“Emma Goldman, An Anarchist at the Opera,” American Jewish History 106, no. 2 (2022): 113-142

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Abstract: Radical anarchist Emma Goldman loved opera’s music and narratives as much as she disdained the genre as an implement of bourgeois self-indulgence. These realities led her to pen opinion editorials, lecture notes, transcriptions, and a memoir reflecting opera’s local and global performances, composers, and singers. Situated at a moment when the genre teetered precariously between the popular culture of the nineteenth century and the high culture of the twentieth century, Goldman saw within opera opportunities to advance her political agenda and self-fashion her historical narrative. Close reading of Goldman’s writings about opera confirms her enduring commitment to anarchist principles, despite apparent contradictions between high culture and anarchism. By contributing to a growing body of scholarship that investigates how and why opera has served as a productive medium for enacting social transformation, this article intervenes in historical discourses that still accept musical high culture as antithetical to the values of the American German and Yiddish anarchist movements.

“I’d Rather [Sound] Blue: Listening to Agency, Hybridity, and Intersectionality in the Vocal Recordings of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand,” Journal of the Society for American Music 16, no. 1 (2022)

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Abstract: This article locates intersectionality, agency, and hybridity within the singing voices of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand by comparing recordings of “I’d Rather Be Blue,” “Second Hand Rose,” and “My Man” from the surviving Vitaphone reels of Brice’s My Man (1928) with the audio from the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) of Streisand’s Funny Girl (1968). Brice and Streisand’s virtuosic stylized vocal performances communicate particular classed, gendered, geographic, and racialized identities for audience consumption. This project aims to restore the sonic and aural to a body of scholarship on these performers that heretofore has focused primarily on the physical and visual. An untapped inroad for analysis lies in the sonic space between these two women, one of whom attempts to posthumously portray the other. By practicing close listening on these recordings and taking seriously the Jewish right to hybrid musical expression within and beyond twentieth-century America, we can move past the essentializing discourses of the American racial binary to which Jews pose a definitional challenge, and open up further avenues for thinking about Jewish sonic difference generationally and contextually.