(This is a guest post on a subject dear to my heart: Jewish
music. Courtesy of the Milken Archive of Jewish Music. Enjoy!)
The study of Jewish America can take many directions. Some of
America's earliest immigrants were Jewish refugees who, fleeing
the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, made their way to the
New World. Throughout the succeeding decades and centuries new
waves of Jewish immigrants continued to arrive. Each new wave of
American Jews influenced the country's history while, at the
same time, America impacted on the Jewish American Experience.
One way that historians learn more about the way that Jewish
life has evolved in America is through studying the community's
music. Music offers a model that allows researchers to study the
development and changes that have occurred in the American
Jewish community, ever since the first Jews arrived in the
American colonies in 1654. Historians trace Jewish life in
America to early refugees who had been living in Recife, Brazil
but were forced to flee when t