A Language of Many Places

Yiddish was my father’s first language: his language of lullabies, of parents’ whispers, of family letters that crossed the Atlantic during those horrible years of Hitler’s war. And although his parents, living in Philadelphia, wrote to their soldier-son in Yiddish, he responded in English; by then, his mastery of the mameloshn, or mother tongue, had begun to wither. But his heart would express itself in the old ways until the end. Shlof gezunterheyt, shtey oyf gezunterheyt, vaks oyf gezunterheyt, he said to me each night, until I left for college. “Sleep in good health, get up in good health, grow up in good health.” When he moved in with my own young family decades later, the nightly blessing resumed. Days before he died, I heard him conversing softly with his mother and father, dead for 60 years, in Yiddish.

As a teenager in the 1970s, I would often find him in our wood-paneled basement, sitting on the sofa by the stereo system he’d purchased as an extravagance, headphones on and eyes closed, conducting a klezmer band or some cantor singing Yiddish folk songs. Our upright piano was in the basement, too, and my father would patiently listen to me race through the pieces my teacher had assigned—Bach fugues and Mozart sonatas, all played without a hint of artistic inspiration—until he’d ask, “Can’t you play something Jewish?” Sometimes he would sing a few bars of a favorite tune as encouragement.

I regret that I never gave my father the music he wanted to hear.

Never too late, I thought. A couple of years after his death, and newly in retirement, I decided to play klezmer music. I took up the accordion, figuring that all those years of childhood piano lessons would flatten my learning curve. That’s how I found myself lugging my 1960s Hohner Concerto accordion to Quebec’s beautiful Laurentian Mountains last August, stretching bedsheets onto a dormitory bunk for a week of klezmer camp.

For fans of klezmer and Yiddish culture, the KlezKanada summer retreat is heaven. It is held at an outdoor-experience camp aptly named Le P’tit Bonheur (“A Little Bit of Happiness”)—or, in Yiddish, Dos Bisele Glik. We hiked through the woods to dinner. We swam in the lake. One afternoon, accordion music wafted over the water as I was kayaking, the player sitting on a dock on the far side, wet up to his knees. Another day, a clarinetist floated by in a canoe, his partner doing the hard work of paddling. The heart of the retreat, of course, was the cultural programming: ensemble groups for all combinations of instruments, talks on Yiddish theater, classes on Yiddish dance, nightly concerts featuring some of the world’s best performers of Yiddish music.

A newcomer to klezmer, I had expected that most KlezKanada participants would be people like me: older, Jewish, amateur musicians who might have been introduced to Yiddish music by immigrant parents or grandparents. Such people were certainly present. But on my first day, I saw, through the open window of my dorm room, clusters of people who seemed to be in their 20s and 30s, some wearing the black-and-white keffiyehs that signified solidarity with Palestinians. Even more surprising: they were greeting their friends in Yiddish, a language I had not expected to hear spoken by secular millennials bearing clarinets and fiddles. These young people were talented artists and informed Yiddishists—and for that, I envied them.

My experience at klezmer camp was a week of shedding misunderstandings about Yiddish culture. First, about klezmer itself. Many people understand “klezmer” to be a catch-all for almost all Jewish or Yiddish-language music, without realizing that it’s a mainly instrumental genre dating to 16th-century Eastern Europe. Early klezmer groups were small, with perhaps a couple of string instruments and a tsimbl, which is similar to a hammered dulcimer. Over the years, the bands grew in size and in instrumental range to include, among other things, accordion, brass instruments, and woodwinds, especially clarinet. The music is infused with musical allusions to Hasidic prayer and liturgical melodies and is tightly linked to dance. Many artists say that before you can play it expressively, you need to dance it—as I did at KlezKanada. Despite my clumsiness and fear I’d have a heart attack as the fast tunes went on, that experience taught me to focus better on timing and translate the gestures inherent in the dance into musical phrases.

Klezmer bands were an essential part of Eastern European Jewish weddings, which could last a full week or longer, as Walter Zev Feldman writes in Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory. Not all the wedding rituals were joyful, so not all the music was, either. For example, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a scholar of Jewish studies and musical performance, described the veiling of the bride this way: “Her braids are loosened (to ease her passage from single to married), her hair is cut … and her hair is covered. During these events, the klezmorim play sad tunes, the badkhn [master of ceremonies] laments the end of the bride’s youth, the bride takes leave of her friends, and everyone weeps.” In 1904, the Russian trombonist, composer, and music critic Ivan Lipaev (who was not Jewish) wrote an article about Jewish orchestras—klezmer bands—for the Russkaya Muzykalnaya Gazeta. “Look what happens,” he wrote,

in the Pale of Settlement at the first sounds of the orchestra: The shtetl becomes enlivened at once, and artisans hasten to finish their labor solely to listen to the musicians. Sometimes poor wives lose sight of their husbands and children for hours because they trail after the orchestra. Moreover, the orchestra leaves the shtetl but the memory of it lives on in the hearts of the simple-hearted listeners for months and years since some fragment of a waltz or a song remains in someone’s memory, passing lip to lip. … And finally, the Jewish orchestra reigns supreme at weddings. A wedding without it is a funeral. (Translated by Asia Fruman)

In many ways, klezmer encapsulates the Jewish experience, having evolved as the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe themselves evolved and encountered other musical traditions. It came to the United States with the wave of Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mingling with American jazz and swing and resulting in recordings such as the Nathan Glantz Orchestra’s Yiddisher Charleston (1926). As the children and grandchildren of these immigrants assimilated as Americans, klezmer fell out of fashion—that is, until its revival in the 1970s and 1980s, when bands such as the Klezmatics began reinterpreting old tunes and writing new ones. The music is, as it always has been, international, blending Eastern European and New World traditions. “We look at the music in Argentina and see how that’s a fusion of Yiddish culture and Argentinian culture,” Klezmatics trumpet player Frank London said in a podcast from the Yiddish Book Center last December. “Etcetera, etcetera. … That’s part of … the history of Yiddish and the Yiddish-speaking people.”

To me, klezmer and Yiddish songs have that major-minor vibe that captures both the joy and the anxiety of being Jewish; as comedian Alan King used to say, “They’re coming to kill us, but first, let’s eat!” To better understand the music and culture, I enrolled in a virtual Yiddish class offered by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and I’ve come to see the language itself this way. The very first words of the first dialogue in my brightly colored beginner’s textbook are “oy-oy-oy,” a refrain that frequently appears in nigunim—wordless, meditative tunes. The dialogue accompanies a cartoon showing an old man in his living room, his hands pressed to his face in worry as an unidentified visitor knocks at the door. (According to the writer and humorist David Sedaris, the Duolingo Yiddish course teaches students to say: “My uncle is a broken man.”) Yiddish is also a playful language that can make you laugh. In English, the name of my father’s brother was a boring “Uncle Jack.” In Yiddish, “Uncle Yankel” became a rhyming “Uncle Yuncle,” an intentional mispronunciation that to a child was so much funnier. A klezmer tune might similarly transition between the foreboding and the delightful. It might start with a zhok, a melody in halting 3/8 time that tempts you to join in a slow dance. (It’s also called a hora, a word that we associate today with kitschy versions of “Hava Nagila.”) But then the tune may turn fast and glorious, and you’re racing in a sweaty circle. Often the music strains relentlessly forward, reaching a beat an instant before you’d expect.

Jewish folk music, Dmitri Shostakovich observed, is “almost always laughter through tears.” There are Jewish songs of love and protest, Jewish political songs, Jewish songs of prayer and longing and loss. Moreover, Yiddish music is not a stagnant relic of a Jewish past: fresh music is constantly being created, as powerful and rooted in contemporary life as tunes penned more than a century ago about love, poverty, toil, and national aspirations. Yiddish musicians frequently speak about the chain of generations that keeps the culture alive. It was a millennial named Aaron Bendich who in 2022 launched a record label for Yiddish music called Borscht Beat. A young New York–based classical composer, Alex Weiser, last year released in a dark blue night, combining his grandmother’s memories of New York with Yiddish poems written by 20th-century immigrants to the city. (Weiser also set Yiddish and English poems to music in an album called and all the days were purple, which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.) KlezKanada has a strong focus on mentorship, awarding about 70 scholarships to young artists from around the world last year.

The music spans artistic genres of the Jewish world. Joshua Waletzky, considered one of the best living Yiddish songwriters, has created ballads about September 11 and George Floyd, and in 2023, he brought together almost a dozen of the world’s top klezmer musicians and Yiddish singers to perform his song cycle pleytem tsuzamen/Refugees Together at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in New York City. The production was deeply personal, rooted in both the vernacular of Yiddish and the problems of contemporary life: “You floated in, a little star, precious as gold / A bright streak of heaven-joy. / But there was always a bone stuck in your laughter, / Lurking like the slaughterer’s knife, / The cry for help that wasn’t rocked to sleep in the cradle.” Oklahoma native Mark Rubin, whose musical roots are in country and bluegrass, incorporates Jewish themes into his songs—for example, playing the banjo while singing translations of Yiddish verses by a poet killed in the Holocaust. (Rubin does not speak Yiddish.) A new genre called Kleztronica is blending techno music and klezmer, drawing hundreds of young people to dance parties. A recent article at the website Hey Alma described the atmosphere at a Kleztronica party this way: “Everyone knows they are about to bask in the soundtrack to the current moment in Jewish radical politics. Finally, a cool ass space for people like us to feel free, to feel motivated, to feel less alone.”

In part, that article was referring to the attraction of Yiddish music to queer and politically progressive and radical Jews. Until I attended the KlezKanada retreat, I had not appreciated the embrace of Yiddish by artists on the left. I should have, as it is not new: Alicia Svigals, a leading violinist in the klezmer revival of the 1970s, wrote in 1998 that the movement was driven largely by “people who are looking for a way of being Jewish that is consonant with their feminist, gay-positive, and other new-left values and that does away with the social strictures of the past: that is, a way of being Jewish while still being themselves.” As a result, Yiddish music draws a diverse group of fans, including politically progressive, secular Jews who feel unwelcome in mainstream Jewish spaces because of the hegemony of Zionism. Artists searching for a Jewish home need not create music in Hebrew extolling a homeland in Zion; instead, they can sing of life in the diaspora, using the pre-state language, Yiddish.

“Even before the cultural revival, Yiddish culture was bound up with politics,” Avia Moore tells me. She is a Yiddish dance leader and a scholar whose PhD dissertation at Toronto’s York University was subtitled, “Critical Approaches to Postvernacular Yiddish Culture.” She’s also the artistic director at KlezKanada and has worked mightily to keep the retreat welcoming to Yiddishists across political divides. “I know there are people who would prefer we attempt to separate art and politics, which from my place as an artist and organizer is an impossibility,” she says. She points to the Yiddish songbook, its topics spanning love and immigration, nationhood and workers’ rights. “If we were no longer going to sing songs with a political history, we’d probably take out 75 percent of the songs from our songbook.” Indeed, anthologies compiled by Eleanor Gordon Mlotek and Joseph Mlotek from the early 1970s through the late 1990s categorize songs by theme, including “songs of work, poverty, and protest.” Consider “Arbeter-Froyen” (“Working Women”), an early labor song popular in Tsarist Russia. Based on a poem by the Russian “sweatshop poet” Dovid Edelstadt, who moved to New York in 1888, the song calls on employed women to fight for workers’ rights:

Working women, suffering women
Women who languish at home and in the factory.
Why are you standing on the sidelines?
Why aren’t you helping build a temple of freedom, of human happiness?
Help us carry the red banner forward, through the storm
Through dark nights!
Help us spread truth and light among ignorant, lonely slaves!

The catastrophic violence of October 7, 2023, and its aftermath in Gaza opened the gates of Yiddishland to new artistic work. In geveb, a digital journal about Yiddish culture, published a collection of poems about those events, written from various perspectives and about loss among both Israelis and Palestinians. Over the past 18 months, musicians have been creating new songs in Yiddish, mainly in solidarity with Palestinians. (None of the artists I spoke with were aware of new Yiddish songs written about the losses in Israel, though such works have been composed in Hebrew.) Some of these songs are entirely new; some are adaptations of Yiddish numbers that are many decades old.

“This past year, there’s been a groundswell of explicitly Jewish response to what’s been going on, of course on all sides of this issue, but particularly in this space of reexamining allegiances, reexamining the meaning of peoplehood, our moral obligation, among our community of creative Yiddishkeit,” says songwriter and actor Daniel Kahn, who has had roles in the Netflix series Unorthodox and the Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof off-Broadway. “There is a groundswell, particularly among younger folks but also my age and older”—he’s 46—“of creating work that speaks to this moment that is very deeply rooted in Jewish traditions, Jewish language, Jewish spirituality.”

Raised in Detroit, Kahn fell in love with klezmer music while living and performing folk music in New Orleans. Today he lives in a houseboat in Hamburg. For more than two decades, Kahn has been recording original songs, adaptations of century-old Yiddish poems, and Yiddish translations of songs by such artists as Tom Waits, Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen. His music is a mix of traditional klezmer, punk folk, political cabaret, and protest motifs. Kahn’s songs tell stories. He has called his music “alienation klezmer” because it addresses capitalism, nationalism, and solidarity with workers. For many years, he performed with a band called The Painted Bird, named for the bird torn apart by its kin in Jerzy Kosiński’s 1965 novel.

Last October, Kahn played at a benefit concert for relief organizations working in Gaza, singing Adrienne Cooper’s Yiddish antiwar anthem “Peace in the Streets.” That song was an adaptation of an old Hasidic tune about the Sabbath; Cooper changed the word Shabbes to sholem, which means peace. In English, the lyric is, “If my voice were louder, if my body stronger, I would tear through the streets shouting ‘peace, peace, peace.’ ”

Kahn also adapted an original song to reflect recent events. He wrote “God-Brother”—Got-Bruder, in Yiddish—more than a decade ago. It’s a personal song, directed toward a childhood friend whom Kahn calls his God-brother. While Kahn had begun questioning Zionism and moved to the left, his friend moved to Israel and now lives in a West Bank settlement: “We are sons of long exile / From the same womb, the same place / We have each transgressed borders / I and you, here and there.” As the war in Gaza intensified, Kahn added two verses, including this one: “Who decided, who decrees / That we need this very soil? / Whose fault is it, that the neighbors / Have breath, have worth?” The song, he says, is about “a cold war in the Jewish family,” within families, generations, communities.

Many contemporary Yiddish songwriters, including Kahn, ground their work in the concept of doikayt, or “hereness,” a view promoted by the General Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia—a secular, socialist Jewish party formed in the late 19th century to fight against anti-Semitism and advocate for workers’ rights. Doikayt was seen as a contrast to Zionism’s focus on a homeland in Palestine: It suggested that Jews could thrive in the diaspora, and that’s where they should build their lives. “If golus”—exile—“is about displacement, then doikayt is about this placement—about radical engagement with one’s local world, with one’s local environment and local politics, and local can extend to country or continent,” says Kahn. Yiddish, he adds, is an ideal language for songs related to doikayt: “It’s a language in which diaspora and transnationalism are baked into the very structure of the language itself. It is a Jewish language, but it is not the language of any one place.” He continues: “It’s a decentralized language and culture, and something about that lends itself to embodying and addressing these contradictions and identities, these models of belonging and not belonging, of tradition versus radical subversion.”

Isabel Frey, a 31-year-old Austrian musician and activist with a PhD in ethnomusicology, had been thinking about writing and performing Yiddish songs in solidarity with Palestine for a few years. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Frey grew up in Vienna, where she was “very much aware of my Jewishness and my Jewish identity” and took part in the socialist Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair. At 18, she visited the West Bank for the first time and “realized that the stories I grew up with weren’t really the full story. I began working through those narratives.”

Last year, following a songwriting workshop at Yiddish New York, she, Waletzky, and songwriter Joe Dobkin began collaborating on an album of Yiddish songs. Frey’s own contribution is a reimagining of Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikva,” with lyrics in Yiddish and English. Where the Hebrew original speaks of a yearning “to be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem,” Frey’s lyrics focus on the diaspora: “Here in exile, here is our home / Love and freedom our mortar and stone / Tear down the checkpoints, prison bars and border walls / Everywhere is Yerushalaim.” Dobkin contributed “Falling Walls,” which he sings slowly, accompanying himself on guitar. “I felt desperate to have some way to get through to Jews whose commitment to Israel causes the stunning cognitive dissonance that leads to excusing the inexcusable,” he says, explaining why he wrote the piece. “Songwriting seemed like the best tool for that job, and I felt I could only say the things I needed to say here by writing it in Yiddish.”

Still, to say that Yiddish music is anti-Zionist or even a phenomenon of the left oversimplifies its role in contemporary culture. Rokhl Kafrissen, a lawyer-turned-essayist who writes about the Yiddish cultural world, rejects the view that Yiddish is inherently tied to the left. The Yiddish language “grew out of a traditional way of Jewish life,” she says. “It was immersed in Jewishness, in Talmudic Jewishness as a way of life. We prematurely narrow our frame if we start out by saying, well, Yiddish is political in this [left] sense. It’s not.” Kafrissen agrees that progressives today are being drawn in larger numbers to elements of Yiddish culture, but she believes that the number of those who fully immerse themselves in it will be relatively small, given the difficulties of learning a new language. She recalls the popularity of the old Yiddish song “Daloy Politsey” (“Down With the Police”)—it took aim at the tsar—at a time when many Americans were calling to defund the police: “I started to see young people whose social-media handles included things like daloy politsey—people who didn’t seem to know Yiddish, who didn’t seem to be familiar with the song apart from the title. There were people who had those larger American politics, who all of a sudden grabbed onto and were resonating with these preexisting texts and symbols.” The commitment and seriousness of the young people at KlezKanada, she says, make them exceptions, not the rule.

Those on the left point to a historical link between Yiddish and the Bund. But Weiser, the composer—who is also director of public programs at the YIVO Institute—points out that Yiddish was widely spoken in Eastern Europe by non-Bundists and Zionists, including most of the founders of the modern state of Israel. Some believed that Yiddish should be the language of the new state. They lost that battle, of course. Weiser sees Yiddish and Yiddish music as “an amazing, shared heritage of the Jewish people. You can take from it what you want, and that’s wonderful, but it should not foreclose other people with different political views taking what they want from it. The thing that really excites me about Yiddish is almost the opposite: the language and the shared history that it represents transcend these boundaries that otherwise divide our community.”

Still, the divisions over Zionism and the war in Gaza have resonated through the small, close community of Yiddishist musicians, as in other kinds of Jewish arts organizations. A few klezmer musicians told me they were reluctant to perform where they might be photographed in front of an Israeli flag—a symbol found in virtually all Jewish communal spaces—because they either oppose Zionism or fear alienating people who do. Divisions were evident at KlezKanada, too, where organizers set up “community conversations” in which participants were encouraged to share differing concerns and fears. Political themes sometimes crept into nightly cabaret performances—but, then, isn’t art supposed to be provocative?

Among the many lovely KlezKanada traditions designed to unify people through their love of Yiddish culture is something called the Backwards March. The march dates to a 2001 retreat workshop called “How Do Yiddish Speaking Jews Walk Together?” and recalled a practice of a century ago, in which members of the Romanian village of Stănișești welcomed the Sabbath by gathering at the river and playing a melody together. Then, while still playing their instruments, they’d process backward, facing the sunset so as not to turn their backs on the Shabbes Bride. (Historically, the Sabbath has been associated with both bride and queen.) When they reached their place of prayer, they put their instruments down.

On the Friday evening of KlezKanada, we gathered at the lake and marched backward, too, playing a simple, wordless melody. It was beautiful and uplifting, but as we neared the tent that would serve as our shul, a ruckus erupted. A few people in the march wrapped themselves in an Israeli flag. Someone removed a keffiyeh and held it aloft. There was a scuffle. The march continued, but the incident set off a period of sadness and self-reflection that continues today: at a time when divisions are so deep and grief seems bottomless, how can this small community produce thought-provoking Yiddish art yet still “walk together”?

Perhaps the music itself provides an answer. My father never got to hear it, but after learning the basics on the accordion, I cofounded a klezmer band that plays to small audiences around town. Mostly we play the standards, including a version of something called a broygez tants, which means “dance of anger.” The klezmer musicians of Eastern Europe must have been experts in family dynamics, seeing how they so often played at weddings at which the marriages were arranged. So maybe it is not surprising that in-laws are a major theme of their tunes. The ceremonial music anticipated that not everything would be smooth sailing. Grievances had to be recognized and worked out.

Enter the broygez tants. As klezmer scholar Walter Zev Feldman writes, “The broygez tants was primarily a ritual wedding dance in which the two mothers-in-law were encouraged to express their feelings of resentment … by dancing in such an exaggerated way so that everyone could see that they were cross with one another. Then, with a change of tune by the musicians, the two would dance in such a way as to mime their reconciliation.”

The editor of the collection of tunes used by my klezmer band expanded the English title of our broygez tants, so it is no longer “Dance of Anger” but “Dance of Anger (and Reconciliation).” The version we play is very short, with two sections of just three lines. But we play those lines in every combination of instruments available. We speed it up; we slow it down. We repeat and repeat again. Sometimes we play it in rounds. Occasionally we strike a discordant note.

The music can go on and on. The sparring family members should keep dancing. The music works, no matter how it’s played.