Permeable Boundaries, with Jordan Hirsch

Lecture #44 in Joshua Horowitz’s series, The Promiscuous World of Jewish Music

Permeable Boundaries:  Playing on the Hasidic and Jewish Bandstand in NY with American-born Klezmorim, presented by Jordan Hirsch

Monday, April 12, 11am Pacific Daylight Time/2pm New York/ 7pm London/ 8pm Paris/ 9pm Tel Aviv. Please confirm the local time !

Length: 1 – 2 hours

Donations to Josh Horowitz are accepted and appreciated, but not required.

Zoom Meeting ID: 967 8901 9038
Password: 156230

There is a Zoom limit of 100 participants. You do not need to register; simply use the sign-in info above.

When discussing the klezmer ‘revival,’ or ‘resurgence’, or ‘revitalization’, we often think of it as a repertoire and style of music that was practiced by fewer musicians in fewer places for fewer people through the 50’s and 60’s. But if we think more broadly about the definition of klezmer and its world, there is another path through which the music was kept alive and even vibrant. The New York Haredi community held on to a more traditional mode of performing Jewish music long after the rest of American Jewry adopted the musical and aesthetic trappings of the general culture. Jordan Hirsch and his peers are the last group of musicians to come up when the Jewish wedding scene still played by the old rules, and klezmer and Ashkenazic expressive culture, to borrow a phrase, could still be learned on the bandstand. Jordan will relate his experience and try to tie it to the journey of klezmer in the U.S. in the post-war era. 

About Joshua Horowitz»

This project has been made possible in part by a grant from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, in partnership with the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Grants for the Arts, and The California Endowment.