- Christian Dawid - Berlin-based, world-renowned klezmer clarinet player - explains that he likes Yiddish for its "roughness" and the ways in which it can be both beautiful and obscene.
Part of Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project Excerpts
- Hankus Netsky tells us about his recent book Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia, a portrait of the folk music and traditions of the city’s Jewish community.
Part of The Shmooze Podcast Series
- Yidstock program director Seth Rogovoy discusses Yidstock 2013 - from the opening concert with the Klezmer Conservatory Band to the Yidstock All-stars closing concert, and other events that will take place at Yidstock 2013.
Part of The Shmooze Podcast Series
- Rachel Weston, London-based singer with a particular interest in Yiddish song, reflects on the Klezmer revival as it relates to Yiddish as dichotomous to nationalism. She describes how Yiddish is opposite, alternate, and powerful in its suggestion...
Part of Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project Excerpts
- Henri Oppenheim, klezmer musician based in Montreal, describes the process that led him to his album "Tur Malka," if which he sets Yiddish poetry to music. He recalls how he found the poetry of Chava Rosenfarb, and his surprise at receiving a grant...
Part of Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project Excerpts
- Henri Oppenheim, klezmer musician based in Montreal, critiques the focus on lyrical content in Yiddish music over musical experience. He considers this to reflect prejudice about the purpose of Jewish music, and seeks to make Yiddish music that...
Part of Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project Excerpts
- Jerry Weinstein, former Education professor at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, describes how he learned to play piano in the Klezmer style so that he could play gigs with his musician father, and reflects on how proud this made his father.
Part of Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project Excerpts
- Jeff Warschauer talks about his interactions with the elderly Jewish community in Boston in the 1980s. Every Thursday evening he would go to meetings in apartment buildings where many Jews lived and there would play klezmer music and speak Yiddish...
Part of Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project Excerpts
- Tine Kindermann - German artist, convert to Judaism, and wife of prominent klezmer musician Frank London - discusses the ways in which Germany has tried to cope with the Holocaust, yet is also aware that Germany can never really overcome its past.
Part of Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project Excerpts
- Adrienne Cooper z"l talks about her daughter, Klezmer musician Sarah Gordon, growing up in the Yiddish world and her early exposure to Yiddish culture. She describes her daughter at the age of four sitting at Max Weinreich's desk in YIVO,...
Part of Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project Excerpts
