Join Jeremiah Lockwood and Judith Berkson, two of the brightest voices in new Jewish music, for an afternoon concert, which will include havdalah. Khazones is the Yiddish term for the work of a special kind of artist that once played an integral role in the Jewish community—the spiritual music virtuoso who represented the community through a style of vocal music that was deeply desired and legible to listeners as a mirror to the soul of the collective. In this presentation, Berkson and Lockwood share new work drawing on the early 20th century cantorial tradition, intertwined with a talk on the history of the music and its reverberations in the current moment.

Berkson and Lockwood bring their unique and radical perspectives on the cantorial tradition to the forefront in their promotion of new communities devoted to creativity, celebration of outsider voices, and heritage reclamation.

PLEASE REGISTER BELOW to attend this in person event.

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar, singer, guitarist and composer. He holds a PhD from Stanford University in Education and Jewish Studies, where his dissertation fieldwork focused on young Hasidic cantors in Brooklyn. His first book Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era  was published by UC Press in 2024. In recent years he has produced concerts with important cantorial voices at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and at the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival. Jeremiah is currently a Research Fellow at the UCLA Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, and received Fellowships from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in recent years. His musical career began with years of playing guitar with blues musician Carolina Slim, and in synagogue singing with his grandfather Cantor Jacob Konigsberg. Lockwood is founder and frontman of The Sway Machinery, a group whose music the New Yorker has described as “unclassifiable and uplifting.” Lockwood has also recorded 14 albums, toured internationally, and been the recipient of numerous academic honors including the Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award and the YIVO Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music and Theater. He performs frequently with The Sway Machinery, as a touring member of The Ebony Hillbillies, pioneers of African-American string band music, and in the duo Gordon Lockwood, with drummer Ricky Gordon, a fellow disciple of Carolina Slim.

Judith Berkson is a mezzo-soprano, pianist and composer living in Los Angeles, California. She studied voice with Lucy Shelton and composition with Joe Maneri at the New England Conservatory. She received her MA in composition from Wesleyan University and a Doctorate in performance and composition from California Institute of the Arts. Judith has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, Wet Ink, Yarn/Wire and City Opera and has presented work at Picasso Museum Malaga, Roulette, Le Poisson Rouge, Joe’s Pub, The Stone, Barbès, Bang On A Can, and the 92 Street Y. She has received a Six Points Fellowship, a Jerome Foundation grant, Meet The Composer grant, New Music USA funding and support from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her solo album “Oylam” (ECM Records) was called “Standards and Schubert and liturgical music, swing and chilly silences, a beautiful Satie-like piece to open and close the record” by Ben Ratliff of the New York Times. She composed music for the film Christopher at Sea (2022), a queer retelling of Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise which premiered at Sundance and the Venice Biennale, and won awards at SXSW and at Outfest LA. Her latest chamber opera Partial Memories premiered at the NODO Festival in Ostrava, Czechia. It was dedicated to forgotten female artists Janet Sobel and Mary Gartside and featured the Ostravská Banda. Judith is also a cantor and has collaborated on Yiddish and cantorial music with Frank London and Theodore Bikel. As a vocalist she has premiered works by Enno Poppe, Alvin Lucier, Rick Burckhardt and Chaya Czernowin. She has served as DMA Lecturer at California Institute of the Arts and as a guest lecturer at Columbia University and at The New School.