Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of klezmer, an instrumental music genre of Ashkenazi Jews.
Klezmer
The Latest
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Music Meet the musicians turning old Yiddish poems into 21st-century songs
Two new albums reimagine a centuries-old tradition of adapting poetry to music
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Culture The Extraordinary Life Of Leopold Kozlowski, The Last Klezmer Of Galicia
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Leopold Kozlowski, the last active musician to have grown up playing traditional Jewish music in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, died March 12 in Krakow at the age of 100. A world-renowned expert on Jewish music and a teacher who trained generations of klezmer musicians and Yiddish…
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Music Klezmer Revivalists Hail The Lords Of The ‘Tanz!’
In 1955, just when klezmer was about to end its half-century-long run as a viable commercial and creative outlet for immigrant-era Jewish musicians and a few younger instrumentalists who took up their torch, the great Ukrainian-born clarinetist Dave Tarras recorded one more album at the urging and with the creative guidance of his son-in-law, Sam…
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Culture Listen To The Entire Yiddish Repertoire — At Once!
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Most American Jews recognize at most two or three Yiddish songs: “Afn Pripetshik,” “Tumbalalaika” and perhaps “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn.” American Jews who grew up speaking Yiddish, however, can recognize dozens of others such as “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen,” “Afn Veg Shteyt A Boym” and so forth. Fans…
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Music ‘Yiddish Under The Stars’ Turns Central Park Into Fabulous ‘Panoply Of Sounds’
Central Park’s annual SummerStage Festival, typically the domain of Americana artists like Rhiannon Giddens, rap veterans including Public Enemy, indie rock legends such as the Feelies, latter-day folkies like the Indigo Girls, jazz artists including McCoy Tyner and Roy Haynes, and Afropop stars such as King Sunny Adé, took on a decidedly Ashkenazic tinge last…
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Culture With a New Director, Klezkanada Looks to the Future
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Since its founding in 1996, more than 10,000 people have attended Klezkanada, the annual festival of Jewish culture and Klezmer music held in Quebec’s Laurentian mountains. Despite Klezkanada’s ambitious scale (besides music it features theatrical workshops, Yiddish classes, creative writing seminars and concerts), the organization never had…
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Culture A Yiddish Cruise on the Danube
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The longtime editor of the Bundist journal Lebns-Fragn and an Israel-correspondent for the Forverts, Yitzhak Luden z”l, used to say that Yiddish today outside of the Hasidic world is a language mainly spoken at festivals. Soon we’ll be able to say that it’s also spoken on river…
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Yiddish World Klezmer Singer Daniel Kahn’s Unique Celebration Of Engagement To Dancer Eva Lapsker
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the traditional Jewish betrothal ceremony (called tnoyim in Yiddish), the bride and groom barely play a role. The parents of both sides draw up a document detailing all the prenuptial conditions; the parents then sign that document, alongside two “kosher” witnesses. But at the recent engagement…
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