“Klezmer: Music, History & Memory” presented by

The Jewish Music Forum: A project of the American Society for Jewish Music

Walter Zev Feldman, Visiting Professor of Music, NYU Abu Dhabi

Discussants: James Loeffler, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia and

Glenn Dynner, Professor of Religion, Sarah Lawrence College

Wednesday, December 14th at 7pm

at The Center for Jewish History

15 West 16th Street, NY

Emerging in 16th-century Prague, the klezmer became a central cultural feature of the largest transnational Jewish community of modern times. This talk and roundtable discussion celebrates the recent publication of Feldman’s book, Klezmer: Music, History and Memory (OUP, 2016), the first comprehensive study of both the musical structure and the social history of the klezmer.

Walter Zev Feldman is a leading researcher in both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music, and a performer on the klezmer dulcimer cimbal (tsimbl). During the mid-1970s, the and Andy Statman studied with the preeminent klezmer clarinetist Dava Tarras and were two of the creators of the klezmer revival. At the time, Feldman reintroduced the cimbal into klezmer music, notably in their groundbreaking 1979 LP Jewish Klezmer Music.

In 1998 he co-founded the Khevrisa ensemble with Steven Greenman—their CD European Klezmer Music was issued by Smithsonian-Folkways in 2000.

This program is co-sponsored by the American Jewish Historical Society, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center, and the An-sky Institute for Jewish Culture at the Center for Traditional Music and Dance.