Seth Rogovoy: The Essential Klezmer

This multimedia program takes audiences on a journey via music, visuals, and storytelling, tracing klezmer’s evolution and development from Old World shtetls to New World nightclubs and concert stages. The program includes insights into the sound and shape of klezmer and introduces many of the great heroes who helped transform Eastern European Yiddish wedding music into the vital form of world music it is today.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music (Algonquin Books, 2001), the all-time bestselling guide to the vibrant genre of contemporary music with roots in Old World Yiddish wedding music. Seth is widely recognized as a leading authority on klezmer and Jewish music and has lectured and taught classes and workshops about the music, its history, social context, and the culture surrounding it, across the US and in England. He is the artistic director of the annual Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music, which takes place at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. Seth also created and produced From Shtetl to Stage: A Celebration of Yiddish Music and Culture for Carnegie Hall in 2019.