The Wexler Lecture on Jewish History: Jews and the Metropolitan Opera House

The recent television series The Gilded Age depicts the birth of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House as a class war between the city’s established “old money” clan and its newly wealthy arrivals. In this talk, historical musicologist Dr. Samantha M. Cooper draws on archival, oral history, and press findings to reveal the real-life dynamics that characterized Jewish involvement with the opera between the 1880 founding of the Met and its 1940 sale to the public.

Her presentation retells the well-known story of the Met’s first sixty years with a new emphasis on the essential roles that Jewish men played behind the scenes as patrons, laborers, and volunteers. In spite of the fact that Jews had to negotiate their place as “undesirable persons” in the opera house’s by-laws, they regularly worked for the Met in diverse capacities, hosted Jewish community events at the opera house, and attended its productions. A diverse milieu of virtually unknown and famed Jews, from anarchist Emma Goldman to Cantor Yoselle Rosenblatt, could be found in the Met’s audiences and on its stage. What is more, the patterns of large-scale Jewish involvement in New York’s opera industry were subsequently replicated in many U.S. urban centers, from Philadelphia and Boston to Chicago and San Francisco.

Ultimately, this talk reads against the grain of American opera history to tell a new story about how Jewish people navigated a fraught and often antisemitic institutional environment, even as they made vital contributions to this opera house and the city’s larger opera scene.

This program is a part of the annual Wexler Lecture series made possible by the Edlavitch DCJCC’s Bernard Wexler Fund for Jewish History. Free to attend in person or virtually, but registration is required. Please contact Lilli Marz at lmarz@edcjcc.org with any questions.

Dr. Samantha M. Cooper is the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is working on her first monograph, American Jews and the Making of the New York Opera Industry, 1880-1940 (under contract with Oxford University Press), which is supported by the Association for Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. Samantha served as the Ariel and Joshua Weiner Family Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (2023-2024), and as a Harry Starr Postdoctoral Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies (2022-2023). She received her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology at New York University (2022). Her articles have appeared in The Opera Quarterly, American Jewish History, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Samantha’s scholarship recently received the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award (2024), and the American Musicological Society’s Jewish Studies and Music Study Group Award (2023). She is the producer and host of The Sounding Jewish podcast, and the Co-Executive Director of the Jewish Music Forum, A Project of the American Society for Jewish Music.