The shift comes at a delicate time for the institution and for the Conservative movement, for which it serves as spiritual incubator and intellectual home. The school is reportedly millions of dollars in debt. At the same time, the once-vibrant movement has seen a steady shrinking of its membership rolls and a parallel diminution in what sets it apart from Judaism’s Reform movement.

These tensions come to the fore in the institution of the cantorate. In the immediate postwar years, most Reform and Conservative congregations boasted a charismatic, operatic cantor, who sometimes even eclipsed the rabbi. Reform Judaism began a move away from this model toward more participatory services in the 1960s and ’70s. The Conservative movement has been caught in something of a bind: while it has more recently embraced the shift in an effort to lure a younger audience, doing so has served to further blur the line that divided it from the Reform movement.

On Monday afternoon, JTS chancellor Arnold Eisen met with a large, distraught group of students, alumni, and faculty to defend the de facto demotion of the cantorial school. While students complained about a lack of institutional transparency, Eisen reassured the assembly that the cantorial school would not be closing. Monday’s meeting may be the only student-administration faceoff in recent memory in which a polite student body prepared for the face-off with a “Solidarity Mincha,” or afternoon prayer service, and in which student leaders requested that the chancellor not only promise to give students more decision-making power, but that he ratify that promise by signing a covenant, or brit.

The reorganization did not come as a complete surprise. Faculty, if not yet students, got a whiff last year that big changes were ahead in the cantorial school. Last spring, the seminary’s board hired Jack Ukeles, a management consultant who often works with Jewish organizations, to develop a strategic plan for revamping the institution. The plan that Ukeles drafted a few months later advised shutting down the cantorial school altogether. Chancellor Eisen has stated repeatedly that he never even considered implementing that suggestion—and Provost Alan Cooper told Tablet Magazine that the changes now being announced have nothing to do with Ukeles’s report—but rumors nevertheless began to circulate.

“Everyone jumped to the worst possible conclusions after it came out,” said Alberto Mizrahi, a Miller School alumnus who is now a cantor at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago and a frequent music coach at his alma mater. “Everyone has something to say: Are we going to close the school? Are we going to merge with Hebrew Union College?”
There’s no truth to the latter rumor either, the administration says, though cantorial students at JTS and HUC, the Reform movement seminary, last year began sharing some classes on musical technique.

While the faculty’s worst fears were not realized, they were reactivated Friday afternoon when students and professors were informed via an email from Eisen that “the position of dean of the H.L. Miller Cantorial School will no longer be part of the academic structure of JTS.” He further explained that the previously autonomous cantorial school will, as of this summer, fall under the same umbrella as the seminary’s larger rabbinical school, and will be supervised by the rabbinical school’s dean, Danny Nevins. It also announced, less controversially, that JTS’s graduate and undergraduate schools of academic Jewish studies will soon share a dean as well.

Shortly after the email was sent, Shabbat began, and for a strange 24 hours, everyone on the religiously observant campus was at least officially at rest. Once the Sabbath ended, though, cantorial students began feverishly posting alarmed status updates on their Facebook pages: one student was “very worried about the future of the North American Cantorate”; another ominously referenced the upcoming meeting with Eisen: “Crisis at JTS Cantorial School. Monday is the Day of Judgment.” Meanwhile, Cooper sent a memo that attempted to dispel the rumors about the cantorial school closing, merging with HUC, or being taken over by the rabbinical school. Though students say their worst fears have subsided, they are still—as student representatives said at Monday’s meeting—worried about being left out of the process, and devastated about the loss of their dean.

“JTS has always been the place for people who sought to maintain traditional nusach [musical style] in the service—to move forward and add contemporary music as well, but also to preserve some of the great pieces we have from the golden age of hazzanut [cantorial performance] when cantors were really something,” said Rebecca Platt, a second-year cantorial student. “Now I’m concerned about whether we’re going to be able to maintain that, without Henry and without a very autonomous program.”

The economic logic of the move goes beyond JTS’s budget deficit, said Andy Shugerman, a recent graduate of the JTS rabbinical school who now runs educational programs for the seminary in Florida and the South. Some small synagogues are cutting costs by hiring just one spiritual leader instead of a rabbi and a cantor. By making the boundary between rabbinic and cantorial training more fluid—teaching rabbis to lead a congregation in prayer and training cantors more extensively in halacha—JTS hopes it can make its alumni more marketable at a particularly vulnerable time.

The softening of that boundary could be a silver lining of Eisen’s plan, cantorial students said, and not just because of the dismal job market. Historically, relationships between rabbis and cantors have been rocky—JTS itself didn’t allow cantors to sleep in its dorms, which were for rabbinical students only, until the 1970s. “What might finally start happening is bringing together the rabbinical and cantorial schools, and that might be great,” said Yakov Hadash, a fourth-year cantorial student and the president of the Miller School’s student organization.

Eisen and Cooper have publicly framed the restructuring of the cantorial school as part of a philosophical shift toward a future model of the Conservative movement, a demonstration of just how far the pendulum has swung in Conservative circles away from traditional hazzanut. But outside the JTS administration, even those sympathetic to the plan see it as primarily an economic decision. “The school is in major financial trouble, and Henry Rosenblum, who is an old and dear friend of mine, is one of the statistics that happens in this world,” Alberto Mizrahi said.

It’s not yet known who will be hired as the new cantorial school director—a position that will encompass some duties of the erstwhile cantorial school dean but will be subsidiary to the rabbinical dean—and how long a search for that person will take place. Students in their first few years of the five-year cantorial program, Hadash said, are concerned about whether their academic lives will be thrown out of whack if they are temporarily leaderless—and that, if they don’t like the yet-to-be-appointed director, things might not improve.

Most of all, though, students are mourning Rosenblum’s departure; he held his position for 12 years and had, by all accounts, been an important mentor, advocate, and emotional support system for JTS students both in an out of the cantorial school. Said Platt, “Our hearts are collectively a little broken.”

With additional reporting by Jenny Merkin.

When I first attended High Holiday services at UCLA, as a 19-year-old college freshman in 1995, two sisters shared cantorial duties. I had never before been so moved by chanting; their singing wasn’t flowery or operatic, as it had been at my Reform synagogue growing up. It was simple, soulful, and understated. After several years, these sisters moved on, and the UCLA rabbi, aware that I was the director of the school’s Jewish a cappella group and that my career in show business had included singing, asked me to take over. Having seen me in services, he knew I was already familiar with the way our community davened. On a dozen cassettes, the sisters recorded the trope for the hundreds of High Holiday machzor pages so that I could practice nightly in the year leading up to my first yontif as cantor, or chazzanit.

I felt I was living out a personal destiny: my mother’s father was a lay chazzan for his community of Holocaust survivors in the Bronx and San Diego. As a nine-year-old child in Poland, he left yeshiva to earn money for his family, but I had been told that he could have been one of the greats. My grandfather Ephraim (he went by “Frank”) was a feisty, primarily Yiddish-speaking Orthodox man who barely grasped the concept of a girl having a bat mitzvah. How would I explain to him, then almost 90, that I was going to lead services? That I’d wear a lacey kippah and the white kittel, or robe, typically worn by pious men on the High Holidays?

He was incredulous that a 26-year-old woman would perform a role traditionally reserved for men. He smiled gently, opened his mouth to debate the halachic implications, then thought better of it and sighed deeply. The world was changing faster than he could grasp.

My debut as a chazzanit marked many firsts: the first time I attended all services of all of the holidays, the first time I ever attended a Musaf or Yizkor service, and the first time I fasted a full 25 hours, even though I was nursing my firstborn son every two hours. All of this was so different from my experience growing up—in my family on Yom Kippur, we fasted until we got hungry, usually around lunch.

As my grandfather got older and more frail (and less confrontational about the unconventionality of a female chazzan), the months before the High Holidays became a special time for us. Our interactions were becoming more difficult as his mind faded, but I would rehearse the traditional melodies and ancient words with him at his retirement home, helping him recall his youth. He was not very communicative or psychologically aware, so I’m uncertain exactly which parts of this time together touched him most. I know that he was thrilled that I could “kvetch it out” like he did, nursing the mournful notes and having them catch in my throat, and he would grow teary-eyed as I practiced. He would listen with his head turned once his eyesight had failed him, to eliminate even the possibility that his attempts to look at me might take away from the spiritual and melodic experience. My voice was therapy for us both; it gave us something to connect with and brought us close together. He wished he could come to shul both to hear me and to take the lead in chanting the Maftir service (his favorite duty from his youth), but, being Orthodox, he would not drive on a holiday and was, by then, too frail to walk the far distance to our shul.

When I studied for my role as chazzanit, I did so in an academic way, setting out to learn dutifully all of the prayers which I had previously skimmed as a congregant. There was a tremendous amount of Hebrew I had never recited before and had to learn to pronounce. What surprised me in this process was that it became more than a rote study of text. It became a passion. I intuitively felt the rhythms of the prayers in my body as if they were written inside me. The trope made sense as if it was a physics equation that the universe had encoded for my voice millions of years ago. I was a conduit for the community. This was true when I chanted Kol Nidre, asking for a kind of pre-anullment of all the oaths and promises that our community will make that we may fail to fulfill. This was true as I held back tears recounting the massacre of the rabbis, and as I chanted El Maleh Rachamim for those who perished in the Holocaust. I felt a sense of mystical energy surrounding the congregation when I covered my head as the kohanim made their priestly blessing. I did not feel arrogant about the responsibility entrusted to me; I felt blessed and valued beyond measure.

As I grew more observant in those years, I started feeling a bit anxious about leading services. Doing so violated the rules of kol isha, the restrictions on the voice of a woman singing before men, forbidden in Orthodoxy. Though any man sufficiently concerned with this issue would probably not have been attending the service I led, where men and women sit together, I nevertheless chafed at the idea that my leadership role was a violation of codes of modesty, to which I was increasingly faithful. Moreover, there is a traditional prohibition about women reciting collective blessings on behalf of men. I felt uneasy about challenging that.

By the time I was expecting my second child, my pregnancy made some of these issues moot—after all, I couldn’t well stand on the bimah nine months pregnant, and so I took a “maternity leave.” Taking a break felt right—my life was now about parenting and exploring observance. A year later, I held baby number two and distracted my toddler with his train set as I sat listening to the daughters of the original chazzanit sisters chanting what I used to chant. These young women, one finishing high school, one in college, were beautiful, single, and they pronounced the Hebrew I often struggled with as if it was their first language. Although they sang so well, my heart broke for the lost opportunity to serve my community even while I was certain that tending to my boys was the best job I could ever have. In retrospect, I see that the tension I felt had to do not with wanting to take on a role that men traditionally fill, but with adjusting to being satisfied with my new role as a fully present mother to young children. Finding spiritual fulfillment within the confines of Jewish law is a hefty challenge for me, but I’m up to and am enjoying the journey. This year, those two gifted daughters will be on the bimah again and I’ll sit and follow along with my boys, now one and four, still with a bit of longing for the experience they’re having. But this time I will contribute in a way that feels right to me for now—I’ll attend all services, fast the full 25 hours on Yom Kippur while, yet again, nursing. And this time, I will be on the bimah, not chanting, but proudly blowing shofar.

The most revealing photo of Josef Rosenblatt shows a squat, well-fed figure decked out in a chesterfield, a high gray hat, and a golden fob and tiepin, holding a cane with a gloriously ornate knob. What stands out most are the grave, intelligent eyes behind the rakish round spectacles, and a dark beard so finely groomed that it could be a Persian lamb collar. Like so many portraits from the raucous 1920s, this one has a whiff of Diamond Jim Brady about it, a sense of vagabond self-invention and glamour that recalls images of Babe Ruth in his beaver coat or Gloria Swanson on the set of Queen Kelly. Like them, Rosenblatt was the highest-paid practitioner of his art, a superstar. What’s different, of course, is that Reb Yossele”as nearly everyone addressed him”was also a functionary of the temple, a hazzan who, long before coming to America, had chanted for the Hasidic rabbi of Komarno, in Galicia. The holy man who had proclaimed of the nervous ten-year-old: “He has a pure mouth and his prayers will be heard. In those early years, at the close of the 19th century, when Rosenblatt made a living as an itinerant boy cantor who wandered from town to town across the Pale of Settlement, these righteous men often repaid him with homemade amulets believed to ward off illness.

I hadn’t been looking for Rosenblatt when I discovered his recordings. To me, he belonged to the drab twilight of America’s unassimilated Jewry, lost behind a century of gaudy modernity like the lone jar of gefilte fish stowed at the back of my grandparents’ refrigerator. An immigrant myself, I didn’t want to look. Then, last September, Ornette Coleman changed my mind. “I was once in Chicago, about 20-some years ago, the 76-year-old saxophonist and composer told Ben Ratliff of The New York Times. “A young man said, ‘I’d like you to come by so I can play something for you.’ I went down to his basement and he put on Josef Rosenblatt, and I started crying like a baby. The record he had was crying, singing and praying, all in the same breath…. He’s making the sound of what he’s experiencing as a human being, turning it into the quality of his voice, Coleman went on to say about Rosenblatt. “He’s singing about something. I don’t know what it is, but it’s bad.

It was definitely bad. The advent of electronic recording in the late 1920s brought into being America’s most powerful and original music to date, nearly all of it composed and performed by disenfranchised and culturally mutated communities”the Western Swing of working-class white Texans and Mexicans, the hot jazz of transplanted Southern blacks, and–of course–country blues. Coleman touched upon something I’d always hoped to discover”an indigenous Jewish soul music of the Eastern European immigrant, of the remembered miseries of Bialystock and Minsk and the newer privations of the tenement, of world socialism and the Yiddish stage and the Lower East Side.

While Rosenblatt achieved unheard-of secular fame, he never managed to eclipse his celebrated contemporaries and near-contemporaries in America and abroad. For one, Rosenblatt didn’t possess the most operatically legitimate instrument (that was Mordechai Herschman) nor was he the most emotive singer (that one’s a tie between Gershon Sirota and Moshe Koussevitsky) but he was the hottest showman by a mile. At his disposal he had a buttery baritone with the worrying upper register of a tenor, epic breath control that allowed him to string together seemingly endless interlocked phrases without a pause, a coloratura that would have made a Neapolitan soprano red with envy, and, almost unfairly, a pure, pleading falsetto that he used to roughly the same effect as Prince. And Rosenblatt took the sob–that most Jewish interjection, and the cantor’s bread and butter–to its theoretical summit. Today, to listen to Rosenblatt’s Melech Rachaman, from 1914, is to invite disbelief. It’s best attempted with headphones, to pry the miraculously uncompressed voices from the sludge of the Columbia 78 rpm disk. The male choir’s bizarrely high singing, harmonies and all–is it a boy choir?–makes Rosenblatt’s thundering entrance all the more savory. Over the course of next three minutes and change, Reb Yossele takes off on outrageous coloratura runs up and down the register, appears to break down and weep at least twice, and completely kicks out the footlights when he unleashes the falsetto. The text is Hebrew liturgy, but the recording, with its frantic interplay between the singers and the eerie combination of Middle Eastern melody and operatic technique, is a singular, strange, highly premeditated, and brilliant piece of pop music. Field hollers and Sonic Youth notwithstanding, American music is most effective at its most populist, and like every truly devastating gospel record, Melech Rachaman is at once unapologetically commercial–in the best sense–yet resolutely divine. Underlying the vocal drama, the cantor’s voice is heavy with the deeper hues of devotion. In Coleman’s words, “he’s singing pure spiritual. Though in his lifetime he was often called “The Jewish Caruso, today Rosenblatt sounds more like the Jewish Clara Ward.

He was born in 1882 in the Ukranian town of Belaya Tzerkov (white church), which resident Jews called Scwartze Tum’oh (black defilement), because like so many nearby towns, it had a vandalized Jewish cemetery to attest to its long history of pogroms. By the time he was four, Rosenblatt and his father, a Ba’al Tefilah (prayer leader) at the local shul, had already taken to the road, performing in synagogues and private homes in settlements across Ukraine, Galicia, and Carpatho-Ruthenia. By the age of 12, the boy was already a sensation, packing record crowds into synagogues in Krakow and Vienna. At 18, he married a childhood sweetheart and began officiating in front of his own congregation in Munkacs, a Hungarian outpost that would change sovereignty five times in the coming decades. In rapid succession, he traded his post there for the title of oberkantor in Presburg (now Bratislava), then, beckoned by Hamburg’s high Germanic cosmopolitanism, took a job at one of the city’s largest synagogues. It was there, in 1906, that Rosenblatt first heard Caruso, an encounter that radically expanded his understanding of the vocal possibilities of song. But the prim, conservative Hamburg Jews discouraged his growing showmanship, a mixture of Eastern European emotiveness and stylistic flourishes gleaned from the opera house. “Mr. Rosenblatt, you sing so divinely, one of them remarked after a service. “Why, then, should it be necessary for you to sigh and wail? “How do you like that? the cantor told his wife Taubele that evening. “I serve the most delectable dish, the Jewish sob, which is the sauce of hazzanut, and along comes my good friend and tells me that I wail,”  recalls Rosenblatt’s son Samuel in a hagiographic but thoroughly entertaining account of his father’s life, published in 1954. All along, Rosenblatt’s migrations were spurred by a growing need for money. If feeding his seven children wasn’t enough, he had to consider his seven older sisters, whose dowries had become his responsibility. (As the biggest earner in a quite poor family, he had taken the responsibility onto himself.) He’d become the continent’s most celebrated cantor, but his congregation’s repeated refusals to grant him a raise left him dispirited. Then, one day in 1912, two visitors from abroad approached him with an unbelievable offer.

Jewish New York was in the midst of a flowering of theater, poetry, and the mighty Yiddish press. Columnists debated the merits of the city’s swelling ranks of celebrity cantors, who enjoyed renown outside the temple as cultural heroes, and when Rosenblatt arrived In New York he was received like a long-awaited heavyweight. (You can watch Reb Yossele and a gallery of his most daunting rivals in their mind-boggling primes on Great Cantors of the Golden Age, a fascinating new DVD.) He settled in Harlem, home to many of the city’s prominent Jews, not far from the Hungarian congregation Ohab Zedek, whose members had lured him with the unheard-of salary of $2,400. Including tips, his annual take exceeded $5,000, making him the world’s highest-paid Jewish cleric. Taubele loathed New York, with its gutter speech and lack of manners, but Rosenblatt loved its wide-open possibilities. He became a United States citizen at the earliest opportunity and named his first American-born child Ralph. His showmanship was never curtailed again, and when he officiated at Ohab Zedek, the congregation often burst into applause mid-service, in blatant violation of orthodox tradition. Nothing if not industrious, Rosenblatt embarked on a vastly productive recording career, signing a contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company and later doing dozens of sessions for Okeh, Columbia, and RCA, a practice that proved all the more remunerative because most of the compositions were his own. More controversial among the faithful were his unprecedented appearances at Carnegie Hall and on other concert stages with a repertoire that eventually included folk songs and romantic arias sung in a half-dozen languages.

During his two decades in America, Rosenblatt’s negotiation of the sometimes porous line between the religious and the worldly was followed with minute interest in the Yiddish dailies. He made headlines around the world in 1918 by turning down an opportunity to appear in the Chicago Opera’s production of Halevy’s La Juive opposite the Odessa-born soprano Rosa Raisa, an offer that came with a guarantee of $1,000 per night (the offer was later doubled), kosher meals, and Saturdays off. “I have certainly no desire to obtain glory for myself, Rosenblatt told a reporter, “at the hands of aristocratic non-Jews who might come to the opera to see for themselves how a Jew forsakes his God and forswears his religion and his people on account of money. Years later, when Warner Brothers executives arrived at his door promising a hundred thousand dollars to play the role of Al Jolson’s father in The Jazz Singer, Hollywood’s first talkie, Rosenblatt said no again, though he later appeared in the film as himself in a brief recital. He was less adamant about ventures that didn’t involve makeup and acting. In addition to commanding astonishing fees for officiating on high holidays–he received $25,000 for chanting the midnight Selichos with a choir of 35 in front of 3,000 Jews at Chicago’s Wigwam–his appetite for performing outside the temple was both voracious and catholic. He sang on the steps of The New York Public Library to help hawk war bonds, pitched in for Irish Easter Relief, entertained at Sing Sing prison, and lent his voice to a benefit for striking tailors at Madison Square Garden.

But by the mid 1920s, an investment in a failed Yiddish newspaper had bankrupted Rosenblatt. The crisis pushed him onto the vaudeville stage, a place that many among the Orthodox considered undignified and possibly blasphemous. The cantor took it in stride. Billed as “The Man With the $50,000 Beard, he toured the nation by train, entertaining at movie theaters between showings of Westerns and comedies. At a typical stop, at the Pantages Theater in San Francisco, he sang “Mother Machree between screenings of Broken Hearts in Hollywood, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Louise Dresser. His opening act was “child memory marvel Dodo Reid. Rosenblatt felt at home in front of the mostly gentile audiences. He goofed on stage with Will Rogers and Sophie Tucker, dropped in on Caruso and Charlie Chaplin, and even had time for pranks, like the time he belted out Irving Berlin’s “When You and I Were Seventeen with Tito Schipa, the bel canto tenor, in an alley behind a Chicago auditorium. And when Irish tenor John MacCormack greeted him onstage in Chattanooga with “Hello, Jewish MacCormack,”  the cantor shot back, “Hello, Irish Rosenblatt.”

He’d become the world’s most renowned Jewish entertainer and one of its highest-paid performers. He toured Europe twice and even swung through South America; on stateside tour stops, a police escort accompanied Rosenblatt to his hotel. But soon the talkies would obliterate vaudeville, while the secularization of America’s Jews was slowly dimming the lights on the golden age of hazzanut. While on an initial visit to Palestine, where he was working on a Zionist documentary and had decided to relocate, Rosenblatt died of coronary thrombosis in 1933. He was nearly destitute. The best of Rosenblatt’s roughly 200 sides bequeath recordings every bit as eternal as The Carter Family’s, as willfully uncompromising as Uncle Dave Macon’s, and as original as Sidney Bechet’s. Alongside them Reb Yossele presides over the joyous, weird celestial banquet of America’s musical forefathers, whistling a benediction for the ages.

Jeremiah Lockwood earned his musical chops playing the New York subway circuit with blues musician Carolina Slim. He was thirteen when they first collaborated.

But Lockwood’s music training stretches much further back. As a child, he regularly listened to the musical recordings of his grandfather, Jacob Konigsberg, a renowned cantor from Cleveland. Later, his grandfather began teaching Lockwood his interpretations of traditional prayers. Now, Lockwood is featuring that music in his fusion jazz-rock-klezmer band, The Sway Machinery.

He talks with us about his grandfather’s pedagogical method, the Sway’s innovations, and the connections between chazzanut and the blues.