Stefan Wolpe’s Zionist Network

As the plight of the European Jews deteriorated during the 1930s and 40s, Zionism suddenly became the last hope of the Jewish people for survival. In America, a network of Jewish artist-activists worked in tandem to bring the Holocaust to public attention and to further the Zionist cause. They produced a steady stream of projects that kept the ongoing Jewish tragedy in the public eye. In this paper, I focus on composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), showing how his artistic collaborators helped him to shape the views about Jewish identity and Zionism that he expressed in his music. I discuss Wolpe’s work with Jewish song specialists Sarah Osnath-Halevy and Sarah Gorby; his participation in the Zionist song projects of Hans Nathan (Bohlman 1994) and Corinne Chochem; his collaboration with Yiddish playwright David Pinski; his two dance scores for choreographer Benjamin Zemach, creator of “Jewish ballet;” and his artistic partnership with fellow refugee composer Trude Rittmann (Pomahac and Clarkson 2007), including their jointly composed score for Helmar Lerski’s propaganda film, Palestine at War (1942), which linked the Zionist cause to the hoped-for Allied victory in World War II.

I will draw on previously unexamined documents held at NYPL, the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive (Hebrew University), the Zemach family archive (Pennsylvania), and YIVO, as well as Wolpe’s published and unpublished works, to illustrate Wolpe’s use of a wide spectrum of both Hebrew and Yiddish texts, both secular and religious, in his political advocacy. Wolpe employed Jewish liturgical texts and verses from the biblical prophets in order to set the secular Zionist narrative within the context of traditional Jewish messianic aspirations (Shapira 1998). This fusion of secular and religious ideologies was characteristic of Labor Zionism (Avineri 1998), the dominant ideology of pre-state Zionism and the first decades of Israeli statehood.