Cantor, Banter and Song in Encino

One mixes Yiddish humor with traditional cantorial music.

The other goes Broadway.

Together, Herschel and Judy Fox offer an evening of comedy and song stretching across cultures and generations. On Sunday, they perform in concert at Valley Beth Shalom synagogue in Encino.

Herschel Fox has been the temple’s cantor for 10 years; his wife has served in the same capacity for nine years at the Temple for the Performing Arts in Westwood. They met in 1979. Judy fell in love twice--with her future husband and with the traditional Jewish music she had learned as a child. Her professional career had taken a different twist--as a singer, she briefly opened for Rodney Dangerfield at his New York club--but she soon returned to her roots.

“My grandfather was a cantor in Hungary; my great-grandfather was a rabbi,” Judy Fox said. “It’s just something that touches my heart.”

She is part of a growing tendency among Jewish women to enter formerly closed roles in synagogue life. Until late in the last decade, only the Reform movement--the least traditional in Judaism--accepted women as cantors. But now Conservative temples allow women to sing the prayers.

“There’s more of a concept of an egalitarian service,” Herschel Fox said. “Within 25 years, there will be more women cantors than male cantors.”

The Foxes will sing a few songs together and also do solo material. Elliott Finkel, who has provided musical backing for such performers as Ginger Rogers and Barbra Streisand, will lead a seven-piece orchestra. Fox said he will attempt to give the audience a sense of what Jewish cantorial music sounded like in the early years of the 20th Century.

“The synagogue music is more Western today,” said Fox, 45. “More and more cantorial music today sounds like you’re listening to the radio. There was a certain crying out then that came out and touched the soul.”

He will also tell some Yiddish jokes.

“There is a tremendous passionate Jewish life that exists in that language,” Fox said.

Added his wife: “Some people shied away from Yiddish after World War II; they didn’t want to talk about those days. But enough time has gone by now, and the joy of that language is coming back.”

Judy Fox will revive another object of nostalgia--Broadway show tunes. At every concert, she said, she gets requests and obliges the audience. She sings songs from “A Chorus Line,” “Evita” and “Cats.”

“People always want to hear me sing English,” she said. “I get criticism when I don’t. I usually do a Broadway medley.”

Herschel and Judy Fox will perform at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Valley Beth Shalom synagogue, 15739 Ventura Blvd., Encino. Tickets are $15 to $30. For information, call (818) 788-6000.