More in ‘klezmer’

There’s a long tradition of Jews embracing others’ musical traditions. Some of these people—including perhaps the most famous example, the Jazz Age clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow (né Milton Mesirow), who fully renounced his Jewish heritage and identified as an African-American instead—were running away from something; namely, Jewish music and Jewish identity. Others, however, were running toward ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Marissa Brostoff presents 1920s cartoonist Milt Gross’s Yiddish-inflected version of “The Night Before Christmas”—“De Night in de Front from Chreesmas”—read by a Yiddish actor and accompanied by Gross’s drawings. Music columnist Alexander Gelfand profiles a klezmer quartet started by two brothers whose father lost his family in the Holocaust. David Lehman ...

When Cioma Schönhaus fled to Switzerland from Berlin on his bicycle in 1943—a story he tells in The Forger, a memoir of the four years he spent living by his wits as a Jew in the heart of wartime Germany—there wasn’t much that he could take with him. Not much that he could touch, at ...

For as long as I can remember, my father has made fun of Hasidim. In fact, he rarely uses that word; instead, he refers to the Hasidic Jews in my hometown of Montreal, who happen to be prominent in the textile and garbage-bag industries, as “garmentologists” or “garbologists.”
As a child, I thought this was a ...

Israeli-born musician Oran Etkin fell in love with jazz at age 10, when his parents gave him his first CD—a Louis Armstrong record. Later, he would fall in love with the clarinet, then with the polyrhythms of Malian music, and, later still, with the plaintive sounds of klezmer. In his new album Kelenia, ...

I used to love Passover. Now that I have two small children, I tend to rush through the seders, hoping to tie things up before bedtime. But when I was a child myself, I savored those long nights: the special foods, the table packed with visiting cousins, and the songs, many of which we only ...

In the early 1920s, Polish photographer Witold Chrominski took a panoramic shot of Szeroka Street, the central artery that leads into the main square of Krakow’s Jewish quarter, the Kazimierz. In the photo, the square is packed shoulder to shoulder with Jews, men in hats and long wool coats, women wrapped in shawls lugging stuffed shopping bags. It is a scene that bursts with life: you can hear the hum of conversations, the shuffling of weary feet, the shouts of vendors. Today, that same square bursts with a different kind of life and is mostly visited by tourists who’ve come to see the place that was once full of all of those Jews. It is a vibrant place these days, to be sure, but when you stand in the middle of it and think of that photograph, the square’s enduring emptiness is stunning.

Eve Sicular is the founder of and drummer for the bands Metropolitan Klezmer and Isle of Klezbos, but her new work offers much more than traditional music. It’s called J. Edgar Klezmer – Songs from My Grandmother’s FBI Files. In the show, Eve combines archival materials, spoken word, and original songs from a variety ...

A few months ago, I performed a Jewish cultural showcase, a variety show with somewhere around 20 different acts”a chick folksinger, a boy band, an Orthodox kid with big bushy payes doing poetry—where, except for the fact that they’re Jewish, the performers have nothing in common.
There’s always plenty of speech-making going on at these things, ...

Some people love conferences. Me, not so much. The last time I set foot in one was nearly a decade ago, and it was not a happy experience.
I had gone to Austin, Texas, to read a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and seeing so many musicologists at close range ...