A century after its heyday in the United States, the klezmer community continues to thrive as a small but deeply passionate group of fans and performers.
But unlike klezmer classics "Hava Nagila" or the soundtrack to "Fiddler on the Roof," contemporary klezmer practitioners don’t see this music as solely for special occasions or a vestige of Ashkenazi Jewry of days past. For them, klezmer is a continually growing artform for which they feel a responsibility to bring to audiences.
A combination of the Hebrew words for instrument (kley) and song (zemer), klezmer defined the sound of Ashkenazi Judaism pre-World War II. Klezmer blends the instrumentation of Eastern European folk dance, the rhythmic patterns and intricate cadences of traditional Jewish choral music, and minor key improvisation. The genre lost prominence in the 1950s when Jews began to Americanize en masse, teaching their children Hebrew instead of Yiddish, and embracing music and dance from the Mizrahi community — Jews who descend from the Middle East and North Africa.
Over the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in Yiddish culture and klezmer music by Ashkenazi Jews who want to engage with elements of their heritage that were lost to assimilation. While many klezmer musicians have stuck to traditional styles and pieces, others blend klezmer with mainstream genres and perform their music in unconventional locations.
Among these fusion contributors is composer and trumpeter Frank London, who won a GRAMMY with the Klezmatics for their album of unreleased Woody Guthrie songs "Wonder Wheel" in 2007. In December 2023, London delivered a new Hanukkah klezmer album, Chronika, that provides new interpretations of Festival of Lights staples such as "TOPZ (Sevivon)."
London, a pioneer in the klezmer revivalist movement, was tired of compartmentalizing the genres he both performs and enjoys as a working musician. He believed that Yiddish music could be brought to the club space, and set out to do so with Chronika. The album fused klezmer with a variety of secular genres, including techno, reggae-dub, soca and folk-inspired club music.
"The inspiration for ‘Chronika’ was just to put klezmer music in the context of all these other world musics that were going on," London tells GRAMMY.com. "The idea was just to make really fun danceable music that is totally rooted in tradition."
London also used this fusion to call for a moment of unity between the Orthodox and the Caribbean communities in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with "UNITY: Carnival in Crown Heights," which combines raucous big band klezmer and West Indian Carnival sounds. (Despite being largely divided by Eastern Parkway, tensions between the Black and Jewish communities in the neighborhood have been fraught for decades, reaching a fever pitch during the 1991 Crown Heights riots.)
"One tiny part of that lineage": Kleztronica and community
Chronika is the product of an early 2010s trend that blended Balkan and Romani music with techno beats, and its basic tracks were recorded 15 years ago. Since then, a new generation of klezmer musicians have continued to put their spin on electronic Yiddish music.
DJ and singer Kaia Berman-Peters has been involved in the klezmer community since high school and performs with Yiddish band Levyosn, but first began blending electronica with klezmer songs, poems and speeches while studying at the New England Conservatory. "There's a tradition in electronic music of sampling your ancestors. I knew that when I made electronic music, it would be up to me to sample my ancestors," says Berman-Peters, who performs as Chaia.
Academic work guides Berman-Peters' tracks. Inspired by the Jewish Talmudic (Rabbinical commentary) tradition of deciphering a text and its subsequent analyses, the 22-year-old uses music as an opportunity to study Yiddish texts. Her songs then become a conversation with listeners about her own takes on the source material.
"It's really important for me that my own take is in there, my history," Berman-Peters says, adding that she often looks through Kaballistic, or Jewish mysticism, lens when making her modifications to music.
Berman-Peters’ own history and lived experience led her to develop a series of Yiddish "Kleztronica" raves across New York City in December 2022. Held every few weeks, the raves have provided a space for thousands to see the diversity of the contemporary klezmer scene. Berman-Peters saw dramatic similarities between the community-centric rave scenes in New York and Boston, and the atmosphere of her synagogue on the Upper West Side. She felt that the political tradition that accompanied the house and techno scenes in Chicago and Detroit is mirrored by Yiddish activism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Kleztronica performances are a combination of traditional klezmer, kleztronica performances, and Yiddish drag performers. These drag performances include biblical tableaus, dance and even a Yiddish clarinetist drag king — all to honor the longstanding queer tradition in Yiddish theater and rave.
"I live in a queer klezmer community that's guided and shaped by the queer people who practice it. I'm just holding that one holding one tiny part of that lineage," she adds.
The small-but-mighty kleztronica scene continues to come out to the shows Berman-Peters arranges, much to the delight of London who is excited by the prospect of the next generation of klezmer stars experimenting with their craft.
"Even though it took me a while to finish 'Chronika' it's got a Zeitgeist moment now with these [kleztronica] musicians in their 20s and 30s, who are starting to have the same kind of fun of mixing the traditional roots klezmer with dance beats," London remarked.
Bringing updated Old World charm to social media
Other contemporary klezmer performers are choosing to keep Yiddish-language music alive through more traditional styles.
The Shvesters, composed of childhood friends Polina Fradkin and Chava Levi, sing Yiddish jazz to their 90,000 fans across Instagram and TikTok.
Fradkin, who was born in Russia, grew up with Yiddish music like the Barry Sisters always playing in her home. She and Levi had always enjoyed singing together, but truly felt in sync when they tried out Yiddish music. "Something just clicked in us where we looked at each other and we said ‘this is different. This is special,’" Levi recalls.
Shortly after, the Tel Aviv-based duo began posting videos of their tight harmony duets of Yiddish classics like "Tumbalalaika" and "Mein Yiddishe Momma" to positive reception.
The style of the Shvesters (Yiddish for "The Sisters") more closely resembles klezmer performed by the more Americanized Jewish community in the 1920s and 1930s. But without many jazz duet arrangements of this music, especially for two women, Fradkin and Levi had to tailor the tunes themselves. They attempted to evoke the thoughtful same feelings that might come from looking at a modernist Marc Chagall painting, or the otherworldly sensation of studying Kaballah’s divine powers and occult knowledge. As a result, some videos can take over four hours to record what becomes a 30 second clip.
Despite the legacy of Yiddish being a suppressed language in Israeli culture as the nation looked to encourage people to speak Hebrew, Israeli Jews of Ashkenazi descent are now looking to explore Yiddish and connect with the Old World. Music, Fradkin believes, is the easiest way to enjoy the culture of her ancestors since, even centuries later, many songs still resonate with the Jewish experience. "Speaking Yiddish was a major faux pas in Israel for many years. A page has turned in history, and now here we are," Fradkin notes.
"We really can sing in any language and sing any songs, but the difference is that these songs are ours. People yearn to come back to their roots and this immortalizes our culture," she says.
Recently, the Shvesters have begun playing live shows with a jazz guitarist and have booked a few festivals. Their first show sold out within hours. Now, their thousands of fans await their first singles "Ain Kik Auf Dir" and "Shein Vi Di Levone."
"It is just so fulfilling to be able to sing music that I personally connect with, that many generations of Jews connected with, and to see in person someone's real-time reaction to a song that's over 100 years old that we are lucky enough to bring back to people," Levi says.
Sspreading klezmer with Borscht Beat
Inspired by his grandfather’s love of klezmer music and desire to engage with his own Ashkenazi heritage, 30-year-old Aaron Bendich wants to share Jewish music with the masses. "It's the closest I can get to actually having music that feels like it is inherently mine," he says.
Bendich founded Jewish music label Borscht Beat and a radio show of the same name on Vassar College’s station. The show led him to a few paid speaking engagements, for which he decided to put his earnings back into the Jewish music community. The product of labor became his label, which has released nine klezmer albums since 2022 and three on the way this year.
Bendich has balanced working with more established klezmer stars like London on Chronika and Yiddish Psychedelic Rock band Forshpil with newcomers like Berman-Peters’ Levyosn.
Klezmer, like many smaller genres with religious or cultural affiliations, struggles with commerciality. While major record labels competed for Jewish music until the 1960s, today the market for Yiddish music is extremely niche. Add to that the increasingly small profits from albums in the streaming age, and there is an existential crisis to how klezmer performers sustain its cultural practice.
For this reason, Bendich believes projects like Borscht Beat that uplift klezmer are integral to the Jewish community. Klezmer not only preserves Yiddish music and language, but it provides an opportunity for skilled musicians to explore their heritage.
"Today, we have very few avenues for commercial opportunities for Jewish music. There's a really high degree of talent in the klezmer scene," Bendich says. "To be a good Yiddish singer, let alone a songwriter, you need to basically be an expert in a language that most often these folks did not grow up speaking."
Making culturally rich music for modern audiences
Klezmer musicians aim to reclaim a sense of Ashkenazi pride that was lost through assimilation by returning to their musical roots (and often iterating on those traditions). They hope that others are able to see themselves reflected in these modern takes on Yiddish music.
While the Shvesters adhere to strict jazz conventions, they want their music to feel fresh and relatable to the modern Jew. They hope their performances dispel misconceptions that Yiddish-language music has to be schmaltzy, but instead can feel elevated and artistic without compromising its history.
"We're not making music for people's great-grandparents. We're making music for the next generation to want to listen to and for this to be something that we would want to listen to," Fradkin says. "It's not cool anymore to put away your roots or hide your identity. Being who you are, knowing where you come from, your family, your history. It's a beautiful thing."
London believes that a musical tradition must continue to evolve and meet modern times. He believes the klezmer tradition will fade away if it’s not built upon either by practitioners following traditional styles or fusion artists.
"If these traditions are alive, they have to evolve because that's what that's what culture does. That's what language does. That's what everything does. What doesn't grow is dead and klezmer is not dead," he emphasizes.