Music Exhibit Recalls Another Time For Jews and Blacks

[mjzee]

Just south of the bustle of Harlem’s famed 125th Street corridor, a mix of brownstones and churches in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park neighborhood prospers today as home to a large working-class black population. But walk down these streets with John T. Reddick, and he will show you the remnants, still-visible, of the vibrant Jewish life of the early 20th century, which forged a rich era of musical collaboration between blacks and Jews.

There, etched high atop the facade of apartment buildings on 119th Street, are Stars of David, created when Jewish residents began moving uptown from the tenements of the Lower East Side. A few buildings down on 119th Street stands Emanuel A.M.E. Church, originally Temple Mount Zion, where future comedian Milton Berle was bar mitzvahed. On 120th Street, composer Richard Rodgers lived next to Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, a popular composer, known as “The Jewish Caruso,” who led prayers at Congregation Ohab Zedek, then located at 116th Street. The cantor’s building bordered the house of lyricist Lorenz Hart, Rodgers’ songwriting partner, to the north. Hart, often annoyed by Rosenblatt’s constant singing from his backyard, would throw water out his window and onto the cantor’s head.

”People think it was Jewish and became black, but it was a shared community,” said Reddick, an African-American architect and historian who has lived in Harlem since 1980.

These days, Reddick is reviving this forgotten history through an exhibition of sheet music and photos from the era. “Jews worked with black performers behind the scenes, and I want to get across the richness of the engagement and the proximity in which they lived,” he said.

Read more: http://forward.com/a...-ol-days/?p=all