Ari Y Kelman | Stanford University (original) (raw)

Papers by Ari Y Kelman

This article takes critical issue with the well-circulated but often misapplied term “soundscape.... more This article takes critical issue with the well-circulated but often misapplied term “soundscape.” Coined by Canadian composer Murray Schafer in his book “The Soundscape,” the term has become one of the keywords of sound studies, but in its wide circulation it has become disconnected from its original scholarly concept and used broadly to apply to nearly any sonic phenomenon. Scholars either misapply it or redefine it to suit their needs. This article is an attempt to trace an intellectual history or genealogy of the term, and to open a conversation about the term’s use, application, and utility for scholars of sound. This article draws on Schafer’s work in an attempt to ground the term in its own intellectual history, and then traces the use of the term in a variety of sound studies works. The term Ari Y. Kelman is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in Ame...

Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, 2009

Advancing the Learning Agenda in Jewish Education, 2018

Beyond Jewish Identity, 2019

Journal of Jewish Education, 2021

The New Jewish Leaders, 2011

Religion and American Culture, 2020

ABSTRACTThis article tracks changes in conceptions of American Jewish congregational prayer music... more ABSTRACTThis article tracks changes in conceptions of American Jewish congregational prayer music during the second half of the twentieth century, paying specific attention to the late 1960s and early 1970s. During those years, more than fifty albums of new American Jewish synagogue music were released. These drew on the sounds of folk and rock music, and they represented a shift from the sounds of classical cantorial synagogue music. These changes have largely been understood as a shift away from cantorial styles, which emphasized performance and virtuosity, and toward more accessible and more participatory forms of prayer. This article contributes to our understanding of the sounds of American Jewish prayer practices by attending to the larger discourses in which the musical changes were situated. By listening to the music, reading album liner notes, and contemporaneous writings about Jewish prayer music, we discover a shift in descriptions and expectations of how Jewish prayer ou...

Religion and American Culture, 2019

As a regular feature of Religion and American Culture, the editors invite scholars to comment fro... more As a regular feature of Religion and American Culture, the editors invite scholars to comment from different perspectives on an issue or problem central to the study of religion in its American context. The FORUM format is designed to foster the cross-disciplinary study of religion and American culture and to bring to the readers of the journal the latest thoughts of scholars on timely, substantial topics. Contributors to the FORUM are asked to present brief essays or "thought pieces" instead of carefully documented articles. This FORUM is a little different from those in the past. First, we decided to run a series of essays on a single topic through two issues in 2019. Second, we asked Ari Y. Kelman and Kathryn Lofton to serve as guest curators, assembling authors from different disciplines and perspectives to engage with a remarkable text from five decades ago, but with themes that still resonate today.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2016

American Jewish History, 2016

“Please open the gates for me. Please open the gates.” That’s how Shlomo Carlebach introduced him... more “Please open the gates for me. Please open the gates.” That’s how Shlomo Carlebach introduced himself to his audience at The Village Gate, the legendary Greenwich Village club where he performed on a number of occasions during the early 1960s. This beseeching, almost liturgical invitation opens his 1963 album, “Shlomo Carlebach: Live at the Village Gate,” and serves as an introduction to his version of Psalm 118: “Open the Gates of Righteousness / I long to enter and give thanks.” According to Carlebach, he wrote the melody for the song on his way to the performance, when he may well have been contemplating the connection between his music, its connection to sacred Jewish texts, and the music scene of the moment in New York’s Greenwich Village in which he had become an active participant as a singer, performer, composer, and somewhat marginal figure in the Folk Revival. In other words, Carlebach wasn’t necessarily talking about the club, but he might as well have been. Gates, after all, are places of admission and transformation. They open and close, they protect and they make possible. They are liminal places. Literal thresholds. They are places of tricksters and traders, of migrants and paupers and, in the legends of Jewish midrash and folklore, they are where the messiah, appropriately dressed as a vagabond changing the dressing on his wounds, will eventually be found. And, of course, gates, both closed and open, gesture to the Holocaust, a term barely more than decade old in 1962, its survivors trying to reconstitute their broken lives, and something about which was deeply embedded in

Contemporary Jewry, 2016

This article reviews the conceptual frameworks that have underscored the social scientific study ... more This article reviews the conceptual frameworks that have underscored the social scientific study of Jewish identity and experiments with a methodological and analytical approach that aims to respond to contemporary social trends. Beginning with a historical account of the concept's emergence in the study of American Jews, we consider the ways in which scholars and their research subjects have co-constructed the concept of Jewish identity. Based on our analysis of qualitative interviews with fifty-eight post-boomer American Jews, we propose that Jewish identity be understood primarily as a relational phenomenon that is constructed through social ties, rather than as a product of individual meaning-making or assessments of social impact. We set our exploratory findings in conversation with some of the most influential and widely cited qualitative studies of Jewish identity in the past to examine the implications of that conceptual shift for scholars and scholarship on Jewish identity in the 21st century. Keywords Identity Á Constructivist theory Á Jewish Á Post-boomer Á Narrative Á Qualitative Á American Á Social science He was the kind of guy who was always telling you what kind of guy he was.

Religious Education, 2016

Abstract This article examines student perceptions of religious Released Time Educational (RTE) p... more Abstract This article examines student perceptions of religious Released Time Educational (RTE) programming. Through interviews and surveys, we found that students made little distinction between public school attendance and RTE attendance and that many believed their RTE program to be part of their school. Moreover, many students found it to be a compelling and important element of their education, even though they also found it to be not very rigorous. The students’ impressions of their own schooling and education offer crucial insights into the ways in which students navigate their own education across church and state.

Choice Reviews Online, 2010

... introduction James Loeffler has argued that Gross provided a kind of lin-guistic bridge betwe... more ... introduction James Loeffler has argued that Gross provided a kind of lin-guistic bridge between Jewish novelists Abraham Cahan and Philip Roth, for the ways in which he rendered Yiddish syntax without Yiddish vocabulary.11 Cahan, known best in his capac-ity as the editor ...

American Jewish Year Book, 2014

The Pew Report most significant weakness is its conceptualization of the variety of ways in which... more The Pew Report most significant weakness is its conceptualization of the variety of ways in which people understand and define Jewishness. With an overabundance of terms for religion and a paucity of terms for other registers for understanding Jewish life, the Report limits its own ability to adequately account for the lives of American Jews.

Contemporary Jewry, 2010

Are non-Orthodox American Jews growing more distant from Israel? That question indeed is the cent... more Are non-Orthodox American Jews growing more distant from Israel? That question indeed is the central issue in this exchange of views between our friends and colleagues-Ted Sasson, Charles Kadushin, and Len Saxe-and ourselves. Their scholarly contribution above presents their response to their reading of our Beyond Distancing (Cohen and Kelman 2007). In that report, one that we prepared for the larger lay public rather than an academic audience, we presented results from our 2007 national survey of American Jews. The Distancing Phenomenon: The Evidence, the Explanation Our survey analysis delineated several pieces of evidence pointing to diminished attachment to Israel among younger Jews. ''In sharp contrast to their parents and grandparents, non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders.'' Our survey contained numerous measures of Israel attachment leading us to claim that the age-variations are not the result of a peculiarity in one or another measure of Israel attachment. Rather, drawing upon many survey questions, we discerned a deep-seated, and broad-based gap in Israel attachment between old and young. The following graphs illustrate our findings: