Music and Justice Conference

As part of its new Music and Justice series, the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music will host a public conference featuring prominent scholars and experts exploring the historical and cultural connections of Black and Jewish communities in the United States, intimate analyses of Brubeck’s The Gates of Justice, and the contemporary relevance of music to social justice.

Attendance is free and open to the public.

9:00 a.m: Welcome and First Session

Opening remarks from Professor Anna Spain Bradley, Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UCLA

“Historical and Cultural Connections of Jews and Blacks in America”
– Hasia Diner (NYU) “Jews and Blacks in America before World War II”
– Charles Hersch (Cleveland State University) "Jewish and African American Pursuit of Social Justice in Jazz”
– Kelsey Klotz (UNC Charlotte) “The Sounds of Justice: A Musical Understanding of Brubeck’s The Gates of Justice”

11:30 a.m.: Keynote Address

Professor Dwight Andrews of Emory University: “Spirituality in Dave Brubeck’s The Gates of Justice”

2:00 p.m.: DARIUS, CHRIS, and DAN BRUBECK: “Dave Brubeck and Social Justice”

3:30 p.m.: "Music and Social Justice Today" panel discussion

– Dwight Andrews
– Darius Brubeck
– Larry Blumenfeld
– Arturo O’Farrill
– UCLA students

5:00 p.m.: Reception

About the Conference Speakers

Dwight Andrews is a professor of Music Theory & African American Music at Emory University. Andrews is a composer, educator, and minister presently working on a study of Black music and race.

Larry Blumenfeld is a culture reporter and music critic at the Wall Street Journal. For 25 years, Blumenfeld has worked as a journalist, critic, blogger, editor, lecturer, producer, and curator with special expertise in jazz, Afro-Latin, and world music, with a particular focus on New Orleans and Cuba as well as the connections between culture and social justice. His writing has won him multiple accolades and support from the Open Society Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, and others.

Hasia Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at NYU. Diner is a leading scholar of American Jewish history, American immigration history, and women’s history. She is the author of many books including In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks 1915-1935.

Charles Hersch is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Cleveland State University who has written widely about music, art, politics, and race through three books: Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity (2017), Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans (2007), and Democratic Artworks: Politics and the Arts from Trilling to Dylan (1998).

Kelsey Klotz is a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has a Ph.D. in musicology from Washington University in St. Louis. Her book Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness will be published by Oxford University Press in January 2023.

The Music and Justice series is presented by the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, The Milken Archive of Jewish Music, and the UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). Co-sponsor are the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Hugo and Christine Davise Fund for Contemporary Music at the UCLA Music Library.