Germany/Music -- Alan Bern to Speak in NYC about Yiddish Summer Weimar, etc

Street dancing led by Zev Feldman at Yiddish Summer Weimar. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Folks in New York -- Don't miss Alan Bern  speaking in New York on May 9 at the Center for Traditional Music and Dance about the Yiddish Summer Weimar and related events and developments.  The talk is called "Weimar Republic."

Center for Traditional Music and Dance’s An-sky Institute for Jewish Culture, the Center for Jewish History and the American Society for Jewish Music present a multi-media lecture by composer/musician Alan Bern about klezmer and Yiddish music in Germany and his work in creating Yiddish Summer Weimar - now 10 years old and one of the most celebrated institutes for Yiddish culture in the world. In addition to founding and directing Yiddish Summer Weimar, Bern is Musical Director of the internationally renowned Brave Old World ensemble, and leads the Other Europeans, an amazing new international ensemble of 14 leading musicians who explore the deep connections between Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) musical traditions. A reception will follow the program. We are grateful for the support of the Keller-Shatanoff Foundation in making this program possible. 

"Other European" videos

Mark Rubin has posted some videos showing early rehearsals of the Klezmer and Roma bands involved in the "Other Europeans" project sponsored by the Yiddish Summer Weimar, the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and the KlezMORE Festival in Vienna. (And which I wrote about in my most recent Ruthless Cosmopolitan column.)

Mark plays tuba and bass in the Yiddish band. The videos shed fascinating light on the creative process as the two bands prepare similar but different/different but similar performance repertoire based on mainly Moldovan sources.

I'm posting a couple of them below, but you can access them all through Mark's youtube channel (click link above). He has also posted various other clips from Yiddish Summer Weimar.

Thanks, Mark!

New Ruthless Cosmopolitan Column

In my latest "Ruthless Cosmopolitan" column for JTA I write about "allosemitism" -- the concept that Jews are the perpetual "other". I describe this year's Yiddish Summer Weimar festival and also a summer exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Munich on "that certain Jewish something" that makes things and/or people Jewish.

The column can be seen at the JTA web site or at various other sites, including the Jerusalem Post.

I am aggregating all the columns on a Ruthless Cosmopolitan blog, where they can be subscribed to via RSS.


DOES A "CERTAIN JEWISH SOMETHING" REALLY SET JEWS APART?

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

WEIMAR, Germany (JTA) -- I learned a new word this summer -- "allosemitism."
Coined by a Polish-Jewish literary critic named Artur Sandauer, the term describes a concept with which I am quite familiar -- the idea of Jews as the perpetual "other."

Allosemitism can embrace both positive and negative feelings toward Jews -- everything, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman put it, "from love and respect to outright condemnation and genocidal hatred."

Read full story

Yiddish Summer Weimar Symposium

I've been invited to speak again at a symposium in July at the Yiddish Summer Weimar, an ambitious workshop/festival on Yiddish music and culture that takes place for about a month in Weimar, the Germany city more associated with Goethe, Schiller and a failed "Republic" than with East European Jewish traditions....

This year's Symposium July 12-14, and the Yiddish Summer as a whole, are dedicated to a project called "The Other Europeans" -- an intercultural dialogue exploring Yiddish and Roma music, culture and identity.

I'll be speaking about popular images of Jews and Yiddish culture in Europe, including stereotypes, cliches and kitsch. I'll discuss their inherent ambiguities in a world that straddles the Jewish and non-Jewish community and where stereotypes and shorthand often take the place of nuanced definitions.

As I noted in my last post, from LA -- boundaries between insider and outsider, believer and non-believer, devotee and ironic observer can sharply delineate the differences between kitsch and caricature, art and artifice, stereotype and homage. Perspectives shift, and the boundaries often blur; the images and their meaning are often decidedly in the eye of the beholder, and they are frequently dictated by changing religious realities, philo-Semitic, often engineered nostalgia, and the powerful exigencies of the marketplace.