In 1910, the Odessa cantor Pinchas Minkovsky published a book-length diatribe against the dangers of the “lust machine.” The encoding of Jewish chants in the new medium of the gramophone, he wrote, constituted a “pornographic” response to the ills of modernity. The same year, Vilnius entrepreneur Wolf Isserlin, Deutsche Grammophon’s Polish and Russian distributor, opened his own gramophone manufacturing plant. By his own calculation, Isserlin’s number one record customers were Jews. He claimed to have sold more cantorial 78s in a single five-month period than all other records combined over the previous five years. Why did Minkovsky oppose the gramophone while Isserlin staked his career on it? In this talk, James Loeffler will discuss how the rise of the Russian recording industry divided Jewish cantors, turned Jews into modern consumers, and led to a surprising chapter in the history of Zionism.

James Loeffler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses in Jewish and European history, and the history of human rights. His other research interests include American Jewish politics, contemporary Jewish culture, and the history of Jewish music.  He is currently completing two books: Rooted Cosmopolitans: Human Rights and Jewish Politics in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming with Yale University Press), and an edited volume, The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyering and International Law in Historical Perspective (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).  - See more at: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/Calendar/Detail?id=35292#sthash.FnXPH9LY.dpuf

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