As the 20th century reached its midpoint, tunesmiths moved elsewhere. (The Brill Building, famously home to later generations of songwriters, is just north of Times Square.) Old buildings came down while new ones went up, and our portion of West 28th is now a bustling commercial hodge-podge bookended by the flower district to the west and the perfume district to the east. To learn more about our new neighborhood—where Emma Goldman founded her anarchist magazine, too, and Zero Mostel had a painting studio—Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke to Jim Mackin, a New York City historian and tour guide, about West 28th Street, how specialized commercial districts come into being, and Irving Berlin’s first big hit. [Running time: 16:17.]

But think of the music Sachs leaves out. What do we do with George Gershwin and Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, with the songs belted out by Fanny Brice in the Ziegfeld Follies or Lou Reed at Max’s Kansas City—the whole messy sprawl of 20th-century American pop music history, which, from I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” to I’ve Gotta Be Me” to “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)” has been inflected by the Jewish genius for passing and pastiche? And where, for that matter, does it leave Serge Gainsbourg, Israeli techno, Jonathan Richman, Yo La Tengo, or Ofra Haza? Or ”Hanukkah in Santa Monica”?

Perhaps a better answer to the Jewish musical conundrum is a famous quip. The story goes that the composer Jerome Kern and the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II were discussing the possibility of a musical based on the life of Marco Polo. Hammerstein said to Kern, “Here is a story laid in China about an Italian and told by Irishman. What kind of music are you going to write?” Kern replied, “It’ll be good Jewish music.”

Here, then, is our list of the 100 Greatest Jewish Songs. Some were created by Jews, as Jews, for Jews. Some are by Jews pretending to be gentiles—or by gentiles pretending to be Jews. If history has taught us anything, it’s that Jewish music is a dizzyingly broad and fluid category, encompassing an extraordinary range of sounds and styles and ideas and themes, from the sacred to the secular—from the normatively Jewish to the Jew-ish to the seemingly not-at-all-Jewish. Our list includes a bit of everything: sacred songs and synagogue staples and Yiddish ballads and Broadway showstoppers. There’s even some disco and hip-hop. All of them are great songs—and good Jewish music.

CLICK HERE TO SEE A LIST OF THE 100 SONGS ON ONE PAGE.

1. “Over the Rainbow” (1939)

In 1900, L. Frank Baum wrote a strange, 259-page novel about a Kansas farm girl who travels to a magical land. Critics couldn’t help reading it as a Gilded Age political allegory, but Baum insisted it was simply a children’s fairytale. Thirty-nine years later, a movie mogul hired a pair of Tin Pan Alley pros—a cantor’s son from Buffalo and a Lower East Side lefty—to write a theme song for the novel’s film adaptation. The result was a grandly orchestrated echt-Hollywood ballad, crooned by the movie’s 16-year-old starlet to a little black doggie on a barnyard set filled with clucking chickens.

And it was the most beautiful Jewish exilic prayer ever set to music.

In formal terms, “Over the Rainbow” is flawless, lit up by Harold Arlen’s luscious chromaticism and startling octave leaps. Yip Harburg’s lyrics are a triumph of artful artlessness: “Somewhere over the rainbow/ Way up high/ There’s a land that I heard of/ Once in a lullaby.” Call that land Oz, if you’d like. Or call it Israel. (For that matter, call it Miami Beach or Shaker Heights or the Upper West Side.) Any way you slice it, the story “Over the Rainbow” tells is the oldest Jewish story of them all: There’s no place like home. (JR)

2. “Hava Nagila” (1918)

Harry Belafonte has sung it. So has Chubby Checker and the Boss. Dick Dale shredded it; Lionel Hampton swung it. It’s been Latinized, technoized, and Bollywoodized. It’s the Little Freylekh That Could—the Jewish party song that belongs to the world.

The history of “Hava Nagila” is shadowy. The tune is thought to have originated in 18th- or 19th-century Eastern Europe as a niggun, or mystical musical prayer, possibly among the Sadigorer Hasidic sect. By 1915, the melody had migrated to Palestine, where it was transcribed by the musicologist and folklorist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, who was then serving as a bandmaster in the Ottoman Army. Three years later, he played the song in a concert commemorating the British victory over the Turks. Idelsohn added a Hebrew text based on some biblical verses, and “Hava Nagila” was born.

To millions who know no better, “Hava Nagila” is Jewish music. Of course no musical culture, particularly one as rich and variegated as ours, can be represented by a single tune. Still, it’s hard to imagine another song doing the job so well. Like all great dance music, “Hava Nagila” puts the emphasis on joy and community—on the ecstatic fellowship forged by an infectious tune and insistent beat. “Hava nagila, hava nagila/ Hava nagila ve-nismeha/ Hava neranena, hava neranena/ Hava neranena ve-nismeha” (Let us rejoice, let us rejoice/ Let us rejoice and be glad/ Let us sing, let us sing/ Let us sing and be glad).” That’s not a half-bad philosophy of music or, for that matter, of life. (JR)

3. “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965)

U.S. Highway 61, wrote Bob Dylan in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One, “begins about where I came from,” stretching from southern Minnesota, near Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, to New Orleans. “Highway 61 Revisited” begins a bit further afield. “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’/ Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on,’ ” Dylan sings in the opening measures, as the song settles into a bluesy lope.

As always with Dylan, it’s impossible to untangle the strands of autobiography, mythology, and carnival barker gibberish. Many commentators have pointed out that Dylan’s own father was an Abraham—Abe Zimmerman—and that the songwriter’s retelling of the binding of Isaac may have personal resonance. But what is a Dylanologist to make of Georgia Sam, Mack the Finger, Louie the King, and the other cartoon characters that populate the song? And what about the burst of biblical mumbo-jumbo in the song’s fourth verse?:

Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren’t right
My complexion she said is much too white
He said come here and step into the light he says hmm you’re right
Let me tell the second mother this has been done
But the second mother was with the seventh son
And they were both out on Highway 61

As always with Dylan, the meaning is blowing in the wind. What’s unmistakable in “Highway 61 Revisited” is the tone. Delivering Old Testament imagery and cosmic jokes in his most exaggerated nasal drawl, Dylan is part-prophet, part-provocateur, part-badchen, and full-time blabbermouth. In other words: He’s just so Jewish. (JR)

4. “Kol Nidre” (13th century)

It’s the “Stairway to Heaven” of Jewish liturgical music; just about anyone who has ever recorded a Jewish album or led a congregation in prayer has toyed with the idea of recording his or her own version of the annual Yom Kippur eve negation of vows.

The text is vexing, saying basically that one is not responsible for the vows one makes. Not surprisingly, it inspired centuries of anti-Semitic speculation about the shiftiness and general untrustworthiness of Jews in business. Jewish tradition suggests that it was written for Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity who might be looking for a legal loophole through which they could reclaim their connection to Judaism. Still, it’s a strange way to begin the Day of Atonement, when one is supposed to take serious stock of one’s shortcomings, not try to explain away one’s inability to make good on promises.

But it’s the music that really matters. Anti-Semites and Conversos aside, nobody comes to synagogue on Yom Kippur because they believe in those words—they come to hear that unmistakable opening cadence. Unlike much of liturgical music, Kol Nidre has no single known author. Musicologists suggest that Kol Nidre is less a proper composition than a mashup cobbled together from a number of different Jewish liturgical and folk motifs. Nevertheless, the melody of that first line is as heart-aching and moving as any melody in any liturgical tradition. Ever. (AYK)

5. “Hatikvah” (1888)

The Jewish national anthem was in wide circulation well before it unofficially became the Israeli national anthem in 1948. Part of a much longer poem written in 1878 by Naphtali Herz Imber, the text was shortened and adapted a few different times by early Zionist settlers before it became the anthem of political Zionism, concluding with the line: “To be a free nation in our land/ The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

The melody, however, took a slightly more roundabout route on its way to Jerusalem. Samuel Cohen, its composer, said that he adapted the melody from a Romanian folk song, “Carul cu boi.” The song’s central motif can be heard there, and it can also be heard in the Italian madrigal “La Mantovana,” and again in Czech composer Bedrich Smetana’s “Ma Vlast,” his ode to Bohemia.

The song’s resonance lies somewhere between the obvious folk roots of the melody and the haughty and explicitly Jewish political aspirations of the lyrics: Critics hear Zionism-as-colonialism in the non-Jewish folk roots of the melody; Zionists hear the in-gathering of Jewish exiles echoing in the combination of notes.

Everyone else might just hear the unreconciled struggle between the two. It’s still an anthem, but one of a different kind—in some ways, it’s an anthem that captures the contradictions of modern nationalism rather than the bombastic heroism of rockets red glare. (AYK)

6. “My Mammy” (1918)

Before Frank Sinatra, before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson, the 20th century’s first pan-media “rock star.” With his dynamic stage act and rafter-rattling voice, he was for millions of fans the embodiment of pop modernity—the poster boy for ragtime, which was unmooring America from its Victorian past one raucous song at a time. But Jolson was not just a New American; he was vividly, unapologetically a Jewish American, with a fearless devotion to schmaltz and a “tear in a voice,” his birthright as a cantor’s son.

He was also, infamously, history’s most famous practitioner of blackface minstrelsy. Today, we are rightly repulsed by Jolson’s blackface act. But to shunt Jolson to history’s margins is to betray history. Listening to his signature song, “My Mammy”—the 1918 hit that he reprised in the landmark first film talkie, The Jazz Singer—we confront the sheer weirdness of pop music’s early days, when beauty and vulgarity, Jewish immigrant striving and primordial American racism were inextricably enmeshed. Jolson was a pop vocal genius whose art most majestically took flight when he slathered his white skin with burnt cork, affected a broad “darky” accent, and belted out an Oedipal ode to his little old Jewish mother. It’s not a comfortable story, but it’s a true one. (JR)

7. “Shema Yisrael” (19th century)

“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The English translation of this central prayer leeches the deep spirituality of the original Hebrew—which powerfully asserts that all is unified, connected, related, intertwined, one. It’s about as close to a theo-national pledge of allegiance as we get.

It’s been crammed into mezuzot and tefilin, and—apart from Tzvika Pik’s 1972 uptempo version (shunned by many for being too poppy for prayer)—it has, to Ashkenazic Jews, only one melody.

Many treat that melody as if it had been handed down to Moses at Mount Sinai along with the lyrics. In fact, written grandly in 3/4 time by the Austrian cantor Salomon Sulzer, it’s from the early 19th century. Sulzer is credited with helping to modernize Jewish worship by introducing a choir and a handful of other updates to suit his Viennese congregation.

As it’s sung by millions of Jews across the world, it sounds a little uptight, even when belted with big gusts of meditation-y breaths punctuating the text. But the irony is that what now sounds uptight was once considered both radical and modern, an exalted sentiment set to a Viennese waltz. In this way Pik’s 1972 version was just doing what Sulzer did 150 years earlier, giving the “watchword of our faith” a little sonic makeover. And what’s so bad about a little syncopation in the face of the unity of everything? (AYK)

8. “White Christmas” (1942)

“Not only is it the best song I ever wrote,” said Irving Berlin when he finished writing “White Christmas,” “it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.” There’s certainly a lot in it. Its dreamy scenery belongs to the same tradition as Currier and Ives’ wintry landscapes and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The melodicism is pure Broadway and Hollywood sophistication, but the maudlin sentiments—that vision of snow-blanketed yuletides “just like the ones I used to know”—has deeper, homelier roots, drawing on Stephen Foster’s antebellum nostalgia and Victorian parlor ballads, and ladling some Jewish schmaltz over the top.

“White Christmas” was released in the middle of World War II, in November 1942, the first Christmas season that American troops spent overseas. It stirred such homesickness that it became the definitive pop hit of the war—a “why we fight” song that never mentioned the fight. And that was just the beginning of its success. It’s doubtful any song has generated more total record sales. Bing Crosby’s definitive version stood as the top-selling pop single for more than a half-century.

Tonally “White Christmas” stands apart from the cheeriness of most Christmas songs: It’s as dark and blue as it is “merry and bright.” Some have attributed this plaintive quality to Berlin’s Jewishness—to the seasonal melancholy of a man doomed to view the holiday from a distance. But “White Christmas” is sneakier than that. “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin … ‘White Christmas,’ ” wrote Philip Roth in Operation Shylock. “If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!” (JR)

9. “Be My Baby” (1963)

It starts, literally, with a bang: the thunderclap rumble of Hal Blaine’s drumbeat, among the most famous opening salvos in rock ‘n’ roll. That’s just the beginning of the bombast, as hand claps, castanets, swooping strings, braying brass, and background vocals pile on, inflating the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” into something like pop Wagner.

Of course, it isn’t Wagnerian—it’s Spectorian. Phil Spector, a diminutive studio geek from the Bronx, was 23 years old in 1963 when he co-composed “Be My Baby” with two Jews from Brooklyn, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. To realize Spector’s “Wall of Sound” vision took weeks of rehearsal, 42 studio takes, and saintly patience on the part of lead singer Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett, who would marry Spector later that year. On paper, the song’s sentiments are insipid: “Won’t you please/ Be my little baby?/ Say you’ll be my darlin’/ Be my baby now.” But bolstered by a rousing melody and the full fathom force of Spector’s production, they become sublime, proof that a 3-minute-long declaration of puppy love can be as overwhelming—sonically, emotionally, spiritually—as any symphony. (JR)

10. “I Got Rhythm” (1930)

As American credos go, the Gershwin brothers’ most famous chorus is hard to top: “I got rhythm/ I got music/ I got my girl/ Who could ask for anything more?” For declarative brashness, it’s right up there with “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” And it’s got a more danceable beat.

Composed in 1928, “I Got Rhythm” became a hit in the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, thanks in no small part to the performance by Ethel Merman, just 22 years old but already a human wind turbine. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics are a study in compression and pithy interior rhymes. (“Ol’ Man Trouble/ I don’t mind him/ You won’t find him/ ’Round my door.”) But it was George’s chord progression, soon to be known simply as “rhythm changes,” that made the song musical holy writ, the basis of countless jazz songs in the swing and bebop eras. (JR)

There is, of course, another striking fact about this creation story, and about the whole history of the modern musical as Stempel tells it. This Midwestern epic, which seemed to capture the country’s most idealized image of itself—this story about cowboys and farmers, with names like Curly and Laurey and Jud—was being created in New York City by two Jews, with names like Hammerstein and Rogazinsky (Anglicized to Rodgers by the composer’s grandfather). No wonder they felt the importance of “integration” so keenly: What was Oklahoma! if not a triumph of integration, not just artistic but social and psychological? (David Lehman makes a similar point in Nextbook Press’s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.)

Stempel does not tell the history of the Broadway musical as a Jewish story, and of course it is not simply a Jewish story. It is also a black story, and an Irish story, and a gay story, which is another way of saying that it is an American story. For Stempel, it all begins in the mid-19th century, when shows like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Black Crook combined theatrical spectacle, moral uplift, and frank eroticism to create a new kind of popular sensation. All of these elements, Stempel shows, would remain at the core of Broadway’s DNA, and the tension among them was the force propelling the musical’s rapid evolution. Throughout its history, the people who made shows and the people who watched them would debate the proper proportions of sophistication and vulgarity; but the best musicals have always had at least some of each. Try to make the musical a purely artistic form, and you end up with shows like Porgy and Bess or Candide or Assassins—all of which flopped on their first appearance and have lived subsequently in opera houses or on cast albums, not on Broadway.

Shows devoid of any artistic ambition, on the other hand, have made their money and disappeared. Today, the songs that Cole Porter and the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hart wrote for Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s are “standards,” constituting the American Songbook. But no one revives the shows themselves, which were too silly and dispensable to last. How many people who know the Gershwins’ yearning love song “Lady Be Good” know anything about the show in which it appeared, Lady, Be Good!, which ran for 10 months in 1924-25? Stempel is one of the rare ones, and his summary of the show explains the problem: “a brother-sister team of vaudevillians become ever more deeply entangled in high society … until the heroine saves her brother from penury and a loveless marriage by impersonating a Mexican heiress.” The original would have been worth seeing, since it starred Fred and Adele Astaire, but no one is calling for a revival.

That marks the main difference between Broadway before Oklahoma! and Broadway after Oklahoma!. It is the shows of the Golden Age, from the 1940s through the 1960s, that are still cherished and revived. Rodgers and Hammerstein followed their breakthrough with Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Porter wrote the music for Kiss Me, Kate, and Irving Berlin for Annie Get Your Gun; Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Brigadoon. Then there’s West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy, and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, to name just a few of the biggest hits. Reading Stempel’s accounts of these shows and the people who made them—he focuses mainly on the writers, with occasional sidelights on important producers and directors—leaves no doubt that the Broadway musical was one of the great phases of American popular culture, like jazz before it and rock and roll afterward.

This Golden Age is usually said to have come to an end with Fiddler on the Roof, by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, which premiered in 1964 and ran on Broadway for an astonishing seven years. Is it a coincidence that this show, the most explicitly Jewish musical ever written, is the one that marked the end of an era? Writing about Fiddler, Stempel comes as close as he ever does to wondering about the Jewishness of the Broadway musical as a form:

Not only were Jews as a group involved in virtually all aspects of Broadway show business—creating, producing, disseminating, and consuming shows—but Broadway culture itself was regularly perceived as somehow Jewish in character. Indeed, the “disproportionate” Jewish presence in, on, and around Broadway altogether became a topic of interest in many discussions of twentieth-century American popular culture.

The cautious quotation marks around “disproportionate” are understandable—here, as in discussions of Hollywood, the observation that Jews have a large role in creating American culture can sometimes lead to ugly suggestions that they have too large a role. But the proportion of Jews among the makers of Broadway’s Golden Age is more than striking: Of the shows mentioned above, all but one were written by Jews. (The exception is Kiss Me, Kate, with music by Cole Porter. It is a nice example of Broadway’s alchemy that Porter, a WASP born in Indiana, became the most urbane and sophisticated, the most quintessentially “New York,” of all Broadway composers.)

It would be interesting to know what proportion of the Broadway audience, in the years 1940-1970, was also Jewish. Stempel is generally uninterested in economic and demographic questions—he is writing about the works of Broadway, not how Broadway works—and there may be no way of finding out the answer. But it is noteworthy that Broadway’s Golden Age coincided exactly with the period of American Jews’ rise into the middle class and the professions, and with the migration of New York’s Jews from the Lower East Side and Brooklyn to Long Island and Westchester—the prosperous suburbs, from which they could return for dinner and a show in Times Square.

Seeing Broadway’s classics as shows written by Jews for a largely Jewish audience does not make them parochial, or restrict their appeal to American and, indeed, international audiences. (When Fiddler went to Tokyo, Stempel writes, a Japanese producer asked the book-writer, Joseph Stein, “whether they actually understood Fiddler on the Roof in America,” because “it’s so Japanese!”) But it’s possible that, again as with Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals had such a universal appeal precisely because they were the product of Jews imagining their way into American life—a kind of imagining with worldwide resonance in the American century.

Certainly it is striking how many of the Golden Age musicals deal with exactly the subjects that most concerned American Jews in the postwar era, when the aftermath of the Holocaust and the early Civil Rights Movement put Jews at the forefront of struggles for racial and social justice. From Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, with its anti-racist anthem “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” to West Side Story, with its vision of love struggling against prejudice, to Finian’s Rainbow, in which a leprechaun turns a racist Southern senator into a black man, the Broadway musical was drawn to a liberal vision of integration and brotherhood.

That this vision, and the music that expressed it, were never too challenging or too adventurous—that the musical happily used leprechauns to make a point about tolerance—is a reminder that Broadway was always a business first, and the musical always a popular art. If it is no longer very popular today—if jukebox musicals and mega-spectacles have left only a little space for good original shows (like the recent Grey Gardens)—this is not necessarily because, as the usual charge sheet has it, the writers of musicals have retreated into a Sondheimesque intellectuality and abrasiveness. Near the end of the book, Stempel quotes Jason Robert Brown, one of the acclaimed but not quite popular composers hailed as “Sondheim’s children”: “A commercially successful show is, by some definitions, a better work.” On Broadway, Showtime makes clear, a masterpiece isn’t a masterpiece unless it’s a hit.

Rufus Wainwright opened the show, in the Allen Room at Lincon Center, with its wall of windows overlooking Columbus Circle and Central Park, with a soulful rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” He was backed by a 14-piece band, playing sultry nightclub arrangements of a dozen pop standards behind not just Wainwright but also Shannon McNally, Jenni Muldaur, Van Dyke Parks, and Christine Olmann, who brought the house down belting a loungey arrangement of Arlen and Koehler’s “Stormy Weather” in a flowing pink ’60s dress and a towering bouffant of blonde hair.

But even bigger names played, too. Sting proved himself a master of the songbook, delivering plaintive, moving renditions of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Love Is Here to Stay” and, later, “”Someone to Watch Over Me.” And none other than Lou Reed showed up to close the show with a hard-rocking, guitar-and-drums-heavy take on Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “One For My Baby (and One More For the Road).”

All photos by Dese’Rae Stage:

Wainwright with David Lehman, author of the Nextbook Press book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.

Photos from “I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues?” Music and readings from A Fine Romance, at The Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th Street, New York City.

“I Gotta Right To Sing the Blues?”—a concert inspired by Lehman’s book, produced by Hal Willner, and starring Rufus Wainwright and others—takes place tomorrow night at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center.

American Classics With a Yiddish Accent [Soundcheck]
A Fine Romance [Nextbook Press]

Related: Lehman serves up an American songbook playlist

A Fine Romance

Brian Wilson’s New Partner: George Gershwin [NYT]

“The Lady is a Tramp,” music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart. It’s probably my favorite Rodgers and Hart song—though there’s a lot of competition, and it’s fierce. “The Lady is a Tramp” is a perfect example of Hart’s wit on the one side and Rodgers’s gift for up-tempo melodies on the other. Hart’s irony is such that not everyone who loves this great song presumes to understand it, so here’s a quick primer: the song defies the classy “lady” by listing some of the ways she defies convention and stereotype—and thus is a “tramp” in the eyes of fakes and phonies. She is a down-home gal, happy with common things—the rowing in Central Park lake, the beach at Coney Island—who disdains slumming and idle gossip: “Won’t go to Harlem in ermine and pearls, / Won’t dish the dirt with the rest of the girls.” The Frank Sinatra version from his 1957 record A Swingin’ Affair (or from the soundtrack of the 1957 movie Pal Joey) is the preferred choice here.

“Nice Work If You Can Get It,” music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. One of two joyous Gershwin and Gershwin songs that punctuate their celebration of love with the same rhetorical question: “Who can ask for anything more?” (The other song is “I Got Rhythm.”) I have a particular affection for Mel Torme’s version, which he recorded with the Marty Paich “Dek-Tette” in November 1956. Torme sings the verse—usually given at the start of the song—in the middle, as a second bridge. It contains Ira Gershwin’s immortal couplet: “The only work that really bring enjoyment / Is the kind that is for girl and boy meant.”

“All the Things You Are,” music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. There are so many fine renditions it’s hard to know which to recommend: Helen Forrest’s voice mingling sexily with Artie Shaw’s clarinet in 1939; Sinatra reaching vocal heights on a V-disc in 1944; Beverly Sills pouring forth like Keats’s nightingale in 1973; the late John McGlinn giving it the full operatic treatment on his Broadway Showstoppers album of 1993. “Popular songs are subject to constant interpretation,” as Mel Torme has noted, and “All the Things You Are” works as a big-band tune, a pretext for bop improvisation, a ballad, an aria, or a big chorus number developing out a duet. Many consider it the all-time greatest love song. What makes it such? The soaring melody, the harmonic complexities and daring shifts of key, the marriage of the music and the words, the lyrics that express longing and epitomize the ode in praise of one’s sought-for partner. Hammerstein wasn’t very proud of “that moment divine” toward the end: “Someday I’ll know that moment divine / When all the things you are, / Are mine.” The need to rhyme forced the inversion of usual word order. Yet somehow even this poetical outburst enhances the sublime effect.

“Stormy Weather,” music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ted Koehler. When Arlen and Koehler wrote and played their songs as house musicians for the Cotton Club in Harlem, they created such standards as “Get Happy,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” In “Stormy Weather,” they came up with the signature songs of two great singers, Lena Horne and Ethel Waters. It is a lament for a lost love, but it has an unusual spiritual quality. “All I do is pray / The Lord above will let me / Walk in that sun once more.” The music manages to make you feel the sadness of the moment and the promise of that moment redeemed. “Stormy Weather” is at or near the top of meteorological love songs, a surprisingly populous category.

“Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Every time you think that you can sum up Irving Berlin—with his “simplicity” and his “common touch” and his unabashed sentimentality—along comes a song of such melodic complexity and melancholy mood that makes you understand why George Gershwin likened Berlin to Franz Schubert. “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” from 1936, is a song very much of its moment: dark days of bankruptcy and unemployment, with threatening signals of strife to come in Europe. The song is both an invitation to the dance and a variant on the theme of carpe diem: “There may be trouble ahead, / But while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance,” what else can we do but “face the music”—in a double sense—“and dance.” Fred Astaire sings it to Ginger Rogers in Follow the Fleet (1936).

“Over the Rainbow,” music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Yip Harburg. “Over the Rainbow” as sung by the teenage Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939) tops most all-time lists of favorite songs in Hollywood movies. The Technicolor vision of Oz that commences after Garland sings the song in black-and-white occurs not only as a magical answer to her vast yearning prayer but as an allegorical representation of the fantasized end of the Depression. If, following the song from the soundtrack, you listen to Judy sing “Over the Rainbow” in her famous Carnegie Hall concert of April 23, 1961, you’ll enrich your experience of this most famous of Arlen’s songs.

“There’s No Business Like Show Business,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Originally, Jerome Kern was commissioned to write Annie Get Your Gun. When Kern died in 1945, the producers turned to Irving Berlin, who wrote a major score in half the usual time. A peerless mix of humor and sentiment, its anthem, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” quickly became the ultimate Broadway anthem. (Its most formidable competition is “That’s Entertainment” by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz.) Berlin’s song will always be associated with Ethel Merman, queen of the ladies who can belt to the back row without no need of artificial magnification. There’s a 1954 Hollywood movie called There’s No Business Like Show Business starring Merman, Donald O’Connor, Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Gaynor, Johnny Ray, and Dan Dailey: all Berlin songs, and when everyone assembles to do the title number, you’ll want to sing along.

“A Fine Romance,” music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Ginger Rogers sings it to Fred Astaire, but the version I fell in love with is Billie Holiday’s from the 1930s. It’s a sarcastic love song. We may be used to the genre of the lover’s complaint, but it usually comes from the man, and this one is from the female point of view and has a top-drawer Dorothy Fields lyric, “You’re calmer than the seals in the Arctic Ocean. / At least they flap their fins to express emotion.”

“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Leo Robin. Carol Channing performed this song from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes superbly on stage, and Channing’s remains the definitive version, though Marilyn Monroe’s seductive delivery in the movie leaves little to be desired. Jule Styne is a master of the big brassy Broadway number and Leo Robin’s lyrics are unbeatably witty and smart. The triple rhymes come at you fast: a guy may think you’re “awful nice/ but get that ‘ice’ or else no dice.” Never has the adult male aptitude for irresponsible philandering been stated with such melodious gusto: “He’s your guy / When stocks are high, / But beware when they start to descend. / It’s then that those louses / Go back to their spouses.”

“I Can’t Get Started,” music by Vernon Duke, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. It’s that evergreen story: I have conquered worlds but not, alas, your heart. The music is marvelous, and the lyric is an outstanding instance of the inventory as a lyrical form, listing the singer’s diverse accomplishments yet ruefully concluding that he (or she) is downhearted for the simple reason that “I can’t get started with you.” Ira Gershwin’s gift for polysyllabic rhyme is on heroic display: “Oh, tell me why / Am I no kick to you? / I, / Who’d always stick to you? / Fly / Through thin and thick to you? / Tell me why I’m taboo!” Frank Sinatra’s cover on the 1959 album No One Cares) wins my vote for capturing the song’s melancholy. But you might prefer the jovial duet of Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney under Billy May’s direction in August 1958.

On November 10, David Lehman will speak at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. To purchase tickets for this event, click here.

We’re not high-brows, we’re not low-brows,
Anyone can see
You don’t have to use a chart
To see we’re He-brows from the start. 

The Gershwins’ song remained unpublished for a decade after its composition. Today, it is rarely performed and all but forgotten.

“Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha” is unlikely to resurface on any of the 60 CDs that Naxos is set to release by spring 2005 as part of the budget label’s landmark recording deal with the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music. While a final list has yet to be released, the vast majority of the 600 featured works will be world premiere recordings—of symphonies, concertos and art songs (the usual Naxos fare) as well as Yiddish theatre music, cantorial singing, and liturgical music going all the way back to the Colonial era.

Early Milken CDs feature Kurt Weill, Joseph Achron (standing, with his brother Isidor), and Darius Milhaud.

Still, the Gershwins’ ditty crystallizes many of the challenges of the project—established in 1990 by philanthropist and investor Lowell Milken—which has thus far spent $17 million in an ambitious attempt to catalogue and record the “rich and diverse repertoire of music specifically related to the American Jewish experience.” There’s an awful lot of music “related to the American Jewish experience” out there. And notwithstanding the first offerings from Milken and Naxos, which began appearing in the fall, there are good reasons why much of it is obscure.

So far, the project has attracted little but praise for its efforts—at least publicly. The New York Times‘ Allan Kozinn lavished 2,500 words on a Milken-sponsored conference in November. In The Jewish Week, George Robinson claimed that the project had “taken a giant step towards reshaping the canon, not only of Jewish music but of American music.” But behind the scenes (and largely off the record), there’s been plenty of grumbling, especially by those who have cooperated with the Milken Archive or participated in its conferences. Some believe that certain branches of Jewish culture—particularly the Sephardic and Reform traditions—have been shortchanged by the archive’s organizers. For scholars, the project’s consumer appeal and vigorous cheerleading have undermined the careful scholarship necessary for a serious “archival” undertaking. Preserving the rich musical heritage of American Jewry, it’s clear, requires making difficult—and inevitably unpopular—choices about what’s worth preserving and how.

The man ultimately responsible for making these difficult choices is artistic director Neil W. Levin, a professor of Jewish music at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Before the establishment of the Milken Archive, Levin explains, “there was a lot of old music nobody had ever heard about before. Whole genres that were just not thought about: symphonies, piano concertos, and operas relating to Jewish experience directly. There are thousands of Yiddish lieder—art songs—that only a handful of people even knew about.”

Throughout history, much of the music created by American Jews existed ephemerally in the synagogue or on the stage. Take the case of Henry Jacobs, a choir director and prolific composer of synagogue music for Temple Sinai, in New Orleans. After Jacobs’ death in 1964, stacks of his musical manuscripts, none of them published, remained at the temple. “It was sitting in a room in the temple where the roof was leaking, and it was getting damaged,” says John Baron, a professor of music at Tulane University and co-author of the forthcoming Music in Jewish History and Culture. By the time Baron, who helped Milken arrange some local recordings, tried to move Jacobs’ music to a secure place, custodians had already thrown out all but a dozen pieces saved by the congregation’s organist.

Liturgical music is usually transmitted orally, so it can’t be discarded, but it is threatened by the passage of time, which can transform its character and substance. Contemporary melodies might be incorporated into some liturgies, only to be abandoned decades later for tunes of more recent vintage. This is partly why the archive has sponsored audio and video recordings of prayer services and concerts from New Orleans to Seattle to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, effectively taking snapshots of a musical form in perpetual flux.

Most of Milken’s resources, however, have been devoted to its partnership with Naxos, which represents, Levin says, the “core of the archive.” The early releases, as might be expected, have been heavily weighted towards highbrow classical music. “What we have recorded is overwhelmingly European-influenced art music, which takes as its basis many ancient Judaic themes,” says artist and repertoire advisor Paul Schwendener. “The Americas benefited disproportionately from the German late classical modernist tradition, because so many were forced over in the 1930s and 1940s.”

Some of these recordings have been illuminating and moving. Darius Milhaud’s Service Sacré is an expansive setting of the Sabbath morning service with additional prayers for Friday evening. Others, such as a promising disk of music by Joseph Achron (1886-1943), the Vilnius-born composer who aimed to create a Jewish national art music, seem rather forgettable. Concert-goers have had their ears assaulted for centuries by musical depictions of a sumptuous banquet hosted by Belshazzar, the last king of Babylon depicted in the Book of Daniel. Do we really need yet another ear-splitting, bombastic setting of Belshazzar’s feast? A previously unrecorded epic work by Kurt Weill, The Eternal Road, is tantalizing but incomplete, since only excerpts have been recorded. Taken together, this first wave seems more like a collection of curiosities than essential musical expressions.

The CDs of prayers from the Colonial period and Yiddish theater masterpieces are another story, but these recordings are as problematic as they are remarkable. Take the Yiddish songs: production scores from the early 20th century, if written down at all, have been lost, so the project was faced with the challenge of reimagining a lost sound. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, performers from the Lower East Side made thousands of studio recordings, but Levin is mostly dismissive of their efforts. “There were no recordings with a full theater pit orchestra,” he explains. The recordings that exist “use maybe three to five instruments, one of which would be a tuba, which would never have appeared in a pit orchestra.” Patrick Russ, who was responsible for the archive’s Yiddish theater orchestrations, has gone even further, declaring that there were “no surviving examples of Yiddish theater music except as it evolved into Fiddler on the Roof.”

Not surprisingly, the Milken recording sounds nothing like an old 78. The vocals are exciting and virtuosic, the melodies irresistible—and yet they are backed up by an orchestra that sounds more at home in Vienna’s Grosser Musikvereinssaal than on Second Avenue. In fact, on the Milken recording, it is the Vienna Chamber Orchestra that performs this most idiomatic expression of America’s musical vernacular.

Thus the Yiddish theater project has left some musicologists unsatisfied. Lorin Sklamberg, a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and lead vocalist for the Klezmatics, provided the Milken project with some historic recordings for research and is disappointed with the results. “The orchestra isn’t visceral enough,” he says. “If you’re trying to evoke a certain style of playing, then go to the trouble of doing it. If you’re going to go to the trouble to record these songs, then take a little more time, ask people who would actually know the difference, and see how it affects them. These songs are done a disservice by the setting they’re put in.”

“I am sure that these songs never ever sounded like they sound in the archive now,” says Edwin Seroussi, a Milken board member and the director of the Jewish Music Research Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “They were performed in the past by musicians that were probably out of tune, who didn’t know how to read music, who improvised, so of course the impression was different. But it would be silly to record the songs in a poor manner just to say that this is an authentic historical reconstruction.”

The question of authenticity has always bedeviled period performances. Back in the 1980s, at the dawn of the early music revival, Berkeley musicologist Richard Taruskin provoked a storm of controversy by suggesting that “historically correct” performances were far better understood as expressions of modern taste. Whatever one thinks of his argument, it should be clear that the Milken effort to preserve American Jewish musical culture comes bundled with some unspoken assumptions. From its concentration on classical music to its glistening reconstruction of Yiddish theater works, the archive has a tendency to apologize for the earthy character of American Jewish creativity, to smooth it over and make it more palatable for Lincoln Center audiences.

Perhaps it would be better to stop thinking about the project as an archive at all. Most archives strive to preserve and maintain historical artifacts and documents, many of which are crumbling or incomplete. The Milken Archive, on the other hand, has a much broader aim—to reconstruct the past, to airbrush its imperfections, and to publicize its efforts. And it is guided by a philosophy that seems to come straight out of Gershwin’s “Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha,” whose four highbrow violinists “may play low-brow in his privacy,” but take to the concert stage armed only with the works of Europe’s greatest classical composers. In short, it is an original creative project in its own right, inspired by the long and accomplished history of Jewish American composers of art music. By next year, when dozens more CDs will have been released, listeners and archivists will have a better idea of its historical significance.