Communication professor Josh Kun has been featured extensively in some of the country's most prestigious news outlets — including the New York Times, National Public Radio and Newsweek — because of a new book he co-authored about the almost-lost history of Jewish music from the 1940s to 1980s.

Kun and Roger Bennett (pictured right with Kun) co-wrote And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost (Random House, Inc. 2008) after spending years scouring garage sales, thrift stores and bargain bins for vinyl music records of Jewish music that slipped through history's cracks.

"The result, And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost, is the year's most enjoyable popular-music book and one of its most revelatory — part revisionist cultural history, part eye-popping coffee table anthology," according to a Slate.com article that named the book one of 2008's best.

Kun said the book is about much more than digging up old records for the world to see.

"The book is really one piece of a much larger quest, which is to create a living archive of American Jewish music," he said. "We're trying to do for Jewish music what scholars in the past did for American folk music. We want to use all the resources we can to preserve the music and the stories."

The larger quest includes an exhibition of the album covers in February at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco that will last six months, a record label named Reboot Stereophonic, a regularly updated book blog and a wiki Web site called idelsounds.com that is dedicated to preserving historic music, and other projects in the making such as a documentary film about the collection process. Together they form the multi-platform archive, The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, which is actively seeking grants and funding. The instant success of the book, released last month, has also triggered more musicians and musicians' family members who want their stories told, and Kun is actively working to record those stories as oral histories.

"We're getting lots of folks who want their lives or the lives of their mothers and fathers to be recorded," he said. "We're dealing with a significant number of artists who, for the most part, have been written out of history. We're doing our best to rebuild those stories from the ground up."

Kun and his partners — including Bennett and music industry veterans David Katznelson and Courtney Holt — are building an extensive collection of music he hopes becomes much more than a typical music archive.

"Most archives tend to sit there and wait for people to find them," said Kun, adding that he wants to work with current archives to make them more accessible. "We want to make sure people find those archives and we want to make sure the stories of the past are told in a way that engage a new generation of listeners. It'll be a long-term quest to not only keep collecting this music, but to start archiving so people can use it and relate to it."

Kun first became interested in the history of Jewish music after he came across Irving Fields' record Bagels and Bongos (pictured left).

"It was a record of Yiddish songs done as mambos and cha-chas," Kun said. "It spoke out to a much larger trend in American history when Jews and Latinos were recording with each other. The knowledge has all come from these cultural objects who a lot of people have written off as being marginal or inconsequential. We're tying our best to say, 'Wait these objects matter not only as documents of the past but as ways of rethinking the present.'"

He told NPR: "For me (Bagels and Bongos) was the record that was the key that opened up this whole world that I never knew existed, which was the Jewish Latin craze of the 1940s and '50s. Bagels and Bongos was really just the tip of the iceberg. Its cover is probably the most striking thing that first caught my eye 'cause of its total elegance. But the music on the record is just beautiful, beautiful Latin versions of various Yiddish songs and Hebrew songs."

The album covers for records such as Bagels and Bongos are looked at as artwork and as cultural documents — and the book. As a Newsweek article stated, "From the opening images of an eerily serene Barry Manilow and a pelvis-thrusting Neil Diamond, the album covers in And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl are so perfectly dated — and hilariously kitschy — that it's impossible to look away."

But the music and its cultural significance is what started all the research and data collection. 

"Our book is the product of five years of obsessively collecting vinyl from across the country — a work of passion that took over our lives," Kun and co-author Bennett said in a New York Times blog. "Believe it or not, after tracking down thousands of lost albums and chasing down the performers who once recorded them (now mostly in their 80s and 90s), we still can’t quit the music."

The well-designed hardcover includes short essays from contributors, including several with USC connections, such as Norman Lear, the benefactor of USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center, novelist Aimee Bender of USC College, and USC Thornton School of Music guest lecturer Lamont Dozier.

More
Kun and co-author Bennett's "Top 12" list (NY Times)
Jewsish Journal feature article
NPR story
NY Times article
Newsweek article
Listen to Kun's interview (WNYC)
Trail of Our Vinyl blog
Album cover samples