Alexander Gelfand
By Alexander Gelfand
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News Songbook Recaptures Lost Melodies
Heard any good Yiddish folksongs lately? Chances are good that the answer is “no.” Not because there aren’t any good Yiddish folksongs to be heard; for generations, the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe sang innumerable songs about love and loss, death and marriage. They sang to their children to soothe them to sleep, and they…
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News Symposium Seeks To Save Yiddish Dance
Most academic symposia don’t offer a steady supply of cold beer and hot pirogi. Fewer still offer the chance to see Michael Alpert, frontman for the progressive klezmer band Brave Old World, dancing on a chair. The first-ever Yiddish Dance Symposium had both. The bulk of the symposium, which was chaired by Alpert and by…
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Culture A Tale of Three Cities: Sephardic Music From New York, Amsterdam and London
When my wife and I briefly moved to Portland, Ore., a decade ago, one of the first things we did was shop around for a synagogue. Despite our Ashkenazic roots, we eventually settled on Ahavath Achim, a Sephardic congregation that offered a perfect trifecta of friendly people, good food and beautiful music. The melodies used…
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Culture A Musical Midrashist
Composer Michael Isaacson has returned to his roots — and not quietly. In the 1960s, Isaacson helped instigate the American Jewish camp song movement before moving on to a career writing music for film and television — composing the themes for “Days of Our Lives,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “The Bionic Woman.” Eventually, Isaacson returned to…
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Culture Israel’s Jazz Messengers
No one who has bought a Pesek Zman chocolate bar in the East Village or eavesdropped on a Hebrew conversation on the Upper West Side would be surprised to learn that New York City has a healthy Israeli expatriate community. But how many know that Israelis have come to occupy a prominent place on the…
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Culture Lenny Bruce’s Mild-Mannered Heirs
Let’s start this week with a pop culture quiz. Lenny Bruce was: (a) A very funny guy (b) A fearless champion of First Amendment rights (c) God To many of his devotees, the answer is “all of the above.” You have to wonder, though, just how many of those who attended the second annual “Homage…
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Culture The Jewish Gypsy
He is a resident of Seville who has devoted his life to preserving Gypsy music and dance from southern Spain. He founded an ensemble for that purpose, whose Spanish title means “art and purity.” And his name is… Ethan Margolis. So what’s a nice Jewish boy from the Midwest doing running a traditional flamenco group,…
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Culture The Anti-‘Fiddler’
It presents nine actors playing dozens of roles, including a stone gargoyle and a deceased bride. It has an onstage band featuring accordion and tuba, costumes by fashion designer and recovering Lubavitch Levi Okunov, and spooky animation by artists Tine Kindermann and Mor Erlich. And that’s just the beginning. The latest adaptation of I.L. Peretz’s…
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