This is the Forward’s coverage of klezmer, an instrumental music genre of Ashkenazi Jews.
Klezmer
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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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The Schmooze WATCH: Japanese Gymnast Performs Rio Routine — to Klezmer Music
American Olympic gymnasts Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas aren’t the only ones in Rio with a Jewish connection. On Tuesday, 16-year-old Sae Miyakawa of Japan performed her floor routine to a klezmer arrangement of the song “Kol HaOlam Kulo,” which was written by founder of the Hasidic Breslov movement Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. Though the…
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Culture How Alicia Svigals Helped Me Go Public With My Klezmer Obsession
A master violinist was giving her star pupil a lesson one hot and humid summer day. The student’s instrument, sensitive to both heat and humidity, kept sliding out of tune as the student played the difficult piece. “The notes! Play the right notes!” The master cried, as the student’s sweat beaded on his furrowed brow….
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Music Excavating Lost Pre-War Klezmer Recordings
Ever since the beginning of the klezmer revival in the 1970s, music critics and musicians have wondered just how close to its European roots the music they were performing is. The musicians of the 1970s had access to only two sources from which to learn: the few still-living musicians, such as clarinetist Dave Tarras, and…
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Music How Michael Alpert Brought Klezmer Into the 21st Century
The scent of herring; owlish spectacles; dusty, tragedy-laden archives; scratchy vinyl records you wouldn’t want your friends to know about — these are the things one sometimes associates with Yiddish culture. For more than three decades, Michael Alpert has worked hard on preserving and reviving an Eastern European Jewish tradition that is precisely the opposite…
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The Schmooze Hasidic Stars Bring Yiddish Soul to Central Park
It’s as if the rain knew to stop precisely at 6 o’clock. After one of the wettest days of the month, the sky turned from gray to blue, the clouds parted for the last hour of Tuesday sun, and Yiddish Soul took the stage at Central Park’s Rumsey Playfield. The concert, a showcase of cantorial…
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The Schmooze Tokyo Meets the Lower East Side at Kulturfest
It would have taken the fanciful imagination of a writer like Haruki Murakami or Salman Rushdie to have invented a scrappy quartet of Japanese musicians who play a punk-rock infused brand of Ching Dong — a style of Japanese street music roughly analogous to New Orleans parade band music — until one day the leader…
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