“Jewlia made me laugh, she made me sit up, she made me stand up — her commitment and engagement were totally inspiring to so many. Her passionate light remains.” — Fred Frith

"Jewlia Eisenberg is a fierce, fearless artist; a woman following in the footsteps of artist-activist singer-composers like Meredith Monk & Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone & Adrienne Cooper. She walks the tightrope of academic research and punk performance with the adroit skill and elegance of a circus virtuoso, throwing in twists, turns, jumps and sprints that make your heart beat faster and your brain go into overdrive. Her work is endlessly fascinating, resonating Cabalistically on levels within levels, political and personal, mystical, magical and mind expanding.” — Frank London

Jewlia Eisenberg & The Ginzburg Geography

Composer/vocalist/lay cantor Jewlia Eisenberg died on March 11, 2021.

In the summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, with a severely compromised immune system and suffering from debilitating pain, Jewlia pushed herself into Bird & Egg recording studio in Richmond, California. With 6 HEPA filters whirring away during a record heat wave, Jewlia recorded vocal tracks and directed her ensemble of Charming Hostess collaborators, working to finish what would become her final album.

Through research, touring, experimental medical treatments, and multiple hospitalizations, The Ginzburg Geography had been in development for eight years. Now Jewlia and her musical collaborators were facing the imperative to finish the album before she underwent a bone marrow transplant that she knew would either cure her rare immune disorder or, more likely, kill her.

Why was it so important to Jewlia that she finish this record? What compelled her to fight so fiercely in her final days to create such a powerful musical/political statement?

Starret City Hoedown

Julie Eisenberg was born in New York City in 1970. She was co-raised in the Starrett City housing development in East New York by what she would lovingly describe as a “Stalinist” collectivist pod of three families; she has two Black godsisters and two Jewish godsisters. (While culturally Jewish, her family was fervently secular.) Her upbringing was steeped in labor activism, race and class consciousness, protest songs, and the influence of the UCC, a social justice-driven community center rooted in folk art practice run by her father, Martin. At a young age, Jewlia learned song and dance from many cultures. As a child, she toured with a UCC youth clogging ensemble that caught stares at the state fair and developed one of her many secret powers: square dance calling.

Jewlia’s mother, Anne, left the pod early on. Anne, a technical writing professor and a science writer for the New York Times, taught Jewlia to speed-read before kindergarten and took her to museums and opera at an age when most children couldn’t sit still. In sixth grade, Jewlia tested into Hunter College High School in Manhattan, where she sang in the madrigal chorus, led trips to abortion rights protests in Washington, D.C., and challenged peers and teachers with her leftist ideas, keen intellect, and pugnacious pleasure in argument.

Jewlia would pick up myriad influences along the way that wrapped around the core of these formative influences: Martin’s staunch commitment to activism, Anne’s love of language and passion for culture, and the polyglot folk practice of the Center.

Westward Ho! Barrington & Beyond

In 1988, Jewlia went onto U.C. Berkeley in California, studying music and history. Away from New York City, she developed an ardent connection to her Jewish roots, shedding her parents’ atheism and starting to spell her name Jewlia.

“While reveling in the particularities of local Jewish traditions, Eisenberg believed in a vision of Judaism that was expansive, cosmopolitan and welcoming. Delighting in contradiction and irony, she changed the spelling of her first name to both embrace and poke fun at notions of ethnic pride.” —jweekly

It was in Berkeley that Jewlia’s first and most enduring musical project – Charming Hostess – was founded in 1993. The name "Charming Hostess” was part joke and part true. In the early days of the band Jewlia brought food for the entire audience, even as the shows grew pretty large – feeding people was always important to her. It was part joke because she was decidedly not the 1950's era polite and demure hostess. Jewlia called out injustice no matter how much larger the person behind it was. She believed strongly that a woman controlled her own body and destiny, whether that meant following her own interests or joining a group that trained women how to perform menstrual extractions. She described her hobbies as “class war and knitting.”

Charming Hostess arose from the fertile anarchy of Barrington Coop and nurtured by the West Oakland arts community, along with other bands such as Fibulator, Eskimo and Idiot Flesh (which shared half its members with Charming Hostess). Barrington was an off-campus U.C. Berkeley student housing cooperative famous for activism and artist foment. Numerous attempts by the city and University were made to shut Barrington down, culminating in one of the residents (allegedly) being pushed off the roof and murdered by the Berkeley PD, squatters beaten and raped, and Jewlia brutally arrested and jailed.

In the aftermath of police violence, Jewlia took off to pursue ethnomusicology and spiritual growth, shedding her parents’ atheism embracing her Jewish roots, and starting to spell her name Jewlia. She spent a year traveling and studying various female vocal traditions. She returned to the Bay Area loaded with cassettes. Over the next decade she traveled to Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Ethiopia, Italy, Tunisia… In Israel, Jewlia studied cantorial singing with a group of radical Orthodox women called the Orthodykes.

Back in the East Bay, Jewlia began exploring young bands in the local music scene. She sang in Stuart Popejoy’s band, “King Beaver“ with Andy Borger (drums), Nils Frykdal (guitar), John Yi (tenor sax) and Tom Yoder (trombone).

“If you’re looking for ancient women’s texts, you’ll find a lot of them are preserved in traditional folk songs of North African and Eastern European peoples… I was interested in taking those texts which express female sensibilities and bringing that into a more modern context.” —jweekly

In 2000, Charming Hostess played at Tonic, NYC where Jewlia connected with John Zorn, leading to her first release on Tzadik, Trilectic (2002), The long association with Tzadik garnered wider recognition for Jewlia not just as a bodacious band leader, but as a composer.

My first gig with Jewlia, really my first ever professional singing gig in NY, was a Trilectic show at Tonic. Looking back on all of the singing I have attempted to do in my life, I think that was the biggest musical challenge I've ever had… We were singing with Pamelia Kurstin, Dawn from Faun Fables, Marika, I don't remember who else… In rehearsal, we would start in one key and end in another, traveling and turning together like an amoeba. When things went awry, you had to vocally run alongside the moving vehicle and try to jump in again. But when we found each other, what exhilaration, what power you could feel in an ephemeral moment. More than a video of the moment, I wish I could be there in that circle, in that feeling of hard listening and feminine sound. —Ganda Suthivarikom

Radical Text Practice

Throughout her career, Jewlia studied women’s texts in Aramaic, Ladino, Yiddish, Hebrew, Italian, Bulgarian, Romanian, English, Latin and other languages. She worked directly with leading scholars and traveled the world to study from primary sources. This process resulted in Jewlia forging an intimate connection to project subject matter and the text itself. Her multidisciplinary collaborators would then contribute their collective voice and vision towards illuminating the text through various mediums, including music, maps, architecture, video, interactive technology, and ritual.

Musical compositions for each project are structured as: 1) Original arrangements of ancient and modern traditional songs; 2) Ancient and modern texts set to her compositions; 3) Original songs and lyrics pulled from adjacent themes in Jewlia’s personal life.

Each project she embarked on was akin to the scope and scale of pursuing a PhD. But rather than going back to school, Jewlia forever existed on the margins of academia. Instead of writing multiple dissertations, she created soul stirring albums and immersive interpretive media.

Projects & Recordings

“All her music was steeped in a percolating mixture of forgotten histories, revolutionary politics, an ebullient spirit, a sly sense of humour, and her powerhouse voice that… could sing anything." —KALX

Jewlia Eisenberg works at the intersection of voice, text and diaspora consciousness. She is primarily a composer, a musician, and the leader of ensemble Charming Hostess. Her mission is to make lovely noise about complex ideas… in a fun, open way. Jewlia also works in immersive performance--making hybrid spaces that incorporate music, visitor participation, and non-coercive ritual.

Jewlia is founder and leader of Charming Hostess, an ensemble renowned for their whirl of eerie harmony, hot rhythm, and radical smarts. ChoHo’s music is based on the sounding body: voices and winds, handclaps and heartbeats, sex-breath and silence, pushing for translation strategies between verbal and non-verbal languages. Jewlia Eisenberg’s compositions draw on women's vocal traditions (primarily from Eastern Europe and North Africa), integrating them with American folk forms, both white and black. As a vocalist, she investigates the emotional, erotic and spiritual terrains that the voice can traverse.

The Ginzburg Geography will be the sixth album released under the Charming Hostess rubric. Numerous other recordings in various project configurations abound. Highlights include: the Charming Hostess Big Band (legendary gender-bending punk-klezmer ensemble); Trilectic (radical setting of texts by philosopher Walter Benjamin, Bolshevik revolutionary Asja Lacis, and Jewish mysticism scholar Gershom Scholem); Sarajevo Blues (music and text from the Jewish, African, and Bosnian diasporas with text by Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic); The Bowls Project (album and vaulted dome, based on women’s texts from babylonian demon amulets); Book of J (new psalmody collaboration with Jeremiah Lockwood).

The Ginzburg Geography | Tzadik, SPECTRUM Series

“Eisenberg hewed to an earnest anti-fascism in everything she did, something which doesn’t lend itself so easily to commodification” —Tablet Magazine

The Ginzburg Geography tells the WWII-era love story of Natalia and Leone Ginzburg, Italian Jews famous for antifascist resistance and intellectual brilliance. The songs draw from the Ginzburgs’ writings, both public and private, exploring the journeys of love, resistance, exile, and liberation of a couple who sacrificed everything to work for justice. The Ginzburg Geography creates a series of sonic maps via new and traditional music drawing from the Italian regions of Piemonte, Abruzzo and Rome; from Italian Jewish liturgy, the oldest and most remote in Europe; and from Italian anti-fascist songs, work chants and resistance anthems. These maps track the journeys in the Ginzburgs’ lives through fascist Italy—and the way their journeys interconnect with our own.

"The Ginzburg Geography is an examination of the lives and work of Natalia and Leone Ginzburg during World War II. As with her other Charming Hostess endeavors, Jewlia Eisenberg plunged deeply into research and created songs inspired by their life, love and writings as well as including songs of protest and cultural significance from the time. Jewlia laid down vocals and oversaw the recording of the majority of band tracks but was not able to finish. Since her passing, her longtime collaborator Marika Hughes has completed the album consistent with Jewlia’s vision based on her notes and past performances. Tzadik is deeply honored to present this historic and heartfelt final project by the endlessly creative force that was Jewlia Eisenberg." —John Zorn

Through research, composition, touring, repeated hospitalizations and experimental treatments, Jewlia worked on The Ginzburg Geography for eight years. The project follows Natalia and Leone as they resist Italy’s descent into despotism and war, exploring these vital questions: What sustains people in severely oppressive situations? How do you hope when hope seems beyond possibility? How do you unify and inspire when organizing is punishable by death?

In 2013, an emotional/spiritual/political roadmap to navigating literal fascism might have seemed to many Americans like an abstract or philosophical exercise. However, Jewlia had an intense reaction to fascist threads and since Reagan had detected seeds of populous reactionary tendencies she saw destined to bloom into full-throated facisim. With each ensuing year, the prescience of the central questions of The Ginzburg Geography have increasingly come into focus. Now, in 2022, a year after Jewlia’s passing, with the RNC’s pronouncement of the January 6 insurrection as “legitimate political discourse,” our daily news is no longer about fascism as metaphor or history, but fascist efforts to undermine our present-day democratic structures.

The themes of the album are timeless and rooted in the tradition of the protest and freedom songs that Jewlia was raised with. However, in its timeliness and urgency, there are few parallels to this musical document. In this way, The Ginzburg Geography is perhaps most akin to the final recordings of John Coltrane, made months before his death – urgency and physical suffering and immortal spirit cascading from Coltrane’s horn, an artist in conversation with a near future that they themselves won’t experience in physical form. The Ginzburg recordings lay bare the vulnerability in Jewlia’s wavering cantorial cries, a living epitaph reverberating out and echoing back from the other side:

Revolution, Revolution 
I wanna be in a revolution
Can I be in the revolution with you?

Thanks for reading “The Map”, a 10-min biography by Jason Ditzian.

Try “The Dig” to take a deeper dive with a visual timeline.

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