How young cantors are embracing the sound of the traditional synagogue

Superstar cantors could once be heard from the synagogue to Carnegie Hall. These legends, like Yosele Rosenblatt and Gershon Sirota, were famous for their performances of the distinctive musical art form known as khazones: a dramatic mix of opera, intense minor keys and emotional vocal techniques that mimicked crying and moaning in song. 

Some younger cantors from across denominations are rediscovering this music and publicly performing it, giving appreciators of this Ashkenazi fine art renewed hope for its future. 

Join Forward deputy Yiddish editor Zach Golden in conversation — and song — with cantors Judith Berkson and David Childs about the revival of this deeply resonant tradition.

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Judith Berkson is a cantor, composer and multi-instrumentalist who has been active in Jewish music, Jewish education, synagogue leadership and spiritual outreach for over 15 years, and is a cantor at Congregation Beth Shalom Santa Clarita Valley. She has worked with distinguished musicians including Theodore Bikel, Frank London of the Klezmatics, John Zorn, the Kronos Quartet and Hankus Netsky and has performed on NPR and PBS, at Picasso Museum Malaga, BrucknerTage, Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, Carnegie’s Zankel Hall and the Krakow Jewish Music Festival. She has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet on arrangements of early cantorial recordings which were performed at Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival in 2013 and featured on their CD “A Thousand Thoughts” for Nonesuch Records. From 2010-2012 she received a Six Points Fellowship from the Foundation for Jewish Culture to compose “The Vienna Rite,” an opera about the Viennese cantor Salomon Sulzer and composer Franz Schubert. From 2014-2016 she was an artist in residence at the YIVO Institute, creating new cantorial music from within their sound archives. In 2018 she was a guest artist at the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University and in 2022 she was a guest composer at New Opera Ostrava Festival in the Czech Republic. Her music has been written about in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, TimeOut, Lilith Magazine, The Jewish Week and Tablet. 

David Childs is becoming a familiar name in the world of Jewish music, noted by The Forward for his “passionate interpretation” of Yiddish song. He took part in the West Coast premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Symphony No. 6, Vessels of Light, reciting Yiddish poetry alongside cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper and the UCLA Philharmonia. David worked on the cantorial staff at Sinai Temple in Beverly Hills from 2018 until 2022, and at Shomrei Torah Synagogue in West Hills from then until 2023. He currently serves as cantor of Temple Beth Israel in Port Washington.

David is a graduate of the H. L. Miller Cantorial School at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, where he received cantorial ordination and a Master of Sacred Music degree. There he studied the art of cantorial music, known colloquially in Yiddish as khazones, under Cantor Jack Mendelson and Cantor Richard Nadel. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Music from UCLA. During his undergraduate studies, David studied Jewish music with celebrated artists in the field, singing in a Lazar Weiner masterclass given by composer Yehudi Wyner, interpreting Yiddish art song from Poland, and performing songs by Mickey Katz with the UCLA Klezmer Ensemble. David attended the Aspen Music Festival, where he co-founded the klezmer group Mountain Mishpokhe.