Jewish Music

It would be convenient to divide Jewish musical heritage into sacred and secular; yet the spillover from one domain to the other has been continuous as a result of the intensive immersion in daily prayer, the weekly Sabbath/weekday round, and the intimate mixture of family life and religious holiday celebration. In pre-1939 Eastern Europe, a woman doing housework might sing either a liturgical song setting, a Yiddish adaptation of a sixteenth-century German ballad, or a current Russian...