The Yiddish Book Center will hold its festival of klezmer and new Yiddish music this weekend, July 11 to 14, on their campus in Amherst. In its 12th year, Yidstock is a long weekend of concerts, talks, and music and dance workshops celebrating the diverse world of new Yiddish music. Tickets are still available for some concerts and most of the other events, but Livestream concert passes can be purchased that give access to all seven concerts via live stream.
When Executive Director Susan Bronson came to the Yiddish Book Center 14 years ago, she started the festival in hopes of “creating a real energy” and supporting the musicians “who are trying to celebrate and do new things with Yiddish music.” She knew Seth Rogovoy, author of “The Essential Klezmer,” and brought him on as the artistic director.
The festival grew, and in recent years, they have expanded the scope, bringing in international artists from Israel, Europe, Canada, and at one point Russia. Musicians meet and often play with each other, says Bronson, spurring new collaborations that are exciting for both the artists and the audiences.
The music itself is also a mix of styles and influences, ranging from the more traditional to the experimental. As Bronson points out, Yiddish is “inherently a fusion culture, because Jews spoke Yiddish all around the world. And their culture was influenced by so many other cultures.”
Yidstock kicks off with The Klezmatics, who “brought the revival of klezmer into the rock era, blazing the path for the klezmer renaissance.” A new quartet Levyosn, “a younger group of musicians,” says Bronson, performs on Friday playing both Yiddish song and klezmer.
Canadian Josh Dolgin (AKA Socalled) brings “all kinds of different influences into his music,” says Bronson, “traditional and funk and hip hop. It’s sort of a jam band experiment in Yiddish funk.” There are still tickets available to his Saturday night concert with his current project called Gephilte.
Socalled “has a deep, deep knowledge of Yiddish music of all kinds,” says Bronson. He started out doing a lot of Yiddish hip hop music. “Every time he comes here, he looks through all the sheet music. He’s created a lot of new fusion music out of his vast understanding of this music. He’s just so talented and exciting, and that’s going to be a great show.”
Daniel Kahn, who lives in Germany, is playing a sold-out show Sunday with master fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment and legendary klezmer percussionist Richie Barshay. “Yiddish has a real protest song tradition,” explains Bronson, “and he riffs on that and does a lot of social justice music in Yiddish. The group offers “radical treatments of modern Yiddish songs” and Yiddish translations of American songwriters.
There are a few tickets left for Basya Schechter and Avi Fox-Rosen on Sunday, who will perform their settings of Yiddish poet Itzik Manger’s work, specifically his retellings of Bible stories. Their music combines a singer-songwriter aesthetic with various other musical influences.
The music, Bronson thinks, is “really fun and engaging, and I think most people come and they love it. There’s great energy, and the music itself is accessible to everybody.” Bronson says the Yiddish Book Center has a lot of Jewish members who really love Yidstock and come from all over the country, but it also has a younger audience that “is just inherently more diverse.”
“There’s some traditional religious music that is the basis for some of the new music, but it certainly doesn’t require any knowledge of Jewish life or Jewish religion to enjoy the music. It’s just a very fun, rollicking musical style,” says Bronson.
Concerts take place in the Yiddish Book Center’s large concert space, and the artist talks and workshops are held in their smaller theater. There will be also a food truck. The campus sits on an old apple orchard, adjacent to Hampshire College, with walking paths and an outdoor “Yiddish writers’ garden.”
Bronson, who lives in the Berkshires, points out that the festival in Amherst is still accessible to those in the Berkshires, not very different from driving up to Williamstown. The Yiddish Book Center’s museum space has a new permanent exhibition, “Yiddish, A Global Culture.” “So if you come to our concerts, you can also tour the exhibition. It’s really easy to make a day of it, even if you’re only going to one concert.”
The Yiddish Book Center holds other programs, too, and Bronson hopes people will come learn more about what they are doing there. View all of the Yidstock events and purchase tickets or a Livestream concert pass here.
