by Ari [➚] · Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
The brilliant French graphic novelist Joann Sfar has released a second Jewish-oriented book, “Klezmer: Book 1: Tales of the Wild East”. (You may remember his “The Rabbi’s Cat,” about the feline companion to a North African Rabbi of a hundred years ago, a tribute to the Sephardic side of Sfar’s family.)
It’s the sort of imaginative, post-vernacular hash of early 20th century eastern europe that owes as much to graphic novel serials like “bone” as to actual Jewish history or humor. But, unlike, say, the trite, hobbit-like hash inflicted upon users by Jonathan Foer in “Everything is Illuminated,” Sfar has both storytelling and Jewish chops with which to work. And, given the medium, everything is illuminated.
You can read more about it on the KlezmerShack: www.klezmershack.com
by Ari [➚] · Wednesday, August 16th, 2006
So, here’s my current excuse for not posting for ages:
On Wednesday last week, the Jewish Women’s Archive launched an exciting (to me as a staffmember, especially) new project called “Katrina’s Jewish Voices.” The project lets us dive into something we call “online collecting” – the ability of individual people to participate in an exhibit by contributing their own images, documents, thoughts, media files, etc. It also lets viewers of the exhibit, as well as participants, do something that is increasingly common elsewhere in the web world: tag items, as well as to store favorites onsite.
As an archive dedicated to uncovering, chronicling, and transmitting Jewish women’s experiences, it is especially exciting to be extending the concept of “archive” beyond the limits imposed by internal resources and whatever selection process. And, by having this particular archive address the stories of both men and women, we are able to focus on the issue itself—the history of Jewish communities along the Gulf Coast, as well as the changes hastened or created by the impact of Hurricane Katrina last year (yahrzeit in two weeks).
Members of the Jewish community in New Orleans and across the country may now contribute their stories and photographs to an interactive website and browse the existing collection. Documents such as emails describing people’s experiences of evacuation, resettlement, and rebuilding efforts; photos of their homes and businesses; High Holiday and Shabbat sermons; and blogs and web pages are all important parts of the historical record.
Here’s the press release part: ‘If there is one message JWA wants to communicate, it is DON’T DELETE ITEMS—CONTRIBUTE THEM! “We encourage everyone to search their computers for materials they think may be of interest,†says Jayne Guberman, the archive’s Director of Oral History. “We can accept any digital file or people can type in their story directly.†Contributors can categorize, or tag, their items with search terms ranging from “dreidel†to “displacement†and “acts of heroism†to “Katrina fatigue.‒
‘JWA has also partnered with the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Mississippi on the oral history component that complements the website. Dr. Rosalind Hinton, project oral historian, will conduct 100 digital video interviews with members of the local Jewish communities. The public is invited to suggest names of family, friends and colleagues by using the nomination form at www.jwa.org/research/kjv.’
Do come visit katrina.jwa.org and let us know what you think!
by Ari [➚] · Thursday, May 4th, 2006
When Jane Jacobs passed away a couple of weeks ago, I was among the many people who assumed that she was Jewish. I had even met her at a Klezmer concert. But then we began researching her family history for an “In Memoriam” piece on the Jewish Women’s Archive and discovered what I had begun to suspect: she wasn’t Jewish. It wasn’t even a matter of claiming as Wikipedia and the JTA (probably based on the Wikipedia article) do, that she was of Jewish parentage (the name came from her husband who appears to have been Catholic – her maiden name was Butzner, a name not associated with Judaism in her hometown of Scranton, PA).
Who knew? (If anyone has more information, I’d love to hear it – I never heard or read her speak to religion more specifically than to espouse atheism.)
But, she was still a remarkable woman who raised hell and changed the way we understand cities for the better.
by Ari [➚] · Thursday, May 4th, 2006
For the last few years I have been aware of a group of people doing some very interesting work putting American Jewish Women’s stories on the Internet. Sometimes that means being the only source of detailed information on someone famous (or famous among women) such as Molly Picon or Emma Goldman or Bella Abzug. Sometimes that means telling the stories of contemporary communities (Baltimore Stories, Seattle Stories, the forthcoming Katrina’s Jewish Voices), contemporary women (Women Who Dared)—including those who have recently passed, and contemporary movements (Jewish women and feminism).
For the last few months, I’ve been on the staff of the Jewish Women’s Archive, so if I was ever unbiased, I am certainly biased now. But it’s really neat to see how the JWA has influenced individuals (most popular pages? people we presume are high schoolers hooking up with the Emma Lazarus pages) and the ways in which the lives of Jewish women are incorporated into teaching history, and Jewish history. Still a lot more to do, but we’re not going anywhere—it’s the day after, and we’re back at work. There will be more birthday parties during the course of the year—probably NYC in November, and some other events tba.
You can hook up to the flickr photo display, or read the online guestbook at birthday.jwa.org. You can also read a great blog post by my predecessor at JWA, Jen Spadafora describing what the event meant to her.
For me, it was great being in a room full of very excited, very energized people, who were as happy to celebrate a 10th birthday of an organization whose work matters so much as to find themselves in the crowded, extraordinarily diverse company of similarly-minded people. My job at the party, in fact, was to find people who looked lost, or bored, and to talk with them. There weren’t any.
So, pardon the boast and shout out to my employers and fellow staff, but a good time was had by all and it’s worth mentioning to the Jewish world (and to the world) at large.
by Ari [➚] · Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
I am sorry to report on the death of Jane Jacobs, a woman whose influence on my own life was profound, but not nearly so profound as the revolution in urban planning that followed her 1961 book, “Death and Life of Great American Cities.” She followed that with a life of activism and additional writing.
In the late 1950s/early 1960s, Jacobs also led a coalition that stopped Robert Moses’ plans to run freeways through Washington Square NYC. It is one of the few areas that he did not succeed in turning to concrete wasteland.
In 1967, after a demonstration at the Pentagon, and with her own children approaching draft age, she and her husband picked up and moved to Toronto where she immediately became known for stopping yet another freeway (the proposed Spadina Freeway) from destroying downtown neighborhoods. The city ultimately honored her with a conference on her work which included everything from an exhibit of her drawings at the Art Gallery of Ontario to an actual celebration of new urban planning (or anti-planning).
I met her in person at a Flying Bulgars concert in Toronto a decade ago and treasure that short meeting. She was everyone’s dream of a wonderful Jewish grandmother, although she, herself, considered herself a more general atheist. When I discovered her writing a couple of years later, I was most blown away by how much of what she wrote about good physical city planning applied directly to the online community work that I had done over the preceding two decades.
Goodbye, Jane, and thanks for the insights and activism. A better role model would be hard to find. Her memory will certainly be a blessing.
More complete obituaries can be found on the Toronto Star, or at the Planet Netizen (great community planning) site.
by Ari [➚] · Tuesday, February 21st, 2006
Here’s the backstory. George Eliot is friends with/admires Benjamin Disraeli, the British politician of Jewish descent who is the prime minister who buys the Suez Canal for good ol’ England. She writes a novel, Daniel Deronda, which features a sympathetic Jewish character.
This isn’t unique. Rebecca Gratz is widely thought to be the inspiration for the character Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe”. And, of course, the grandfather of the “Jew as human being like all of us, maybe even wiser” genre of literature is Gotthold Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise.” The inspiration here is Moses Mendelsohn, grandfather of Felix and Fanny, godfather to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement that signaled the collision between European Judaism and modernity.
I’ve read Ivanhoe many times. Outside of Stefan Heym and Heinrich Böll, I tend to avoid German literature. And about once a year or so, George Eliot comes up in conversation between my wife and I and we ask, “you’ve read ‘Daniel Deronda, haven’t you?” Somebody had to do it. And despite the fact that one is halfway through the novel before the focus shifts for more than a paragraph at a time from a very spoiled Englishwoman, I did.
If you like George Eliot and Victorian-era novels, this is great stuff. That’s why I’m sharing it here. Eliot actually spent some time getting to know something about Judaism, enough so that the high culture musician of “German, Slavic, or Jewish” descent is called Professor Klesmer (read the last name as though it is German). I gotta wonder if klezmer music was considered as low class in Victorian-era England as it was in twentieth-century US. If so, that adds a sly wink to the rest of the story. The tale is also influenced very much by that Austrian fellow (or his peers) who was just starting to agitate for a return to the Jewish homeland as a way of curing the Jewish problem.
As for the story? Lots of psychological insight. Lots of interesting pictures of upper class English life. Lots of nick of time acts of God and coincidence. A romp. Check it out.
by Ari [➚] · Sunday, September 18th, 2005
So, tomorrow night the New York Jewish Music and Heritage Fest and Heeb Magazine will cosponsor something they are calling “1st Annual Jewish Music Awards”.
This is undeniably a good thing in theory. Given that there isn’t even a Grammy award for anything relating to “Jewish”, it is great that at least somewhere in the Jewish community someone is noticing Jewish music. But as I look at the nominees and categories, I can’t help but reflect that the awards also feature something else for which Heeb is notorious: clueless attitude.
This year has seen an explosure of interest in Jewish culture by people with delightfully bad attitude. I have written a short rant on these particular awards and why “clueless” and “attitude” don’t add up to “worth missing a Mikveh concert for” on Klezmershack.
by Ari [➚] · Tuesday, June 14th, 2005
Leslie Bunder, who already does a radio show in the UK and is a major force behind “somethingjewish.com” announces to the Jewish-Music list:
If anyone has a Jewish music blog, then you may like to submit it to a new site we have just put into beta – JewishBlogging.com
We already have a couple of Jewish music blogs indexed, but are there any we are missing? [He already lists the KlezmerShack and Jew*School and the Jewish Music WebCenter. There are more needed? ari]
JewishBlogging.com is from SomethingJewish and offers all bloggers the opportunity to get their blog indexed.
And if you know other Jewish blogs who should be featured, then let me know.
by Ari [➚] · Sunday, January 16th, 2005
The 20th annual KlezKamp has come and gone. Proud parent, Bob Blacksberg, has done his usual wonderful job of taking pictures and putting them online. You can sample them at rblacksberg.com/page2.html. Lots of people posted to the Jewish-Music mailing list, and gave me permission to gather everyone’s excitement, pleasure, kvetches, and everything that makes KlezKamp the wonderful experience that it is into one long webpage on the KlezmerShack.
It’s important that we have gatherings like KlezKamp, KlezCalifornia, KlezKanada and the rest. I really dig the new Jewish music, from the Hip Hop Hoodios to Golem and Sarah Aroeste and Khevre and Pharoah’s Daughter. But klezmer is the music that was the key, for me, to get really into Jewish music for the first time and to begin to realize that there was something there more authentic than “Fiddler on the Roof”. Would I get Aaron Alexander or Anthony Coleman, neither of whom have much to do with Klezmer if I hadn’t heard this stuff to begin with? I dunno. I don’t know that I would have been listening for them to “get” them.
In common with all religions, the Klezmer faith is not the only path to oneness and nirvana. But it’s a damn fun way to go, just the same.
by Ari [➚] · Monday, December 20th, 2004
The good folks in Paris taped songs from both Hip Hop Hoodios and Matisyahu at concerts this past fall at La Scene Bastille. You can see a song each via KlezmerShack, along with the latest reviews from both me and from George Robinson (LI Jewish Week).
by Ari [➚] · Monday, November 22nd, 2004
Okay, Thanksgiving is here in just a few days. It’s time for the annual communion with the New Jersey turnpike as I head south to see family. But I’ve got some interesting presents in the ol’ stash bag:
For the kids, and for the eclectic folks, there is a wonderful compilation of (mostly) Washington, DC musicians, doing everything from kiddy-sing to hip hop to honky tonk called “A Chanukah Feast”
For those who want something a bit edgier, my favorite Latino-Jewish hip hop band, the Hip Hop Hoodíos have promised a Hanukah-timed limited release of their new album, “Agua pa’ la gente”. I’ve heard some tracks recorded since their initial EP, and if included here, this is going to be a smokin’ disk. The CD even comes with a money-back guarantee For those, like me, who would rather not wait until March for the official release, you can order the album now and they say that it will arrive in time for the holidays. (Use special “HHH” promo code for the special $11.98 discount price – a discount and it arrives in time for Hanukah!)
Finally, Lorin Sklamberg, of the Klezmatics, has announced a limited edition of the new ‘matics Woody Guthrie Hanukah material: The Klezmatics: Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanuka (Klezmatics Records, 2004)
In 1942, Woody Guthrie moved to Brooklyn and soon, through his mother-in-law, the renowned Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblat, he became involved with the Coney Island Jewish community. He wrote songs about Hanuka, about Jewish history and spiritual life and about World War II and the antifascist cause. After his death in 1967, these songs sat forgotten in archives. Lost for almost thirty years, Guthrie’s Jewish lyrics were discovered in 1998 by Woody’s daughter, Nora Guthrie. She was so inspired by what she found, she asked the Klezmatics to write new music for the lyrics. “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanuka” is the first recorded release of this amazing material. Deftly intermingling klezmer with American folk and bluegrass, “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hunaka” is destined to become a holiday classic for generations to come. This delightful collection of songs, “Hanuka’s Flame”, “Hanuka Gelt”, “The Many and the Few” and others, is among the best of Guthrie’s work, and the Klezmatics’ playful renditions cast a new light on the Hanuka tradition.
This limited edition collectors release comes in a jacket, hand printed at the Chicago Print Museum, that folds into a dreidel! Available only via the internet.
May as well order these now and avoid the rush on Friday after Thanksgiving. Enjoy.
by Ari [➚] · Friday, November 5th, 2004
It was only two weeks ago that the Red Sox won the World Series. I was thrilled and found a way to squeeze a tribute to Jews and baseball onto the KlezmerShack homepage. But, thinking of all those players attributing their victory to an obviously Christian God, I called the current team “goyishe”. Hah! A couple of readers have commented, pointing out the error of my ways. The spirit of Hank Greenberg lives! Who knew?
by Ari [➚] · Friday, September 24th, 2004
This is an event after my own heart. Even if I wasn’t working overtime for regime change 2004, the idea of seeing Alicia Svigals AND Gary Lucas AND David Krakauer in one evening would be worth it.
Concerts for Change presents: Don’t Just Rock the Vote… Freylakh The Vote!
A Benefit for the Democratic Party’s Efforts in Swing States
A high energy evening featuring New York’s premiere Jewish performers:
- Alicia Svigals & The Klezmer Rock Project
- Gary Lucas & Gods and Monsters
- David Krakauer
- What I Like About Jew
- Yale Strom & Hot Pstromi
The Knitting Factory Main Space
Tuesday, October 12th at 7:30pm
72 Leonard Street
(212) 219-3006
To purchase tickets online, go to: Concerts for Change
Tickets: $18 online/$25 at the door
(All proceeds will go to the DNC)
by Ari [➚] · Sunday, September 12th, 2004
Beginning October 13, The Skirball Center in Manhattan will be offering a course in the history of klezmer entitled “The Strange Life, Death, and Rebirth of Klezmer: From Minsk to Manhattan and Back:”
For centuries, klezmer music was the soundtrack to Jewish life in Eastern Europe. In the twentieth century, klezmer went through a wild series of twists and turns, disappearing and reappearing in the most surprising cultural combinations and locations. In America, klezmer arrived with immigrants and collided with American popular music before virtually disappearing following World War II. Now, in the past few decades, klezmer has become an international musical sensation with the most unlikely of influences, including jazz, reggae, and hip hop. Follow the fantastic history of klezmer music and listen your way through a century of amazing, often obscure, recordings.
For more info, click here and scroll down.
by Ari [➚] · Tuesday, August 31st, 2004
Just back from KlezKanada where I spent a delicious week in celebration of Eastern European Jewish music, and the new derivatives of same, plus theatre, language, and cultural classes. This is such a wonderful way to take a vacation, even if, like me, you aren’t a musician.
It was also a place to reflect on how music has become more of a cultural symbol for us, and an expression of who we are, even more than words. This really hit home on Wednesday night at the second staff concert. There was an awesome sequence in which Yaella Hertz played a classical violin duo with a protege with whom she works at the camp, followed by Jeff Warschauer and Deborah Strauss performing a suite that included Jewish folk song, but also more, and then Aaron Alexander, the popular downtown drummer, came onstage to perform a piece from his forthcoming Tzadik album.
Okay, here’s some background. There is a photo at the National Yiddish Book Center of a table at a library in, I believe, Vilna. At the table, doing research, are luminaries from the Orthodox, and Marxist, and Socialist, and Yiddish, and Zionist worlds (with some overlap). There will probably never be a table like that again. There is no common ground for the scholars in those fields. But onstage with Aaron Alexander last Wednesday night there were Jews and non-Jews, representing music from traditional klezmer to avant garde (again, sometimes with considerable overlap) all playing joyously together (do Josh Dolgin’s samples count as playing?). And it flashed through my mind that this KlezKanada stage was our generation’s Vilna library table – the place where people come together either as Jews for the culture, or as non-Jews for the culture, and share and create entirely new, exciting music.
We saw more diversity and got to hang together, shmooze, and jam until all hours, than you’ll see over the course of several weeks here in NYC during the “350 years of Jews in America” celebration this fall. If it isn’t there already, do put KlezKanada on your calendar for next August.
by Ari [➚] · Friday, July 16th, 2004
There is a new online Jewish culture magazine called SomethingJewish, and it is looking for contributors
[SomethingJewish is interested in] reviewers and writers who have an interest in Jewish music, from Klezmer to Hip Hop and from synagogue chants to Yiddish tunes, the new site will cover all forms of Jewish music with reviews, features and interviews.
Whether you are in Paris or London or New York or Toronto, we are keen to get local people to cover what is happening in their city.
If you are interested in writing for us (and also getting an opportunity to review), then send an e-mail to: writers@somethingjewish.co.uk and also if you have some examples of your writing, please paste them into your e-mail.
Please note: At present we do not pay for contributions.
‘Rats’ to that last note, but if you don’t have your own Jewish cultural blog or website, this could be a fun place to get the word out. Doesn’t look like it’s as profound as Heeb, but neither is it as faux as Tikkun.
by Ari [➚] · Saturday, July 3rd, 2004
Okay, here’s the scoop. German Jews didn’t care much for klezmer before the Holocaust. Survivors and recent emigrants (yup, there are hordes of recent emigrants from former Eastern Bloc countries) also don’t have much interest. But for a variety of reasons the music has become a hit with non-Jewish musicians, some of whom are producing amazing klezmer. Recently, a non-Jewish klezmer fan, who has a history of accusing her opponents (those who don’t adore the work and place in history of her talented, and rare-among-Jews klezmer-philic spouse) of antisemitism, wrote an angry screed about how the various factions of non-Jewish klezmer musicians accuse their enemies of antisemitism. Transference, indeed! So, I’ve written a short piece on the subject on the KlezmerShack, Non-Jews, Klezmer, and Anti-Semitism in Germany.
While you’re there, check out recent reviews of Jewish music all across the spectrum, from an avant garde tribue to Israeli pop composer Sasha Argov, to klezmer, indeed.
by Ari [➚] · Saturday, July 3rd, 2004
Margot Leverett (Klezmer Mountain Boys, among other current projects), amazing klezmer clarinet master and teacher, has gotten a slew of neat, and regular klezmer things happening at her synagogue in Astoria, Queens, New York. Now the local Queens newspaper has noticed: Not Your Zadeh’s Klezmer—Astoria Synagogue Puts New Spin On Old Music, by Tom Epler, from the Jun 24 issue.
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