Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of klezmer, an instrumental music genre of Ashkenazi Jews.
Klezmer
The Latest
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Yiddish World Japanese Students Learn Traditional Yiddish Dances
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Dr. Walter Zev Feldman, a leading researcher of Turkish and Jewish music and an exquisite dancer, visited Japan this year with his wife Dr. Judit Frigyesi – a writer, artist and professor of musicology at Bar Ilan University. The couple lectured as part of a symposium at…
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Yiddish World LISTEN: Catalan Nationalist Song’s Popular Yiddish Translation
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Catalonia might not be the place that comes to mind when you think of Yiddish, but a Yiddish version of an unofficial Catalonian independence anthem is now gaining popularity. On October 1, residents of Catalonia will vote on a historic referendum to decide if their region should…
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Yiddish World Yiddish Summer Weimar Will Highlight the Cultures of Israel
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This year the theme of the annual festival, Yiddish Summer Weimar, will be “The Other Israel: Seeing Unseen Diasporas.” Besides its usual programming the five-week celebration of Ashkenazi culture will also include a series of concerts and workshops dedicated to the various cultures of Israel and the…
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Yiddish World Acclaimed Yiddish Folksinger Arkady Gendler Dies at Age 95
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The legendary Yiddish folksinger, folklorist and teacher, Arkady Gendler, died at the venerable age of 95 at his home in the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhe on May 22nd. Gendler, a constant ebullient presence at klezmer music festivals around the world, played an important role in the modern…
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Culture Klezmer Is Alive And Well — And These 5 Recordings Prove It
There’s a branch of musical discourse, typified by the neo-classical puritanism of Wynton Marsalis, that likes to distinguish between “real” jazz and “fake” jazz. The “real” or “genuine” or “authentic” is almost always, as you would guess, the old – the “fake” or “inauthentic” being, of course, newer sounds. It’s distinction that, for me, misses something…
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Culture Why a 400-Year-Old Jewish Music Tradition Continues To Thrive
Klezmer, the Eastern European musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews, is constantly evolving. Played by musicians called klezmorim at weddings and other celebrations, it has enjoyed a world revival in recent years. The musician and researcher Walter Zev Feldman, an expert on Jewish and Ottoman Turkish music, is Visiting Professor of Music at NYU Abu…
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Culture How Klezmer Music Refutes Richard Wagner’s Myth of Racial Purity
The art world has always been a bastion of globalism, with artists constantly borrowing from one another to create new, previously inconceivable works. In our increasingly anti-globalist, anti-immigrant time, it is important to remember that many of the artistic works that we hold dear would not have been possible without centuries of cultural exchange. Few…
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Culture Bringing Jewish Music Back From the Ashes of Kristallnacht
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. When Hirsch Lewin was deported from Germany in 1940 after six months of suffering in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he could not have imagined that seventy-six years later, musicians in Berlin would release an album of the music he had produced. Even when Lewin founded his record…
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