Rokhl Kafrissen
By Rokhl Kafrissen
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The Schmooze With ‘Jews on Vinyl’ You Can Have Your Kitsch and Eat It, Too
“Jews on Vinyl,” an unusual museum exhibit focused on the recent Jewish past, has arrived at the Yeshiva University Museum after touring the West Coast for two years. The exhibit is a project of the Reboot Stereophonic non-profit record label, and is based on the 2008 book “And You Shall Know Us by the Trail…
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The Schmooze Jewish Identity at the Crossroads of Race, Religion and Revolution
Trish McCall, Dan Bielinski and Marcus Naylor in ‘Under the Cross.’ Photo by Louis Zweibel. This summer New York remains the center of Yiddish theater. Audiences looking for a lighthearted romp can go see Hershele Ostropolye (in Yiddish) at the Folksbiene. Those looking for a grittier Yiddish theater experience can head to Midtown and see…
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The Schmooze A Picture Out of Focus
Is Broadway ready for dancing girls in the Warsaw ghetto? Can an American musical high kick through the darkest moments of Jewish history and still avoid giving offense, or worse, falling into kitsch? “The People in the Picture,” a new musical playing at the Roundabout theater until June 19, raises this question, treading where even…
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Culture The Clock Strikes Now for the New Klezmer Wave
There’s a new sound in Jewish music. It’s coming from young musicians with one foot in Brooklyn and the other on klezmer’s silk road through Europe: Paris, Berlin, Krakow, Budapest and points east. These musicians have bands with cheeky names, like Yiddish Princess and Electric Simcha, and they’ve come of age in a cultural landscape…
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The Schmooze Its Bookstore May Be on the Rocks, But All Is Not Lost in Yiddishland
The Central Yiddish Culture Organization (CYCO), a Manhattan based non-for-profit outfit dedicated to the promotion and development of Yiddish literature, is in trouble. CYCO, and its inventory of 55,000 Yiddish books is being kicked out of its current home. Given that the income from book sales could not possibly pay market rent on a new…
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Opinion The ‘Revival’ Is Over, Let’s Talk Continuity
In 1979, when Henry Sapoznik founded the klezmer band Kapelye, he was among a cohort of passionate young musicians, musicologists and cultural workers who sought to reclaim Eastern European Jewish music and link themselves to still-living masters of that tradition. It was hard work. Relatively little had been done to preserve or transmit the culture…
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Culture The New Face of Yiddish Theater
In 1996, Shane Baker looked like just another New York City cliché: a young gay man, recently arrived in the Big Apple from Kansas City, Mo., waiting tables at Tavern on the Green and planning his entry into the world of New York theater. But Baker’s story was unusual, even for New York. A Yiddish-speaking…
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Culture Partisan or Parasite?
Earlier this month, the 90th birthday of folk legend Pete Seeger drew 15,000 people to New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The sold-out show demonstrated the legacy, and continuing vitality, of the American protest-song tradition, a tradition that was born in the Great Depression and gave rise to some of the fiercest critiques of modern…
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