Who Says Jews Don’t Have Soul?
By Beth Kissileff
No one could have predicted thirty years ago that the cantorial school at Hebrew Union College would one day be named for Debbie Friedman. At the dawn of her career, Friedman was considered a maverick, someone who didn’t know about the traditions of Jewish music, a self-taught song leader rather than the prevailing model of cantor, a carefully trained musician. The first time I attended a performance of hers, in the early nineties in a non-descript suburban New Jersey synagogue, my husband and I brought along a recent convert to Judaism who had been a member of the Princeton University Tiger Lilies, a female a cappella group. Since music was so important to this young woman, we wanted to be sure that she knew the range of possibilities inherent in Jewish music. The...