Fierce as Death & Bent Like a Question Mark

Oct 18, 2022 | Boston University | in-person & virtual

Complete Event Info

Free and open to all. Sponsored by the Jewish Cultural Endowment and administered by African American & Black Diaspora Studies, this two-part event celebrates the life and work of the late Jewlia Eisenberg. Featuring a lecture by Dr. Jeremiah Lockwood and a musical performance by Lockwood and Ricky “Dirty Red” Gordon, you can attend in-person at Boston University’s Howard Thurman Center at 808 Commonwealth Ave, Boston and virtually on Zoom via the link below.

5:00PM Lecture Details

“Fierce as Death”: Agadelkha and Jewlia Eisenberg in Memoriam

At the time of her death on March 11, 2021, musician and intellectual Jewlia Eisenberg was midstream in a creative research project on a subject she called “queer piyut.” Eisenberg read piyutim (liturgical poetry) as offering a model for fluidity in conceptions of erotic desire. Under her interpretive gaze, medieval Spanish rabbis such as Abraham ibn Ezra and Shlomo ibn Gabirol were represented as exegetes of desire. In their mystical love poetry, the restless imagination of the poet-rabbis alighted on a vast array of eroticized subjects. In the piyut literature, the mystically elevated image of the beloved underwent fantastical permutations, appearing as an ephebes, a beautiful woman, a gazelle, the breath of the wind on fields of wheat, and other fanciful images encompassing flora, fauna and human identities.

Eisenberg read in the erotic imagery of piyutim a model for queer desires that are resistant to binary conceptions of gender. Queer piyut reach beyond heteronormative models of erotic encounter to frame a description of divine immanence. In her proposal for a project titled “Fierce as Death,” an undertaking Eisenberg tragically did not live to finish, she outlined a plan for a song cycle and performance piece that would expound upon and illuminate her queer reading of piyutim. She received a major grant to work on this project when she was already hospitalized with the illness that would claim her life.

In this talk, Jeremiah Lockwood focuses on Agadelkha, a song of Eisenberg’s from the queer piyut project that she finished, and that he worked on with her as guitarist and co-arranger. Agadelkha, a piyut by ibn Ezra, is sung in the Turkish piyut tradition to the melody of a popular Turkish song, Kadifeden Kesesi, that has an unambiguous gay subtext. In its most famous recorded version, the Turkish song celebrates Beyoğlu, an historically gay neighborhood in Istanbul. Eisenberg was delighted and inspired by the serendipity of this juxtaposition. In her transhistorical imagination, medieval Spanish rabbis, Sephardic paytanim and a gay Turkish pop star were drafted into a lineage that facilitates a reading of
the queer subcurrents in Jewish liturgy.

6:15PM Performance Details

“Bent Like a Question Mark”: The Celia Dropkin Archive

Jeremiah Lockwood and Ricky “Dirty Red” Gordon have been making music together for over two decades, originally as disciples of Piedmont Blues legend Carolina Slim. For their first post-pandemic live shows they have begun a new duo to share the sonic pleasures stored up over a tumultuous year of longing. In their words, "Expect old time blues, new- time rhythms, and ballads about all the things we want to do with you." For more on their collaboration, visit: www.gordonlockwood.com

Celia Dropkin was a transgressive visionary who published her first poems in Yiddish around 100 years ago. She wrote about desire and violence in a way that feels shockingly true; her work is well-loved by musicians and queers. Book of J (Eisenberg and Lockwood) were artists-in-residence at YIVO: Institute for Jewish Research in 2018, setting Dropkin’s papers to music—including unpublished poems, autobiographical sketches and letters.

The BBC called Book of J: “a wonder of haunted American roots music, taking listeners from Yiddish laments to labor anthems via mystical twists and turns” and in The New Yorker, “The affecting, expansive musical landscape of Book of J encompasses gothic Yiddish songs, Piedmont blues, and queer politics."

Since Eisenberg’s death in 2021, Lockwood and Gordon have performed songs from the Book of J repertoire, including arrangements of Yiddish songs Lockwood and Eisenberg created together.