American Jewish History

I use music as a teaching tool in my classes. In an undergraduate introduction to Judaism course that I teach at the University of San Francisco, I play music at the beginning of class, followed by a conversation about its religious and cultural relevance to our class. At the end of the discussion, I ask students to debate whether or not they think what we listened to is an example of "Jewish music." Leonard Cohen features heavily in the rotation of songs I use for this class, as his influence in our classroom discussions mirrors his significance to popular and Jewish culture writ large. For example, during the week of Rosh Hashanah, we listen to Cohen's "Who by Fire," his interpretation of the Unetanneh Tokef piyyutsung in synagogues around the world during the High Holy Days. This song artfully reimagines the prayer Cohen heard as a child at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Westmount, Quebec, the Montreal suburb where he grew up. During another class, we listen to a Ladino version of Cohen's "Hallelujah" recorded by Yasmin Levy, a Sephardic Israeli singer. Because Cohen features so prominently in our conversations on Jewish identity, I was thrilled to discover that the Experience Leonard Cohenexhibition was on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco from August 2021 thru February 2022. I did not encourage my students to visit due to the semester surge in COVID cases. After my own recent visit, I am glad about that decision, not because the exhibition is unengaging, but because the students would not have learned anything about Cohen himself from the visit. Instead, they would have learned about artists inspired by Cohen's life and music in an exhibition that is too esoteric for most undergraduates who do not study art.

Experience Leonard Cohendraws on Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything, organized by the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MAC). The San Francisco version consists of four solo exhibits inspired by the life and work of Leonard Cohen, created by contemporary artists [End Page 223]George Fok, Judy Chicago, Candice Breitz, and Marshall Trammell. Each exhibition is meant to stand alone, and each was located in a different gallery of the CJM, spread over two floors. Together the exhibits form a visual and auditory collage of the four artists' representations of Cohen's work through paintings, recorded audio performances, and video presentations. By showing Cohen's career through the eyes of contemporary artists and their multimodal expressions, these artists take us beyond the image of Cohen as a larger-than-life musical hero to show him as a person who had an immense impact on others.

Chicago's Cohaniminstallation includes thirteen paintings that interpret the lyrics of Cohen songs. These paintings, and Chicago's desire to create the art after learning of Cohen's death in 2016, exemplify how much he meant to her as an artist. According to the installation, Cohen's music was a constant presence in Chicago's art studio; she frequently listened to it as she worked.

Trammel, an Oakland-based experimental artist, titled his exhibit Indexical Moment/um: For Friends. It consists of audio recordings of lyrics from Cohen's songs that repeat until they vanish into the room's natural soundscape. The one thing I appreciated about the piece is that it includes songs by Conspiracy of Beards, a Bay Area a cappella group that performs exclusively music written by Leonard Cohen, thereby adding a local San Francisco component to the Canadian artist's career.

The two most engaging parts of Experience Leonard Cohen, and the most popular on the day of my visit, are the two video installations created by Breitz and Fok. Breitz's I'm Your Mandecenters Cohen the artist and includes the voices of eighteen old men singing a cappella versions of Cohen's songs from...