Debbie Friedman

Abstract

Song leader, composer, and liturgist Debbie Friedman (also Deborah Lynn Friedman, b. 1951–d. 2011) played a significant role in liberal American Jewish music circles over a career that began in the late 1960s, and ended with her premature death from pneumonia on 9 January 2011. Born in Utica, New York, Friedman grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she premiered her service Sing Unto God in 1972 with the choir from her alma mater, Highland Park High School. In the era just before American Jewish seminaries accepted women into cantorial training programs, Friedman parlayed her work with youth groups and summer camps into broader professional opportunities. A season at the Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute, a Reform Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin, led to an artist-in-residence position at Chicago Sinai congregation (1972–1977). From there she moved on to positions as a youth group leader at Houston’s Congregation Beth Israel (1978–1984); cantor/soloist at The New Reform Congregation in southern California’s San Fernando Valley (1984–1987); and co-leader of monthly healing services on New York City’s Upper West Side in the 1990s and 2000s. In addition to an active concertizing career, Friedman recorded twenty-two albums, many of which comprised complete, multipart, religious rituals created in collaboration with progressive religious organizations. Although Friedman’s music has become ubiquitous in liberal Jewish settings around the world, scholarship has proceeded slowly due to ambivalence about Friedman’s lack of formal Jewish music training, perceptions of her “outsider” status related to Jewish institutional life, and concerns that the more popular style of her music symbolized spiritual shallowness—matters made more complicated by Friedman’s own repeated claims that she could not read sheet music. Even when New York’s Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music hired Friedman to instruct its cantorial students in 2007, and when the school itself officially took Friedman’s name just after her death, due to a sizeable anonymous donation in her memory, concerns about her role as a representative of Jewish musical tradition persisted. Thus, most research on Friedman tends to focus on historical and social issues, while struggling to address her music on its own terms. The entries in this article consequently include a significant number of primary and journalistic sources useful for future scholarship.