SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 8 pm

Hankus Netsky & Hebrew National Salvage:A Musical Journey through the YiddishTheatre

THURSDAY, MARCH 27, 7:30 pm

Yiddish Theatre in the Digital Age:

An InteractiveRound Table

Exploring Yiddish TheatreExploring Yiddish Theatre

Art & Conflict Series co-sponsors:

UWM’s Center for 21st-Century Studies

Center for International Education

Cultures and Communities Program

History Department

UWM Libraries

Milwaukee’s Coalition for Jewish Learning

Harry and Rose Samson Jewish Community Center

Hillel Milwaukee

Jewish Community Relations Council

Jewish Museum Milwaukee

Milwaukee Jewish Federation

These events are made possible by the generous

support of the Baye Foundation.

Program

Aaron Rubinstein A Digital Cue for Yiddish Theatre: Why Digital Matters to 21st-Century Humanities Scholarship

Amanda Seigel Broder Singers: The First Professional, Secular Yiddish Performers

Barbara Henry Endings & Beginnings: Mapping the Yiddish Theatre with Ancestry.com

Joel Berkowitz A Phantom Yiddish Theatre School, New York City, 1888

David Mazower Alfred Dreyfus on the Yiddish Stage: London, Paris, New York

Faith Jones Traveling Troupes, Local Cultures: Yiddish Theatre in Winnipeg

Zachary Baker The Historical Jewish Press Project and Yiddish Theatre Research

Debra Caplan Yiddish Theatre, Global Theatre: Mapping the Vilna Troupe with Google Earth

Michael Steinlauf Yiddish Theatre in the Warsaw Ghetto: Pages from the Oyneg Shabes Archives

Francesco Spagnolo If the Fiddler Falls Off the Roof: Yiddish Theatre in Contemporary Italy

Presenters

Zachary Baker is the Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. He compiled the annotated bibliography of The Lawrence Marwick Collection of Copyrighted Yiddish Plays, at the Library of Congress.

Joel Berkowitz is Director of the Sam and Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at UWM. He is a theatre historian and translator whose latest book is Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage, co-edited with Barbara Henry.

Debra Caplan is Assistant Professor of Theater at Baruch College, City University of New York. She is currently completing a book on the Vilna Troupe and Yiddish avant-garde theatre between the two World Wars.

Barbara Henry is Associate Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Washington; her most recent publication is Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage, co-edited with Joel Berkowitz.

Faith Jones is a librarian in Vancouver, Canada and a graduate student at the University of British Columbia investigating Yiddish culture in Winnipeg. She co-translated the forthcoming volume The Acrobat: the Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin.

David Mazower is the author of Yiddish Theatre in London and writes on Yiddish culture, British Jewish history, and Jewish art. By day he is a senior staff journalist with BBC World Service in London, editing Newshour and other current affairs shows.

Aaron Rubinstein is the University and Digital Archivist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has overseen large-scale digitization projects and digital libraries for over ten years, and at one time dabbled in translating Yiddish literature.

Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel, a native of Madison, WI, is a Yiddish singer, songwriter, actor, and researcher in Yiddish culture. By day, she is a librarian in the Dorot Jewish Division of The New York Public Library.

Francesco Spagnolo is the curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also teaches in the Department of Music, and a host for the cultural programming channel of RAI–Italian National Radio in Rome.

Michael Steinlauf directs the graduate program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Gratz College in Philadelphia and is theater editor of the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.

For more information on our presenters, visit www4.uwm.edu/jewishstudies/

Hankus Netsky & Hebrew National Salvage:A Musical Journey through the Yiddish Theatre

Featured PerFormers

A founding member of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, vocalist Lorin Sklamberg has also worked for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for almost 20 years, currently as its Sound Archivist. He also performs Jewish spiritual music with bandmate Frank London and in a duo that explores Yiddish and Irish song traditions with Dublin-born vocalist Susan McKeown. Lorin can be heard on some 50 CDs, and also composes and performs for film, dance, stage and circus; produces recordings; and teaches and lectures from London and Paris to Kiev and St. Petersburg.

One of the most exciting and versatile young musicians performing today, Eden Macadam-Somer is a full-time faculty member at the New England Conservatory. She maintains an active international performance and recording career as a soloist and with such bands as Notorious Folk, the Sail Away Ladies, and the Klezmer Conservatory Band.

Miryem-Khaye Seigel is a Yiddish singer, songwriter, actor, and researcher in Yiddish culture. A fluent Yiddish speaker, she is an original member of the Folksbiene Troupe (National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene). Miryem-Khaye is recording her first Yiddish album, to be released in 2014. She also performs regularly with Hankus Netsky’s Hebrew National Salvage.

Clarinetist Kurt Bjorling is the music director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble, founded in 1984. He has also toured and recorded with the Klezmatics (New York) and violinist Itzhak Perlman, and since 1992 he has been a member of Brave Old World In addition to his involvement with Yiddish music, he has been active playing jazz, chamber music and various styles of ethnic folk music, as well as arranging and performing music for theatre.

Doug Scharf has played trumpet with Tony Bennett, Elton John, Burt Bacharach, Glen Campbell, Ray Charles, and others. He played in the band and wrote music for The Late Show with Joan Rivers, and also wrote music for Roy Orbison, Cher, Jeff Lynne, and Thomas Dolby.

Dan Anderson has been very active as a freelance musician in the Chicago music scene since 1988. He’s played with The Chicago Symphony, Ray Charles, and many others while teaching at Columbia College.

Percussionist Grant Smith has been a member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band since 1986 and has been a part of many world music, jazz, classical, orthodox, deconstructed, and free music projects. Theatre and dance credits include the American Repertory Theater’s production of The King Stag, featuring a solo multi-percussion score and movement works with Shakti Smith, Jane Wang, and Liz Roncka as well as his own choreography known as hogginsho.

One of the richest and most neglected Jewish musical traditions, the music of the Yiddish theatre offers incomparable insights into the lives and worlds of Eastern European Jews and American Jewish immigrants.

Tonight's concert will feature some of the top Yiddish performers of today exploring the work of the Yiddish theatre’s major composers and performers in a diverse program that explores the full range of Yiddish popular music.

A multi-instrumentalist, composer, and ethomusicologist, Hankus Netsky is chair of New England Conservatory’s Contemporary Improvisation Department and founder and director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, an internationally renowned Yiddish music ensemble. He has composed exten-sively for film, theater, and television, collaborated closely with such artists as Itzhak Perlman, Robin Williams, Joel Grey, and Theodore Bikel and produced numerous recordings, including ten by the Klezmer Conservatory Band.

Tonight’s event is an outgrowth of a three-day workshop, the first meeting of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project. Founded by Joel Berkowitz and Debra Caplan, the DYTP is a research collective dedicated to applying Digital Humanities tools and methods to the study and preservation of the Yiddish theatre, part of the rich cultural heritage of Eastern European Jewry. Our program tonight offers a small but potent taste of the group members’ varied research interests. We look forward to a lively discussion with you after the individual presentations.

Yiddish Theatrein the

Digital Age