| Projects
You already know that Living Traditions does KlezKamp. But
that's not all we do:
- KlezKamp Roadshow: Share
the KlezKamp experience with your community center or congregation
back home by bringing them a one-day, weekend, or week-long
immersion in Yiddish culture. Led by our experienced and
inspiring staff, the KlezKamp Roadshow offers lectures,
workshops, and performances featuring klezmer music, Yiddish
radio, dance, folktales, songs, and crafts. Contact
us to order "Jewish Folks Arts to Go" —
we deliver!
- Online Digital Sound Archive of
Vintage Yiddish 78s: Thanks to a generous private
donor, Living Traditions is painstakingly digitalizing more
than 2,500 78 rpm records of early 20th century klezmer
music, folk and theater songs, comic dialogues, and Hebrew
cantorial works. Soon you can download these precious public
domain recordings — remastered with lifelike clarity
— from our new Online Digital Sound Archive.
- "German Goldenshteyn: A Living
Tradition" CD: Over four days at KlezKamp 2005, the
late Moldavian klezmer clarinetist German Goldenshteyn,
together with a hand-picked rhythm section of today’s greatest
Yiddish musicians, sat down and recorded 20 tunes from his
staggering collection of over 800 bulgars, freylekhs, horas,
khosidls, and sirbas. More info >>
And don’t forget…
- The Yiddish Radio Project:
Co-produced with Sound Portraits Productions, this Peabody
Award-winning, 10-week radio series on the history of Jewish
broadcasting for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”
aired in Spring 2002. The program sparked a seven-city nationwide
live concert tour, best-selling CDs, and reached over thirteen
million people. See www.yiddishradioproject.org.
- "Live from KlezKamp! The Staff
Concerts 1985-2003": A 2 CD set featuring the
best of 20 years of KlezKamp staff concerts.
- "The Green Duck/Di Grine Katshke:
A Menagerie Of Yiddish Songs For Children":
Your kids will love this wonderful collection of songs about
animals performed in Yiddish by Paula Teitelbaum and Lorin
Sklamberg, joined by world-class klezmer musicians. More
info>>
What’s new?
- "From the Repertoire of German
Goldenshteyn": a book of 100 of the 800 klezmer
tune transcriptions that German Goldenshteyn wrote down
over his lifetime, including 20 songs featured on the Living
Traditions CD. To order>>
- "Zvee Scooler: Der Grammeister"
CD: An anthology of this beloved Yiddish actor’s
selected radio performances, poetry, and even commerials
was released in December 2006. This is the first in a series
in Living Traditions’ releases — in the original Yiddish
— of rare selections from the Yiddish Radio Project archives.
More info>>
- "Ray Musiker: A Living Tradition"
CD: At KlezKamp 2006, clarinet master Ray Musiker
recorded the next in our "A Living Tradition"
CD series, featuring Musiker’s original and classic material
and backed by a stellar staff ensemble of Pete Sokolow (piano),
Alex Kontorovich (alto sax), Ken Maltz (tenor sax), Jim
Guttmann (bass), Aaron Alexander (drums), and Henry Sapoznik
(guitar). More info>>
What’s coming up?
- Lexicon of Yiddish Theater:
Living Traditions will offer an edited and updated translation
of Zalmen Zylbercweig’s seminal seven-volume Lexicon of
Yiddish Theater, originally published only in a limited
Yiddish edition, for a new generation of scholars, researchers,
students, and historians.
- KlezGig Database: Living
Traditions’ website will soon feature a centralized, searchable
database of Klezmer and Yiddish music performances worldwide
for music fans.
- More from the Yiddish Radio Project:
Living Traditions will create a Digital Archive to preserve
and catalogue Yiddish radio artifacts — original scripts,
correspondence, advertising, newspaper clips, posters, photographs,
declassified FBI and FCC files, and 176 newly-discovered
discs of NY’s WEVD Yiddish radio shows from the 1930s —
with public access online and through major libraries.
Through these year-round projects, Living Traditions encourages
development of a worldwide Jewish community knowledgably steeped
in Yiddish language, culture, and traditions too often forgotten
in modern Jewish life.
Show and Kvell:
The Yiddish Radio Project Wins the Prestigious Peabody Award
 The
Yiddish Radio Project, Sound Portraits and Living Traditions
10-part NPR series on the history of Yiddish broadcasting
has won the coveted Peabody prize. The Peabody Award for Excellence
in Electronic Journalism is considered the most selective
and distinguished award in broadcasting. The Yiddish Radio
series was produced by Dave Isay and Henry Sapoznik.
From the press release issued by the University of Georgia's
Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication which awards
the prize:
“…A National Public Radio
program special, “The Yiddish Radio Project,” an
exuberant celebration of memory, history, and nostalgia provided
the Peabody Board with some of its most enjoyable listening…”
This is the first time in its 62-year history that a Peabody
award has gone to a Yiddish program.
For further information, chek out the Peabody
site.
More Yiddish Radio…
Maybe you’re one of the 10 million people who heard
the Yiddish Radio Project on NPR’s All Things Considered
this past spring. If so, you know the material is pretty amazing:
dramas, music, comedies, news, Dadaist poetry, Holocaust survivor
reunions, and commercials for everything from Manischewitz
matzos to Portnow's Wonder Trusses. Preserved on over 1,000
fragile discs, these programs reflect the Yiddish-American
world during its renaissance and decline, and in the voices
of the people as they lived it.
If you didn’t hear it, or if you’d like to hear
it again, please visit www.yiddishradioproject.org,
our very cool website. We are also happy to offer the critically
acclaimed “Yiddish Radio Project” in a 2 CD set
(or 2 audio cassettes) hosted by NPR’s Scott Simon and
its companion CD “Music From the Yiddish Radio Project”.
(Order form for
the CDs). Both contain original unedited materials plus
several surprise bonus tracks (hint: goofy commercials).
Purchases from our website help Living Traditions in its
work to keep Yiddish culture up-close and personal for new
generations.
Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World
to Our World
For the first time, Yiddish music scholar Henry
Sapoznik traces the complete history of this vital musical
tradition, from the Eastern European Jewish musicians who
brought with them a rich tradition of band music known as
klezmer (from the Yiddish word for “musician”);
to the influences of the dance bands and swing bands of the
1920s and 1930s; to the 1970s, when a new group of young Jewish
musicians rediscovered this music; and through today's rebirth
as world music. Find out more…
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