Stairway to Paradise

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Stairway to Paradise reveals how American Jewish entrepreneurs, musicians, and performers influenced American popular music from the late nineteenth Century till the mid-1960s. From blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, blues, jazz, and Broadway musicals, ending with folk and rock 'n' roll. The book follows the writers and artists' real and imaginative relationship with African-American culture's charisma. Stairway to Paradise discusses the artistic and occasionally ideological dialogue that these artists, writers, and entrepreneurs had with African-American artists and culture. Tracing Jewish immigration to the United States and the entry of Jews into the entertainment and cultural industry, the book allocates extensive space to the charged connection between music and politics as reflected in the Jewish-Black Alliance - both in the struggle for social justice and in the music field. It reveals Jewish success in the music industry and the unique and sometimes problematic relationships that characterized this process, as their dominance in this field became a source of blame for exploiting African-American artistic and human capital. Alongside this, the book shows how black-Jewish cooperation, and its fragile alliance, played a role in the hegemonic conflicts involving American culture during the 20th century. Unintentionally, it influenced the process of decline of the influence of the WASP elite during the 1960s. Stairway to Paradise fuses American history and musicology with cultural studies theories. This inter-disciplinary approach regarding race, class, and ethnicity offers an alternative view of more traditional notions regarding understanding American music's evolution.　 Dr. Ari Katorza is a historian, a cultural studies scholar, and a musician. His research concentrates on popular music, society, and history. He lectures in various Israeli academic colleges and universities as Rimon – School of Music, the Academic Center at Kiryat Ono, and the Inter-Disciplinary Center at Herzlia. Amongst his previous publications: Come Together: Rock 'n' Roll Liberalism, Mass Bohemianism and the Sixties (2020), Pink Floyd: Tear Down the Wall (2014), Unknown Noises: Punk, Post-punk, and New-wave (2019), Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock in the Twentieth Century (2012). Stairway to Paradise: Jews, Blacks and the American Music Revolution, 1890-1965, is his fifth book.

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Pages: 279, Edition: 1., Perfect Paperback, de Gruyter Oldenbourg