August 3 Christina Crowder – Digital An-ski: A Community Expedition

This presentation will describe the brief history of the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project and its vision of a community-centered exploration of primary sources as the means to inform and transform the performance practice in the post-klezmer revival era. This is the story about the improbable set of events that led Anna Rogers (neé Gladkova, and Yiddish Summer alumna) to visit the Vernadsky library in the Summer of 2017, and about the development of the volunteer-driven Digital Humanities project that has been created to share these treasures within and beyond the klezmer music community.

We’ll meet some of the key volunteers in the project who are participants and faculty at Yiddish Summer in 2021, and hear about their experience working with the materials and with the KMDMP Community. Last but not least, you’ll hear a few of our latest favorite tunes from the collection as we share the opportunity to play them together in person at YSW!  

Christina Crowder is a klezmer accordionist, music researcher, and most recently music director and performing artist in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of the Broadway play “Indecent.” She is Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute, which has recently been awarded an National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for the Klezmer Archive Project. back

August 4 Lyudmila Sholokhova – The Jewish collections in the Vernadsky Library

An overview of the incredible collection of Jewish manuscripts, sound recordings and more that are found in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv. These  materials - which contain the manuscripts that are the focus of the KIselgof- Makonovetski Digital Manuscript Project- were collected in the Pale of Settlement and beyond it in the first half of the 20th century. Who collected them and when? How were the expeditions organized and structured? What happened to the materials between their collection and them being made public? What were the challenges of carrying out this work, especially for Beregovski who catalogued the entire collection and prepared a five volume publication over 70 years ago.


As we explore these materials and their context throughout the week, it’s essential to first understand what they are, and how the work of S. An-sky, Z. Kiselgof, J. Engel, and M. Beregovskii laid the foundation for generations of St. Petersburg composers and Jewish musicians of all sorts for a century to come.


Lyudmila Sholokhova is a curator, librarian, author and scholar of Jewish music folklore  in Ukraine. She has worked in and with the Vernadsky Library in Kyiv which houses the Kiselgof and Makonovetsky’s collections in addition to manuscripts and recordings collected by M. Beregovskii, J. Engel and others. Dr. Sholokhova was the author of the first catalog of these materials made since Beregovskii’s own work, the Phonoarchive of Jewish Musical Heritage and coauthor of the multivolume edition of Historical Collection of Jewish Musical Folklore 1912–1917 (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). She is the Curator of the Dorot Jewish Collection at the New York Public Library, and was formerly a Director of the Library at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. back

August 5 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett – Journey of a Thousand Years: A Curatorial Tour a POLiN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Facing the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes on the site of the Warsaw ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews completes the memorial complex by remembering how Jews lived This illustrated lecture explores the thousand-year history of Polish Jews, from the medieval period to the present, as presented in POLIN Museum’s multimedia narrative exhibition.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and University Professor Emerita at New York University. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki), and They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of the Republic of Poland, and received the 2020 Dan David Prize. She serves on Advisory Boards for the Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin, and the Jewish Museum of Tolerance Center in Moscow, and advises on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania, Belarus, Albania, Israel, and the United States. back

August 6 Valery Dymshits – Jewish Ethnomusicology in Russia and the USSR in the First Half of the Twentieth century

Between 1910 and 1930, folklorists and ethnomusicologists in Russia and the USSR achieved outstanding success in collecting and studying of the Jewish musical folklore. The world's first scientific collection of Jewish folk songs was published by S. Ginzburg and P. Marek in St. Petersburg in 1901 and in 1908 the Society of Jewish Folk Music was established in St. Petersburg by Jewish composers, former students of Rimsky-Korsakov. The collections of Jewish folk music gathered by S. A. An-sky, Z. Kiselgof, M. Beregovsky, Z. Skuditsky are still used all over the world by researchers of Jewish musical folklore and performers of Jewish music.

What features of Russian and Jewish culture in Russia and in the USSR led to such flourishing of Jewish ethnomusicology? What was the nature of discussions dedicated to the problem of the authenticity in Jewish folk music? The answers to these questions allow us to understand what and how Russian-Jewish folklorists recorded in the first half of the twentieth century, i.e., how was  a large percentage of the repertoire of the contemporary Klezmer stage formed.

Since 1988 Mr. Dymshits has been involved in studies of Jewish ethnography, folklore, Jewish literature, professional and folk Jewish art.
He is a researcher in Interdepartmental Petersburg Judaica Center in European University at St. Petersburg and Professor of Libera Arts and Science Department in St. Petersburg State University. In 1989-2019 Mr. Dymshits took part in 33 expeditions carrying out studies of Jewish traditional culture and since 1980 has been involved in translation of poetry and prose from English, German and Yiddish. His publication list includes about 25 translated books and he is a member of the editorial board of the journals “Folk of the Book in the World of Books”(St.Petersburg), Judaic-Slavic Journal (Moskow), Yiddishland (Jerusalem). back

August 7 Michael Steinlauf – Hope and Fear: Y. L. Peretz and the Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture

This is a talk about the rise of modern secular Yiddish culture a hundred years ago. It is centered around the work of Y. L. Peretz, who was called the father of that culture, its culture-hero, we might say today. Peretz discovered and explored Jewish folklore and read modern European literature in order to forge a secular culture in Yiddish, the everyday language of the Jewish people.

Young Jews looking for a path out of the shtetl and into modern life streamed to Peretz’s home in Warsaw where Peretz would encourage them to go out into the world and experience all of it, its art and its trash, its hopes and its fears, but to never forget where they came from. As he
put it, to see the world, but with Jewish eyes. And then to use that vision to create powerful new art and a new way of life in the Yiddish language.

Michael Steinlauf is Professor of History Emeritus at Gratz College near Philadelphia. He is the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse University Press) and contributing editor to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. His writings have been translated into Hebrew, Polish, German and Italian. Steinlauf is also active in various kinds of Jewish memory work in Poland and has served as chief historical advisor and curator of modern Jewish culture for the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He is currently at work on a study of the Yiddish writer and activist Y. L. Peretz. back