Leonard Bernstein (1918–90)—the now-legendary composer and conductor—had deep roots among Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Boston. This volume of essays explores aspects of that personal and sociocultural experience as revealed through an intensive team-research seminar at Harvard University during the spring semester of 2006. Titled “Before West Side Story: Leonard Bernstein's Boston,” the course positioned Bernstein within interlocking local networks, primarily during the 1930s and early 1940s. Its aim was not to prepare a standard biographical narrative, but rather to interrogate the synergy between an individual and supportive communities, whether religious, ethnic, educational, or musical. Carol J. Oja and Kay Kaufman Shelemay designed and team-taught the seminar, guiding a group of nineteen graduate and undergraduate students in both fieldwork and archival research, and they timed it to precede “Leonard Bernstein: Boston to Broadway,” a major international festival and conference about Bernstein, which took place at Harvard in October 2006. By drawing on complementary methodologies and capitalizing on the multiple layers of activity made possible by such a large group of researchers, the students covered an extraordinary amount of turf in a short time, and they did so in innovative ways. As their work unfolded, intriguing insights emerged about the powerful, ongoing role played by Boston's Jewish immigrant community in shaping the identity and character of a man who was to become one of America's most illustrious musicians.

Leonard Bernstein is most often perceived as the quintessential New Yorker—music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969 and composer of Broadway shows that made New York their focus. Yet his grounding in the greater Boston area was powerful. He was born in 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and raised in various Jewish neighborhoods within Boston. The young Leonard went to Boston Latin, a prestigious public prep school, and graduated from Harvard in 1939.

This article explores a team research project, made up of Harvard graduate students and undergraduates, which delved into the urban subcultures and post-immigrant experiences that shaped Bernstein's youth and early adulthood. It considers the synergy between an individual and a community, and it examines the complexities of blending pedagogy with research, analyzing the multilayered methodologies and theoretical strategies that were employed.

Given Bernstein's iconic status, his life and career illuminate a broad range of questions about the nature of music in American society. Fusing the techniques of ethnographic and archival research, our team probed Bernstein's formative connections to Jewish traditions through his family synagogue (Congregation Mishkan Tefila), the ethnic geography that defined the Boston neighborhoods of his immigrant family, the network of young people involved in Bernstein's summer theatrical productions in Sharon, Massachusetts, during the 1930s, and the formative role of the city's musical venues and institutions in shaping Bernstein's lifelong campaign to collapse traditional distinctions between high and low culture.

This essay will place Leonard Bernstein within the context of the Boston Jewish community in which he was raised. It was at Boston's Congregation Mishkan Tefila, the family's synagogue, where Bernstein first encountered serious music. The essay places special emphasis on the role of Prof. Solomon Gregory Braslavsky, the music director and organist of Mishkan Tefila, whose influence on the young Bernstein was far greater than scholars have imagined. In 1973 Bernstein wrote to Braslavsky “[I] never forget the tremendous influence you and your music made on me when I was a youngster.” Bernstein, I contend, meant what he said.

This paper examines Bernstein's early relationship with Rhapsody in Blue, including his first encounter with the sheet music at age thirteen; a recently discovered whimsical arrangement of the work (scored for accordion, ukulele, and voice, among other instruments), written in response to Gershwin's death in the summer of 1937; and Bernstein's performances of the piece with the Works Progress Administration's State Symphony Orchestra in Boston in 1938 and 1939. From an early age, not only did Bernstein have a particular vision of how the Rhapsody should operate; he also identified deeply with it. These findings provide important new insights into Bernstein's later, more polemical interpretations of the work in both recordings and the concert hall—interpretations that have had profound implications on the reception of the Rhapsody on the global stage.

In spite of the publicity generated at times by the politics of the mature Leonard Bernstein, the roots of his entanglement with political causes have been little-explored. As part of a larger collaborative project investigating Bernstein's ties to Boston, this article traces his role in the Harvard Student Union's theatrical productions. These shows were important because they represented some of Bernstein's earliest efforts at writing and directing for the theater. Bernstein worked on two shows sponsored by the Union: the production of Marc Blitzstein's Cradle Will Rock in 1939, during Bernstein's senior year at Harvard, and that of Aristophanes' play Peace in 1941, two years after he graduated. Although the Harvard Student Union was a major progressive political force on campus, Bernstein's relationship with the group appears to have been surprisingly casual. Examination of archival materials surrounding the productions, as well as selected interviews from the larger collaborative Bernstein project of which this article is but one part, reveals Bernstein as a man who was primarily interested in the Harvard Student Union insofar as it was an organization amenable to supporting his musical activities. As the heat of Bernstein's celebrity cools with time, such findings are an important aid in avoiding drawing overly deterministic conclusions about the significance of Bernstein's affiliations while ignoring his own immediate aims, political or otherwise.

This article examines Leonard Bernstein's affiliation with Brandeis University, where he served as a faculty member from 1951 to 1956, a Fellow from 1956 to 1976, a Trustee from 1976 to 1980, and a Trustee Emeritus from 1980 until his death in 1990. In particular, the article explores why Bernstein chose to spend his time in Waltham. By the early 1950s he had already achieved celebrity and was busy with multiple conducting and composition projects; why did he commit to teaching at Brandeis and supporting the school until the end of his life? Bernstein's commitment to Brandeis appears to have been a manifestation of his ongoing connection and sense of duty to the Boston Jewish community of his childhood and, more specifically, to his father. This article summarizes Bernstein's activities at Brandeis, gives a brief history of the university, and discusses the ways in which Brandeis can be understood as an expression of Bernstein's ties to Boston's Jewish life, as well as to the Jewish immigrant experience of his parents and their generation.