Dissertation

Cultivating High Society: American Jews engaging European Opera in New York, 1880-1940

(Publication has been embargoed through ProQuest until 2024; selections available upon request)

My dissertation presents the untold story of the American Jewish encounter with European opera in New York from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on a vast array of archival documents, including oral histories, newspaper coverage, and personal papers, I delineate the ways opera shaped American Jewish experience, just as American Jews profoundly transformed opera. I argue that while Jewish New Yorkers benefited from their engagements with opera from the 1880s to the 1940s, the genre and its associated institutions also served as a repository for anxieties pertaining to Jewish acculturation. In this sixty-year period, bookended by the establishment and democratization of the first Metropolitan Opera House (the Met), American Jews from many backgrounds turned to opera as part of their pursuit of remunerative employment, cultural acceptance, and ethno-racial uplift. 

Even as they became essential supporters of the opera both inside and outside of the Met during this period, Jews simultaneously encountered social hurdles that stymied the limits of their engagements with the genre and its associated institutions. In response to circulating anti-Semitic texts and perspectives identifying their “undesirable” status in high culture spaces, Jews pushed for the opera’s democratization for the immigrant masses, and crafted humorous stories, songs, and films about opera-going that articulated their fears of social failure. Ultimately, this project offers a case study of how a heterogeneous immigrant population navigated their encounters with a contested musical genre and space during a fraught historical moment, and documents what happened to them in the process.

This research has been supported by a Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Graduate Research Fellowship from the Center for Jewish History, a Betty Cook Karrh Memorial Scholar P.E.O. Scholar Award fellowship from P.E.O. International, doctoral research fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and summer research fellowships from the American Academy of Jewish Research, and Temple University’s Feinstein Center for American Jewish History.

Presentations based on this research have been given at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society (2020), the Association for Jewish Studies (2021), the Society for American Music (2020, 2022), the Canadian Society for Jewish Studies (2020), the American Jewish Historical Society (2020), and Feminist Music Theory (2022).