Friday night regulars at London’s Central Synagogue might have noticed a frequent visitor some 15 years or so ago, a young woman from California. Jenni Asher had come to the UK to further her studies. Living near by, she would drop in to services at the United Synagogue shul, which, happily for the classically trained musician, was one of those that has retained its strong musical tradition.
“I still remember the men’s choir,” she says. “Their Avinu Malkeinu [sung during the High Holy Days] was incredible.”
Asher, who is 37, was not Jewish then. But she had already embarked on a spiritual odyssey that next spring will take her to a special moment: when she graduates from the Academy of Jewish Religion in Los Angeles, she will become the first black woman in the USA to be ordained as a cantor.
Musical milestone: Jenni Asher will qualify as a cantor next spring Credit: Arjun Ramesh
If you hear her sing on YouTube, you would not be surprised if she had chosen a different career path, as a jazz singer perhaps. But she opted for the cantorship, she said, because “I wanted to surround myself with people who wanted to talk about God.
“I felt like that was good for my spiritual and emotional wellbeing. I was used to that from the way I was brought up. And I just found that Judaism did it.
“I didn’t have to find my own gigs, I could already be in service to people that wanted to hear me. All of my skills were useful. I could improvise, I didn’t need it to be written down on sheet music, I could lead people in song.”
She grew up in a religious home attached to the Worldwide Church of God, an Adventist community whose founder believed in “British Israelism” – that the British were part of the Ten Lost Tribes. The church followed some of the practices of the Hebrew Bible.
“Unlike mainstream Christians, they kept shabbat on Saturday, they kept a version of kashrut – they didn’t eat pork or shellfish, they kept Succot by going to a hotel for a week because that was what a temporary dwelling meant to them. My family still does it.” But as a teenager, she was becoming restless. “I wanted a bigger life. I was looking for a kind of escape – not necessarily from the church. I didn’t want to leave the church, it was my whole world, it was my family, it was very important to me.”
Recording in her LA Studio
London did not disappoint. “It was culturally very intense. I thought I had grown up in a big city – I’d actually grown up in a suburb of LA called Pasadena and moving to London was the biggest cultural shock of my life to that point,” she laughs, “maybe ever.”
Having arrived at 18, she emerged with a bachelor’s degree in violin performance from the Royal Academy of Music in 2010, followed by a Master’s from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and then another year at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in Greenwich.
The Worldwide Church of God had UK branches and she would go there. But in the 1990s her church had undergone a change in direction, leading it to become closer to other Christian denominations. “People like my parents weren’t happy with those changes,” she says. “So I was brought up in a church I was told not to believe in while being told what I should believe, so I went in search of what I thought might actually be more similar to what I did believe and which I kept, which happened to be Judaism. I was actually searching – I didn’t know I was in the process of leaving.”
Band practice
By the time she was 26, she had left. At Central, she befriended “a lovely young couple. She taught me Hebrew in exchange for helping her husband sing Friday night kiddush better.”
But she found something missing in the Orthodox community. “Where’s the female leadership?” She thought. So instead she started going to the (Masorti) New North London Synagogue, in particular to its egalitarian Assif minyan.
“I thought that that was just so beautiful,” she says. “I think I started wanting to be a cantor then. I’m not necessarily a singalong person but I like leading the singalong.”
When she returned to the States in 2015, it was “because I was dating a friend, Aaron, that I knew from here. He couldn’t move to the UK and I couldn’t do any more study to allow for a student visa. I moved back to see if we were going to break up or get married.”
She converted, and married Aaron. When she was pregnant with the first of their two children, she underwent a second conversion, this time to Sephardic Orthodox.
‘My husband is Egyptian-Jewish and when we started dating, it became apparent to me that he felt badly about the Ashkenormativity in the United States,” she says. “His family moved from Egypt to France under Nasser – they got kicked out in the 1960s, [then] moved to the States. They felt the Ashkenazim here regarded them as non-Jewish because they spoke Judeo-Arabic.
“So they decided, we’re not Egyptian, we’re French. We are going to put up a little Christmas tree in the window and we’re not going to pass down of any our languages to our kids. [Aaron] knew he was Jewish but he didn’t really know much more than that. When he became religious, he decided he wanted to speak the Hebrew he remembered his grandparents speaking, with wavs instead of vavs.”
She accompanied him on the reclamation of his heritage. Discovering some sheet music from Alexandria, she has learned to chant the Torah Egyptian-style.
Having sung as a cantorial soloist in synagogues since 2020, she now has a position with a Conservative congregation, Hamakom in LA, where she is musical director. She still teaches violin freelance, plays in a string quartet at weddings and has recorded three albums that display her musical versatility.
“I have always taught classical music but people know me for being able to throw me into anything. I grew up with jazz, pop and new Americana. I minored in jazz at the Academy so I have never been a strictly classical person,” she says.
Her last, mostly instrumental, album, released in 2021, has a Hebrew title, Yaladati – meaning “I have given birth” – as have all its tracks. She embarked on it because she feared losing her creative self in motherhood and wanted to prove otherwise.
Her album Haladati was released in 2021
She has written settings for prayers but delving into the repertoire of the Jewish past, she says, “I’ve been finding my compositions aren’t needed. There is so much to preserve, so much that is being lost that’s really beautiful, amazing music. I think a lot of people have gotten quite caught up in this idea that they need to write, they need to create new music for it to be meaningful. I think I used to feel that way, I don’t any more.”
As a musician, she says, “I like slow and sad stuff, which works quite well for Jewish music. But you can’t do an entire service of slow and sad, so it’s a good mix of contemplative and upbeat feels. Like every Jewish music tradition, we follow the country’s music that we are in. So our music feels very American.”
As far as is known, she will be only the second black Jewish person in the USA to receive ordination as a cantor, following David Fair of Temple Sinai, New Jersey, according to the Jewish News of North California. (There was the phenomenon in pre-war USA of African-Americans performing Yiddish songs and cantorial music to Jewish audiences – but that’s another story.)
Within the American Jewish community, she has found “there is an intention to be accepting and welcoming and diverse. But it’s hard to make that intention reality when it is not the reality. When I walk into a room, mostly everybody is white or white-presenting – and that comes with its own layers and assumptions.”
Undergoing the now requisite diversity training with other cantors, she said, “It’s uncomfortable – not that I don’t have things to learn or that I am perfect at it – I’m definitely not. But it’s hard to sit through when you are noticeably different from the rest.”
She actually found it “easier to live as a mixed person in the UK. I didn’t feel so boxed or that I needed to explain – that I have a black parent and a white parent.
“In the UK, people wanted to know if your black family is from Guyana or from Ghana or Nigeria. That was kind of cool. Also a little devastating – I don’t know, because so many Americans don’t know unless they do a DNA test.”
It’s nice to think that her experience of UK synagogues helped a talented musician to find her vocation.
“It would be amazing to go back now and visit the synagogues I went to on my journey to Judaism,” she says. “I am sure I would cry.”
