Anyone with an interest in connecting to their heritage through the arts owes a debt of gratitude to the Milken Family Foundation’s Milken Archive of Jewish Music, established in 1990 to support the recording of over 50 CDs, surveying the music of the American Jewish experience, in all diverse aspects. These 50 themed recordings include well-known, rarified and rediscovered repertory ranging from sacred prayers and chants to raucous numbers popularized in Yiddish musicals. Conceived as a virtual textbook, the Foundation’s website is a place where visitors can educate themselves by accessing extensive essays, podcasts and videos in which the works are described and contextualized, and by reading about the composers, as well as the musical groups and soloists featured on the recordings.  The website also provides the opportunity to hear excerpts from all of the music, which can either be purchased in its entirety on CD, or played free of charge on Spotify.

Available now is the recently released A Garden Eastward: Sephardi Inspiration, an album of orchestral and chamber pieces and settings of prayers, folk songs and liturgical texts for chorus and soloists by modern composers who both revere and breathe new life into the centuries-old musical traditions associated with Jewish life in Spain and the Middle East. 

​Variously performed by Jascha Heifitz, guitarist Eliot Fisk, the New York Virtuoso Singers and the Barcelona Symphony/National Orchestra of Catalonia, selections written by Italian émigré Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, contemporary composers Simon Sargon and Bruce Adolphe, the Israeli-born Ofer Ben-Amots, and others make use of the same sources, but each demonstrates a stylistic aesthetic which is original, and often, unique.

(Photo courtesy of Jewish Lives Biography Series, Yale University Press)

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Underwritten by the Leon D. Black Foundation, Jewish Lives Series, published by Yale University Press, is also raising the bar on the study of Jewish culture for the general reader by producing high quality biographies of men and women who have all impacted the course of literature, sports, science, religion and numerous other fields, from biblical times to the present day. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council recognized the initiative by honoring the series as a whole with its Jewish Book of the Year Award.

Since 2010, Jewish Lives has garnered praise for its studies of King Solomon, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Primo Levi, Hank Greenberg, and other eminent Jews. Newer entries include books focusing on the accomplishments of two Frenchmen: historian and sociologist Pierre Birnbaum’s work on Leon Blum, the now almost-forgotten but important socialist leader and Zionist noted for his successful effort to improve the lives of the working class as his country’s prime minister during the 1930s and 1940s, and Marcel Proust, by critic Benjamin Taylor, who analyzes the rarified atmosphere of Remembrance of Things Past in the light of the great 19th century novelist’s affinity with his mother’s Jewish background, and the intensity of his reaction to the Dreyfus Affair, when he actively campaigned for the captain’s acquittal.

Readers can look forward to future additions by the late British biographer David Cesarani (Benjamin Disrael)i, to be published in spring, 2016, and author and journalist David Rieff’s Robert Oppenheimer.

(Photo courtesy of Jewish Lives Biography Series, Yale University Press)