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Klezmer-rock band Golem has been reinterpreting Yiddish and East European Jewish music for the 21st century since 2000. YIVO Public Program Director Helena Gindi spoke with founder and lead singer of the band, Annette Ezekiel Kogan, about Golem’s latest album, Tanz, which was released on May 13 on the Mexican label Discos Corason.

Golem’s CD release party for Tanz will be held at Joe’s Pub on May 29, 2014.

Listen to clips from Tanz on Golem’s website.

On Sunday, May 4, 2014 at 3:00pm, YIVO will present Open Secret: The Jewish Sound in Soviet Music, as part of its ongoing Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series.

Before World War II, the Soviet Union was the only country in the world to officially promote Jewish music. After World War II, Soviet authorities declared that Jewish music did not exist. Yet all along, major Soviet composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Miecyzslaw Weinberg, and Mikhail Gnesin found deep inspiration in the sounds of Ashkenazi Jewish folk music. How did these composers manage to weave Jewish themes into some of the most stirring music of postwar Soviet society? How did they personally navigate the ongoing strictures of artistic censorship and the periodic cycles of antisemitic repression?

In this YIVO event, Professor James Loeffler, Yuval Waldman and the young artists of the Krum Concert Series will explore these questions through a unique pairing of music and words. In a blended lecture-concert, they will present several works including Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, Mikhail Gnesin's Piano Trio in Memory of Our Perished Children, and Miecyzslaw Weinberg's Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes for violin and piano.

Attend the event. 

James Loeffler is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia. He also serves as Scholar-in-Residence at the Pro Musica Hebraica Foundation and as Academic Vice Co-Chair of the Jewish Music Forum of the American Society for Jewish Music. His first book, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire was published by Yale University Press in 2010. It received awards from the Association for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP). In 2013-2014, he is Dean's Visiting Scholar on the Andrew Mellon Foundation New Foundations Fellowship at the Georgetown University Law Center. There he is working on a book about Jews, Israel, and international human rights.

Born in Russia and educated in Israel, the United States and Europe, Yuval Waldman has enjoyed great success as a violinist, conductor, and educator. Waldman has appeared as a soloist with orchestras in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel and given recitals at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall in London, and Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. In 2005, Maestro Waldman founded Music Bridges International, to foster cross-cultural music exchange programs that feature the music of different countries. Under the Music Bridges banner, he organized the successful Young Artsist Strings Competition at the “Tchaikovsky’s Homeland” Center in Izhevsk/Votkinsk, Russia.

James Loeffler is interviewed here by Yedies editor, Roberta Newman.

On Thursday, April 24, YIVO will present “What Now? Jews and the Ukrainian Revolution 2014,” a conversation with Josef Zissels, the preeminent leader of Ukraine’s Jewish community, and moderator, David Fishman. Zissels and Fishman will discuss the political situation in Ukraine today, Ukraine’s relationship to Russia and the European Union (EU), and what Ukrainian Jews and minorities can expect from the new government.

Read Josef Zissels's speech at Maidan.
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YIVO Public Program Director Helena Gindi interviewed David Fishman, professor of Jewish History at The Jewish Theological Seminary about the situation in Ukraine.

by LEAH FALK The best parts of the Yiddish past are fragile: a yellowing installment of a serialized novel in Der tog, a barely legible handwritten letter, a fragment of song passed down from mother to daughter. Ruth Rubin, the celebrated scholar, singer, and collector of Yiddish folk music, knew how ...

YIVO presents a panel discussion with European Union Parliament Member, Dr. Leonidas Donskis; award-winning writer and political dissident, Tomas Venclova; Faina Kukliansky, Chair and advocate for the Lithuanian Jewish Community; Saulius Sužiedėlis, of Millersville University; and Mikhail Iossel of Concordia University.

By JENNIFER YOUNG and LEAH FALK

The YIVO-Bard Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization recently celebrated its third anniversary, as YIVO welcomed its largest ever Winter Program cohort, seventy students, who took part in eight morning, afternoon, and evening classes over three weeks this past January.

As always, the Winter Program attracted students of all ages, professional backgrounds, and perspectives: rabbinical students, teachers, social workers, lawyers, and architects shared classrooms with novelists, young historians, psychoanalysts, and genealogists.  Our faculty mirrored our student diversity, representing NYU, Columbia, Wesleyan, Trinity, Rutgers, the New School, and even YIVO itself.

by SARAH PONICHTERA As is appropriate for this time of year, we’ll begin with a look back and end with a gaze ahead. The annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies met in Boston in mid-December, featuring several panels on Yiddish topics, including Yiddish in the twentieth century, and new ...

On January 15, 2014, at 7 pm, Yiddish musicianBenjy Fox-Rosen will release Two Worlds/ Tsvey Veltn (Golden Horn Records),a new song cycle based on the poetry of master Yiddish and Polish writer Mordechai Gebirtig (1877-1942) at a concert at  YIVO, co-presented with the American Society for Jewish Music and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance.

He was recently interviewed by Leah Falk.

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YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent's review of Seth Lipsky’s newly published biography of Abraham Cahan, founder of the Forward, was published in the latest issue of Moment Magazine.

On October 11, Jonathan traveled to Vilnius to participate in a meeting of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania. The Commission is a member of the European Union’s Platform of European Memory and Conscience and is charged with researching the crimes of both the Nazi and the Soviet occupations of Lithuania beginning in 1940, with the aim of creating accurate historical narratives. As a member of the commission, Jonathan’s  specific role will be to work with the sub-group devoted to the crimes of Stalinism in Lithuania.

On Tuesday, November 19, 2013, The Klezmatics will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at YIVO’s 88th Annual Benefit Dinner and will perform excerpts of a work-in-progress based on the Letters to Afar installation by Péter Forgács and The Klezmatics, (featuring YIVO’s unique collection of Polish Jewish home movies from the 1930s) at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Péter Forgács will also be at the event.

The Klezmatics are world-renowned superstars of klezmer. Since their emergence from New York City’s East Village in 1986, they have revitalized Yiddish music for the 21st century. The band has helped to change the face of contemporary Yiddish culture, not least through their career-long research and use of materials found in the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings. They have performed in more than 20 countries, released ten acclaimed albums and served as the subject of a feature-length documentary film, The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground.

On October 9, 2013, The Klezmatics’ lead vocalist Lorin Sklamberg, who is also YIVO’s Sound Archivist, was interviewed by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman. (This is the second of a 2-part series.)