Where has all the Jewish music gone?

By , September 4, 2009 2:25 pm

JSARS logoWhere has all the Jewish music gone?  Ever wondered what happened to all the Jewish music of days gone by?  Voices of the great cantors of the past.  Music from Yiddish theater. The Judaica Sound Archives may not have all the old Jewish music, but with tens of thousands of audio recordings it is well on its way.

The Judaica Sound Archives – Research Station (JSA-RS) was developed at FAU Libraries to provide a digital resource of recorded sound, containing tens of thousands of audio tracks from the archival collection of the JSA. The original source materials available through the JSA Research Station are 78 rpm recordings produced as early as 1901, LPs, 45 rpm recordings, cassette and 8-track tapes, and CDs.

Along with this wealth of audio recordings, JSA Research Stations allow access to discography and other pertinent information such as label and jacket scans which will greatly enhance a researcher’s ability to study this material. This includes the ability to search for and see listings of all recordings in the JSA archives, whether or not they have been digitized. Therefore, faculty and other researchers can conduct real-time, online research using the JSA-Research Station. Currently the JSA-Research Station accesses 19,000 songs from 2,000 different audio albums and 2,322 songs originally recorded on 78rpm. This library will be expanded throughout the coming year.

There are now 13 official JSA-Research Station sites in the USA, Canada, Israel and England. They are:

  • American Jewish University Library, Bel Air, CA
  • Florida Atlantic Univesrity, Wimberly Library, Boca Raton FL
  • Gratz College Library, Melrose Park, PA (near Philadelphia)
  • Hebrew Union College Library, New York City, NY
  • Jewish Music Institute Library and School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, London, England
  • Jewish Public Library of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
  • National Library of Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
  • National Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA
  • Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago, IL
  • University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
  • University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA
  • University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
  • Washington University of St. Louis, St. Louis, MO

2 Responses to “Where has all the Jewish music gone?”

  1. Bill Barabash says:

    I understand that copyright laws prevent you from streaming the entire music collection over the internet.

    What I don’t understand is why the discography information isn’t freely available over the internet, as is the case with the Freedman collection at UPenn. It would be an extremely valuable addition.

  2. jsainfo says:

    Our website development team is addressing this issue. We expect that the information you request will be available early in 2010.

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