Women Cantors, Media, and Early Twentieth-Century Jewish American Popular Culture

Abstract: This essay offers a focused overview of the work of the khazntes , a loosely defined cohort of women performers of cantorial music working in the Yiddish-speaking immigrant community in America and its second-generation progeny in the early to mid-twentieth century, before the advent of ordained women cantors in the liberal movements beginning in the 1970s. Through archival research in the Yiddish press, musicological analysis of recordings and interviews with still-living associates of the khazntes, an attempt is made to push back against the erasure of their work. Starting with the earliest documentation of the term khaznte to describe women singers and working through the media landscape of mid-twentieth-century Jewish popular culture, when women’s cantorial performance achieved a degree of recognizability through the work of star performers, a picture emerges of the broad impact of the khazntes on American Jewish life during their period of greatest activity.