meets Lord of the Flies, published earlier this year. Now he has a new book whose title explains all: And You Shall Know Us By the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost.

The volume, which includes about 400 album covers stretching from the forties to the early eighties, grew out of almost a decade's worth of digging through used-LP bins, thrift stores, and academic archives in search of the music of a forgotten time. As Bennett, a 38-year-old executive with the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Foundation, and his co-writer Josh Kun note in the introduction, "While some take weekends to hit Vegas, play golf, or go hunting, we spent as much time as we could in Boca Raton, Florida. It became our Shangri-la - the place Jewish vinyl goes to die."

And oy, what they found: oddly thrilling music they'd never heard at Hebrew school or synagogue. (If they had, they write, they might never have fallen by the secular wayside.) They discovered a Jewish Latin craze, whose finest specimen may be the Irving Fields Trio's 1959 disc, Bagels and Bongos. They explored the complicated history of black-Jewish relations as filtered through the Temptations' rendition of a medley from Fiddler on the Roof, and wondered what to make of non-Jewish pop stars like Connie Francis recording O Mein Papa and My Yiddishe Momme.