My response to Jazz Jews by Mike Gerber:I just got my copy of Jazz Jews. I am looking forward to reading it! I wanted to thank you for quoting me in the book (p. 38) and including my book in the bibliography. So far, I read the introduction and I'd just like to say that Sudhalter's book didn't impress me a bit for several reasons. He failed to discuss two artists whose work is important. Raymond Scott's music failed to get a mention. This is understandable simply because most jazz books neglect him, too. He doesn't discuss Charlie Barnet at all. By itself, this is bad enough, but omitting him by reasoning that his work is just imitation Ellington and Basie is just plain stupid or lazy. Making negritude a primary factor in jazz studies is problematic in the face of several musicians whose racial background is itself problematic. What do you do with George Russell, Jackie McLean, Josh Redman, Etta James and Charles Mingus? What about white musicians like Johnny Otis who are so often described as African American? Keith Jarrett with his afro?I read online about Jews like Gilad Atzmon who refuse to consider their Jewishness as a factor in loving jazz (I just like the music and it has nothing to do with who I am). I recall that my recently departed German-Jewish aunt used to tell people that she didn't consider herself Jewish, as if being Jewish wasn't the central factor in her life! She failed to recognize that before becoming a refugee all of her family and their friends were Jews and their world was quintessentially German Jewish - in Germany as well as Austria and Czechoslovakia. That makes her Jewish in ways that are more important than whether she attended a synagogue or not or celebrated the holidays. Keeping popular music - and even classical music - out of jazz history makes no sense when you're describing the music between the World Wars. George Gershwin's music is profoundly important to American music and more advanced conceptually than most anybody else's. In this era before improvised solos became the defining attribute of jazz, a performance of a Harold Arlen song, say, by an instrumentalist might even be perceived as an interpretation rather than "a jazz performance." Songwriting and composing influenced by jazz might even have reached its height in sophistication outside of the USA. What about Kurt Weill and the Czech Jaroslav Jezek? In some ways, they were better songwriters than Irving Berlin. It seems that you didn't ask Artie Shaw and other musicians the right questions. Jewish culture in the United States doesn't have much to do with klezmer or even synagogue music, as many of your interview subjects point out. In the first half of the 20th century, jazz was three things at least: music that celebrates urban life, music of rebellion, and music appreciated by musical sophisticates that was open to experimentation and cross-cultural exploration. Jews were fascinated by all of these in different degrees. Some of your interviewees like Jane Ira Bloom and Stanley Crouch understand that. Why do Jews get into music? Because there are so many Jewish musicians to model oneself after and, more importantly, because artistic expression is a strong element of American Jewish culture - an aspect which has its roots in German Jewish culture probably more than in Russian Jewish culture. Why are Jews so intrigued by foreign and exotic cultures - such as the music coming from black ghettos? (Remember that black culture was not in the mainstream before the Civil Rights era.) Jews seem to have a love of marginal culture, and that's why Jewish Americans become blues musicians and Latin musicians, and why ethnomusicology has attracted so many Jews, too. Great book! - Charley