Borscht Beat

If you don't fw Klezmer i don't fw you

@mycr_karenina Also I wouldn't call Daniel Kahn's performance of radical workers songs of the Jewish-American labor movement, or 11 year old Yair Keydar singing a Yiddish art song "nostalgia and self-parody"

@mycr_karenina Heaps of great talent on that stage last night, but please don't take it as a monolith of what modern klezmer culture is. This is the type of program that ends up on that giant stage, but there's other types of programs on smaller stages all the time.

Coming off of yesterday’s New York Sings Yiddish event at CP had me wondering where contemporary klezmer could be if it didn’t lean quite so heavily on nostalgia and self-parody

@MeyerLabin @mycr_karenina bruh

@mycr_karenina This!

@BillyBlueBlaze1 @JOttoPohl1 What does Woody Allen have to do with klezmer?

@borschtbeat @JOttoPohl1 Well, you would know best I suppose, but to my ear it might as well be Woody Allen playing those clarinet riffs in Breakfast in America.

It occurred to me that the decline of Klezmer music predates WWII and is largely a result of the ongoing disintegration of the Yiddishkeit in the USSR and Central Europe before the rise of National Socialism. The war was just the penultimate blow followed by the final coup de grace of the Zionist victory over the Arabs in 1948. Klezmer was a music of the Yiddish speaking shetl or the base of the Bund. But, already in the 1920s the communists had defeated and absorbed the Bund in the east. Of the three main Jewish political trends in the early 20th century the Bundists were the weakest and thus the one that was unable to survive WWII. The communists had the USSR and the Zionists had the Yishuv in Palestine and then Israel. The Bundists had no such protection and backing. The demographic base of the Bund was largely destroyed between 1918 and 1948 and with it much of its cultural expression including Klezmer music. The revival in the US of Klezmer music in the 1970s was a cultural nostalgia movement by the grandchildren of immigrants from the Pale of Settlement. As such it is the musical equivalent of the movie Fiddler on the Roof. It is a highly romanticized modern memory of a culture that no longer exists.

@JOttoPohl1 @BillyBlueBlaze1 What exactly do you mean by "social significance" here? it seems oversimple to say "yiddishkeit was largely destroyed" therefore klezmer lost significance... people didn't even call it "klezmer" until the 70s and there have been klezmorim playing simchas for a couple centuries

@borschtbeat @BillyBlueBlaze1 Yes, but the social significance of the music is radically different before 1917 and after 1948 because in between these two dates the Yiddishkeit was largely destroyed.

@JOttoPohl1 @BillyBlueBlaze1 Klezmer certainly existed all through the 20th century. After the 78rpm era ended, key contributions in the 1950s and the rise of major Jewish record labels laid groundwork for the “modern” revivalists of the 1970s.

Yes, there is a nostalgic revival starting in the 1970s. But, that is just what it is a romaticized nostalgia of a musical tradition from a culture that no longer exists. Which from the point of view of enjoying the music is fine. It is just that the reason the genre largely dissapears between the 1940s and 1970s is that between the three events of the Bolshevik Revolution, WWII, and the forming of the State of Israel the Communists, National Socialists, and Zionists permanently destroyed the Yiddishkeit.

@BillyBlueBlaze1 @JOttoPohl1 It's really a baffling stretch to say the Who and Supertramp featured anything remotely related to klezmer in their music

@JOttoPohl1 It did return in a couple of rock songs in the 1970s. Both the Who and Supertramp had hits featuring the clarinet utilized in the Klezmer fashion.

Sometimes you just gotta get tipsy and dance to klezmer music in your apartment by yourself

@NEPHEWRXK CDBaby provides the same service

DistroKid really pissing me off ! I’m sitting on like 6 projects I’m tryna drop !

@AngelicaOung @upholdreality Real tough to sell klezmer on an international audience. Heck, pretty tough to sell it on a domestic audience...

【たまには宣伝】梅津和時率いる総勢19名による日本で唯一のクレズマーオーケストラ、BETSUNI NANMO KLEZMERの1996/98年にリリースされたCD3タイトル、2008年リイシューの廉価盤が追加プレスされました。特製紙ジャケットは今回の追加製造分で終了かもしれません。まだお持ちでない方はお急ぎ下さい。

@adamrsweet_ @MotronaCherkas What language does that word come from? What culture?

Fuck the war. Let's listen to music. These are sisters from Kyiv, they started as a usual pop-band, were exceptionally popular for over 10 years and closed the project. They suddenly turned up again as a duet reviving kleizmer and Ukrainian retro music youtu.be/MvF8QSnVkHI?si…

@adamrsweet_ Please do

@adamrsweet_ x.com/MotronaCherkas…

@BreadAlien1 @ShrimpinVamp Lmao ok I’ll trust the TF2 Wikipedia page for whether some random song is klezmer

@BreadAlien1 @ShrimpinVamp No

@ZachWeiner I don't like getting into "you haven't tried the right strain yet"-ism, but I think in general dismissiveness about ethnic culture is not good or well intentioned

@ZachWeiner I don't get why Klezmer is often your straw man for self-evident aesthetic crappiness. For some of us it's at the core of an ethnic heritage that we care deeply about maintaining and elevating. (authenticity argument aside)

I have this pet theory that food authenticity discourse is mostly about second-generation immigrants. For a first-gen Jew, caring about bagel authenticity is like an American caring about hot dog authenticity.

@RonSCantor weird AI generated image from a christian account showing exactly not what a 1933 German seder looked like

For the first time, I can relate to the fear that the Jewish people must've felt when they celebrated Passover in 1933.