LOMIR ALLE ZINGEN
Come learn about and sing Yiddish theater and folk songs

Conductor and Performer: Cantor Joshua Finkel

Speaker and Performer: Eléonore Biezunski
Scholar, Singer, Violinist, and Sound Archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Contributing Musicians: L. Michael Griffel, Members of the Riverdale Jewish Spontaneous Choir

Yiddish folk songs are a diverse collection of songs that reflect family, life, love, and social movements. Music is fundamental to Jewish culture and life.

One of the great centers of culture of any kind was Yiddish “Broadway,” or Second Avenue, where there was a thriving Yiddish theater industry around one of Jewish America’s primary means of expression, one experienced throughout the world by way of the recording industry.

Adoring and patronizing its own homegrown entertainment, Jewish America embraced a popular art form reflecting its culture, worldview, changing ideas in the new world and nostalgia and respect for the old world from a new place—usually with a lot of laughter.

Register now!

ELÉONORE BIEZUNSKI is a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.  She is also a member of the Klezmer Institute’s KMDMP and Klezmer Archive Project. She has a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and has published several academic articles about Yiddish music and Yiddish theater. She is a recipient of a NYSCA Folk Arts Apprenticeship. She appears in several documentary films about Yiddish culture and music. An avid collector of Yiddish music, she co-founded and is a member of Ephemeral Birds, Yerushe, Lyubtshe, Shpilkes, Shtetl Stompers and Klezmographers and has collaborated with a large number of well-known Jewish performers here and abroad. Her recordings include Yerushe (IEMJ, 2016) and Zol zayn (2014). She won a Bubbe Awards in 2021 for her song “Tshemodan” in the category Best New Yiddish Song.