The famous poem that sits at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “The New Colossus”, was written specifically for that massive sculpture and referred to Lady Liberty as the “mother of exiles”. The poem, by Emma Lazarus, speaks of the “wretched refuse from the teeming shores” as that collection of souls whom the great lady’s torch was meant to guide to America, preferring it over the “ancient lands” and “storied pomp” of the Old World of Europe.
It seems Lazarus knew that the folks at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder would bring the greatest vitality and creativity to her young country. Indeed, Lazarus lived in New York in the late 1800s and was active in welcoming Jewish refugees escaping genocide in Eastern Europe. It is to these people in particular that American popular song owes so much.
The Jewish Immigrant Song
Nearly everything that makes America’s music exceptional came from those “homeless, tempest-tost” who arrived with no chance or inclination of ever going back if things didn’t work out in their newly adopted homeland. Terrible circumstances beyond their control had uprooted them and brought them to these strange shores. That made for some very intense and conflicted emotions: desperate to make it work in the New World, but also longing for what was familiar and comfortable in the place they’d been forced to leave.
From that cauldron of emotional turmoil – not overlooking the millions of enslaved peoples who are also a critical part of America’s formation – rose some of the most remarkable music on the planet: ragtime, blues, jazz, Broadway, R&B, soul, gospel, hip-hop, country and western, rock ‘n’ roll, and all of them stewed into an amalgam known as “American pop”.
Give Me Your Huddled Masses and We’ll Make Beautiful Music Together
It is one thing to be down on your luck and in need of starting over, but it’s quite another to be on the run for your life. While it’s true that many immigrants got off the boat seeking greener pastures, others disembarked on American soil with a gun to their head or simply because it was their last and only stop to escape annihilation. The latter circumstances tend to take the immigrant spirit to a whole other level; survival was at the forefront of their experience, and this imbued their toils and creativity in their adopted country with great soul and earnestness.
My great-grandfather, an Armenian, escaped genocide at the hands of the Turks by the skin of his teeth, tumbling out of steerage onto the docks of New York harbor in the late 1800s with nearly nothing to his name and no way to communicate with those around him. The Methodists offered to clothe and teach him, but only if he was willing to attend their seminary. Before he knew it, he was a member of their clergy, founding a church in Salem, Oregon. Perhaps not his first choice as an Armenian to spread the gospel in the Willamette Valley, but he did so with zeal for the rest of his life.
That’s what life or death choices bring out in people: zeal and lots of it. That’s the secret sauce that American immigrants have been bringing to the table from even before the nation was founded, and it is reflected in much of the music that emerged as a result.
If it is true that the immigrants most miserable and afflicted upon arrival offered the most creative energy to America’s wellspring of popular song, then this is especially so for the African/Caribbean slave populations. Despite their abduction to North America and all the myriad traumas of enslavement, they have had a rich impact on nearly every aspect of American creative expression, and that influence for the better has never let up.
To mark this cultural gift his people were so inclined to bestow to the US, jazz great Duke Ellington posited ironically in a speech he gave in 1941, “I contend that the Negro is the creative voice of America, is creative America, and it was a happy day in America when the first unhappy slave was landed on its shores.” (Dumain)
Not to minimize the magnificent contribution made by this earliest immigrant wave, there are two other groups of subsequent arrivals who also had a significant impact on American music and perhaps don’t always get the credit they deserve: the Scots-Irish and their offerings to American folk and country music, and the Russian Jews. Here, we focus on celebrating the latter group and their particular contribution to the birth of American pop music.
The Russian Jewish Diaspora and the Birth of American Pop
“In the twentieth century, America would remake the world, the whole world, and popular music would remake America.” – Sidran There Was a Fire
It was named the “American Century” because of the indelible cultural stamp the nation put on the 1900s. The notion of popular music as such had existed for as long as a particular piece of music could be repeated and handed down to an appreciative audience, which is to say, for time immemorial. However, the terms “pop music” or “hit songs” connotes a purely American phenomenon which had its beginnings around the turn of the 20th century, when technology and copyright laws permitted music for the first time to be profitably mass-produced and marketed.
The production of consumer goods was beginning to hit its stride, and so too was the notion of music as a mass commodity to be promoted relentlessly to the buying public, originally through piano sheet music and live performances, and later by way of recordings and radio. Something that had been around for a long time – the appreciation of music – was for the first time being “streamlined and intensified by the industrialization of culture,” and it was happening for the most part in America. (Stanley)
At the same time, a wave of Jewish immigrants was arriving from Russia, and their abrupt influx was at the vanguard of this critical shift in American character, taste, and creativity. They were not only in the right place at the right time to bring about this transformation, but they were also naturally driven to do so.
Irving Berlin (1888 – 1989) was arguably America’s first pop music superstar, and his earliest memory was as a child watching the Cossacks burn his village in Russia. Born Israel Beilin, his family escaped to the US when he was five years old, and he would become one of the nation’s most prolific and influential early songwriters at a time when the Great American Songbook’s first chapters were written.
Jews throughout Europe had been experiencing antisemitism in one form or another since ancient times, but a severe brand of hate emerged in Russia in the late 19th century for a variety of reasons. Despite having populated the Eastern borders of Russia for centuries, Jews were aliens in their own homeland, never accepted by the rest of its citizenry. Once the bigotry against them reached a fever pitch and the pogroms – state-sanctioned riots of killing – began occurring in every Jewish village, it became brutally clear that the place they had called home for generations would no longer tolerate them.
There were no options in the matter. They had to either pull up and abandon everything for someplace different that would take them or stay and be wiped out. They weren’t emigrating for advancement; they were emigrating for survival. That journey would begin and end not with a hopeful yearning as much as an existential anxiousness that would be matched by many of the migrants of today on our own borders and those of Europe.
At the time of Russia’s ethnic cleansing campaign, America was beginning to be known throughout the world as a place where one could begin life anew. The Jews of Eastern Europe, in dire need of a complete reboot, ended up on that singular path to a new world.
This Jewish migration began just as the United States was developing a national persona, finally regarding itself by the late 1800s as something more unitary as opposed to a mere collection of disparate states or regions. Out of this evolving sense of national unity emerged a nascent post-industrial American culture, especially in the growing cities swelling with immigrants eager to thrive. It was a rapidly evolving ethos that celebrated change and exuberant freedom and was best represented in the arts.
Two million Jews fled Russia between 1880 and 1920, many ending up in impoverished parts of New York City. They arrived desperate to assimilate, having been traumatized by their abrupt ouster from their homeland due to their perceived otherness. They arrived in America to stay, with no ticket back and only looking forward, bringing with them nothing but who they were. They were weary of their status as outsiders in their own land, as had been the case for centuries in Russia.
Within a single generation upon arriving in America, they shaved their beards, Anglicized their names, and stopped teaching their children the Yiddish language, all in an effort to adopt an American image as soon as possible. Because they were eager to be perceived as entirely American, and because the American persona was in flux at that moment in history, Jewish immigrants leapt to the forefront in defining modern Americanism, and in so doing, helped to build the inaugural template.
The Jews of Russia saw popular music not only as a delight to partake in but also as a ticket to inclusion in the American dream. Entertainment was becoming an industry as well as the most efficient means of social advancement for the underclass. Once off the ship, you might end up in the slums, but write a few hit songs and you’re the toast of the town. This became abundantly clear to these Russian emigres, who promptly realized they could have written songs all day in “the motherland” and still find their village burning around them.
In the end, they would not only be participants in the art and industry of the American popular song, but their main purveyors, originators, and innovators to a degree that far outweighed their number in the new urban demographic. This strong Eastern European Jewish elixir has continued to flow through the lifeblood of popular American song with the likes of Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, and Neil Diamond, all of whose grandparents were part of the Russian diaspora.
Jewish Immigrants’ Songline through American Popular Music
This Jewish population surge was poised to both join and advance American culture, particularly its nascent entertainment industry, which was emerging in cities at the turn of the 20th century. They were a people with the innate gifts for taking American popular song to an entirely new level. In a matter of years, they abandoned the garment trades they knew from the old country to jumpstart the American hit parade, starting with the songwriting sweatshops of New York’s Tin Pan Alley and later the vaudeville stage, Broadway musicals, and then moving on to radio and the movies.
Freshly minted American Jews were not only yearning to find their niche but also well inclined to transform the country’s entertainment model. They brought with them a culture ready-made for the stage, in terms of both the sacred as well as the secular worlds they inhabited. Their music-saturated synagogues, as well as their rich theater traditions, flavored throughout with the sweet and sour dual sentiments of humor and lament, were a magical formula for popular songcraft.
For a people who defined themselves so much by their faith, music was already at the center of their spiritual practice. Daily religious services were built around song, with the role of the Cantor, a singing church officiant, serving a key role in the congregation. These singing preachers of Judaism had no set musical program to accompany the copious text they recited daily in the temple from their holy book, the Torah. Consequently, they were masters at improvisation. Once ensconced in the US, the Cantor’s unique gift of musical creativity was passed on to their congregation, composed mainly of first-generation Jewish Americans who would take those gifts and apply them to the burgeoning trade of hit-making.
Like Irving Berlin and famed performer Al Jolson (1886 – 1950), Harold Arlen (born Hyman Arluck) (1905 -1986), who wrote iconic songs for stage and screen such as “Stormy Weather” and “Somewhere over the Rainbow”, was the son of a Cantor. He said of his formative years, “I was jazz crazy. I don’t know how the hell to explain it – except I hear in jazz and in gospel my father singing. He was one of the greatest improvisers I’ve ever heard.” (Kapilow) Arlen gave further props to his singing rabbi dad when he said in an interview with The New Yorker, “[My Dad] had a perfect genius for finding new melodic twists. I know damned well now that his glorious improvisations must have had some effect on me and my own style.” (Stanley)
Even Louis Armstrong, arguably the most influential American musician during this most influential time in American musical history, attributes a significant aspect of his performing style to the Jewish culture of faith and song. A black waif growing up on the streets of New Orleans, he had been taken in by a Jewish family during his formative years. Armstrong cites, for example, his experience at the dinner table with swaying Hebrew prayer as his inspiration for improvisational or “scat” vocalization in his early jazz work.
Beyond their faith practices, the traditional Yiddish Theater that they brought with them from the old country – stage productions of great variety featuring the Jewish secular language – easily transitioned into what was becoming a major entertainment industry in cities throughout the States. Vaudeville, a uniquely urban medium for the performing arts derived from the French expression voix de ville or ‘voice of the city’, was where America’s melting pot identity could be seen on stage by the masses multiple times a day.
Vaudeville theaters featured variety shows where any act that could hold an audience’s attention —musical, comedy, or otherwise—was given free rein. The Jewish arrivals soon made up most of the acts on Vaudeville stages, as well as the majority of the audience. When a new form of casual opera – what would later be called the American Broadway Musical – evolved the stage genre further, Jewish immigrants were already well-positioned to excel in this, as well, because of their strong theatrical roots.
With these deep traditions of song and stage, Jewish immigrants had no problem throwing themselves into the entertainment industry for immediate socio-economic advancement, while others in America looked down on such pursuits as lowly professions not worthy of their energies.
Artfully Tuned Yiddish Irreverence
As the country sped toward the 20th Century, its citizens, and much of the world for that matter, began to sit up and take notice when America’s creatives started speaking in their own voice. Mark Twain led with the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884. It was a breakthrough work because it was written in the American vernacular, using ordinary everyday speech. (Ernest Hemingway credited the novel with being the source for all modern American literature.) The same was true for American popular song during this period, and the recently arrived Jewish immigrants were apt to contribute in ways no one could have anticipated.
Due to the relentless march of modern industrialization and commercialism at the turn of the century, American rural farming towns, with their slow-paced lifestyles, were quickly being subsumed by cities, which were becoming the arbiters of contemporary American culture. These urban centers were where the pace of life catered to an evolving culture that was glib, fast-talking, irreverent, and casual.
Having come from an urban-oriented culture already, the Russian Jews were naturally inclined to thrive in the “go go” cultural landscape of the growing American cities. Once off the boats, they took to the busy streets hawking their wares without missing a beat. If those wares were now the songs of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway Musicals instead of those of the garment districts, so much the better. The new American colloquialism of the quick-witted urbanite was easily adopted by Jews since their speech was well-suited to an emerging urban voice.
Their original language, Yiddish, was also irreverent, with little regard for convention. It was highly adaptable, emphasizing flexibility and the ready adoption of slang (e.g., Chutzpah, klutz, kvetch, schmooze). This permitted them to easily slide into the nation’s urban slang and cadence and incorporate it into their songwriting for quick appeal. Jewish immigrants were thus able to both adopt and innovate the American vernacular, both on the street and in the music that the new cities were spawning. They helped form a peculiarly American dialect both in sound and spirit, using it to launch a style of popular song that would swing and resonate with the listener.
The American hit parade was suddenly more interesting. The bland lyrics of 19th-century parlor tunes like “I love you in June by the light of the moon” were summarily replaced with ear-popping phrases that incorporated street slang, the likes of “You Ain’t Heard Nothin Yet” and “Oh, ma honey…Ain’t you goin’?” As the US hit parade spread via records and radio to the rest of the world, other countries “finally got to hear the natural, conversational, confident, and friendly American voice,” and they liked the sound of it. (Stanley)
Jewish Songwriters’ Integration of Black Musical Influence
Besides a unique drive and a ready voice to influence the new American sound, Jewish songwriters had an affinity for parlaying cutting-edge black rhythms into something palatable for evolving American tastes. Black American musicians had been drawn to the cities during the same period as this Jewish migration, and they were making a beautiful noise to complement the urban soundscape. Ragtime, followed by the blues and jazz, was incorporated into the works of Jewish songwriters who immediately grasped its liberating tendencies.
In doing so, they shifted popular music in the US away from an otherwise moribund musical landscape. By the turn of the century, popular music in America had been on a fairly dreary course with a staid Eurocentric Victorian flavor. Dreary and insipid tunes dripping with sentimentality and scored for the piano parlors of the middle class ruled the day. (Think Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer”)
It was music characterized by comfort and elitism, which is exactly what young immigrants sought to challenge. A blend of the romantic and exotic laments of their Yiddish theater and temple cantors with the bold, complex, and cocky exuberance of jazz, as well as the emerging city swagger, all contributed to a sophisticated and vibrant sound that woke the country up.
As recent immigrants, Jewish artists were positioned to serve as intermediaries, showcasing black culture for wider American audiences. Their symbiotic affinity with the black underclass promoted the latter’s musical strengths and, in doing so, introduced black styles into popular music like never before. Sharing the basement of the social ranks in the cities, they were able to readily embrace and co-opt the powerful emerging black sound, mixing their own version of soul in a minor key with brash, exotic rhythms and in the process creating a whole new infectious sound for the new American pop charts.
This Jewish style of hit-making – rhythmic, soulful interplay between major and minor keys – became the currency for all songwriters. Even Gentile song masters such as Cole Porter acknowledged in private that the key to his success was to “write Jewish”. (Sidran). Some of his greatest hits – “Night and Day”, “Begin the Beguine,” or “I Love Paris” – were marked by an eastern Mediterranean flavor of traditional Jewish music.
The Jewish Immigrant and American Pop Culture: One in the Same
Music that celebrated the street culture of urban America, and the broader national identity that went with it, naturally had to distance itself first from the Eurocentric. The Jewish immigrants approached the music at their level, no longer recognizing the old European highbrow sound that had ruled tastes in both America and the rest of the Western world up to that point.
Again, this was an affront to the establishment, which any new underclass would appreciate. They were pulling the American arts down to street level, where they existed, and, in doing so, making a statement that was dismissive of the old world and open to rapid change. “To be this free with the language was to own it; to own the language was to own the world.” (Sidran). The modern urban Jew became one and the same with the new voice of American song and culture that was taking the world by storm.
Jewish refugees may have arrived in the US predisposed to blend in, but to the extent they saw barriers, they were naturally inclined to make their own version of American culture to speed their assimilation. While they abandoned their traditions, they simultaneously used them to carve out a place in the arts. The harder they ran from their Jewishness towards greater assimilation and upward mobility, the more they imbued popular culture with their ethnicity.
It was all too ironic: in a mad rush to disappear into whatever was distinctly American, they instead created a fresh American voice in mass culture and the arts that was attributable to their Jewish roots. That genius to adapt and augment will forever be a big part of the marvel of the iconic 20th century and the soundtrack to American exceptionalism.
Pop music remains a key attribute of Americanism, culturally and beyond. It still reigns throughout the globe in the 21st century, both in terms of influence and favor. The fact that the very thing that came to define America to the rest of the world beginning in the 20th century was, for the most part, the construct of a people who had only recently landed on its shores in a distraught and alienated state, is a testament not only to the Russian Jew but to all immigrants, American or otherwise.
America became the center of the world’s cultural attention during the last century, largely because millions of people were forced to either reach its shores or face oblivion. Blessed are all those wretched and tormented souls tossed across the borders by dire circumstances, for only with their influence has America made the glorious noise that the whole world still echoes today. Perhaps it is because the US absorbed so many diverse souls during its formative years that the rest of the world can hear a natural universal appeal in the music it creates.
In the case of the Eastern European Jew, Russia’s loss was surely America’s gain: the country absorbed into its cultural fabric one of the most expressive, inventive, and exuberant peoples ever to wash up on any nation’s shore. Like the Afro-Caribbean and Scots-Irish, the Jewish people were a bottomless blessing of artistic spirit that, in a very short time, reinvented and reintroduced an American persona to the world through an intoxicating blend of music that conveyed genuine exuberance and bravado.
The Jewish immigrant helped to give the new world a national identity with its own soundtrack, as well as a badge of honor and bragging rights to go along with it. This was all achieved within one vibrant generation.
Works Cited
BBC Walk on By: The Story of Popular Song. Documentary.2001
Dumain, Ralph. The Autodidact Project: Quotes: Duke Ellington: “We, Too, Sing ‘America'”.
Sidran, Ben. There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream. Nardis Books and Unlimited Media, Ltd. 2012.
Stanley, Bob. Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music: A History. Pegasus. 2022.
Yagoda, Ben. The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song. Riverhead Books. 2015.Kapilow, Rob.. Listening for America: Inside the Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim. Liveright Publishing. 2019.
“Yiddish Language and Culture (Judaism 101)”. JewFaq.org.