November 2022
Sholem Aleichem, Friend of Yiddish Culture,
Our holiday season has now concluded with Sukes and Simkhes Toyre, both known as the season of our joy. There are no Jewish holidays in the (lunar) month of Kheshvan (10/26 - 11/24), but we offer a plethora of events to extend the joy!
If someone has forwarded this newsletter to you,
WORKSHOP SERIES
Presented by KlezCalifornia
Tuesdays, November 8 - December 6, 5:30-7pm PT (calculate your local time HERE).
The American Yiddish musical theatre was a powerful force in the turn-of-the-century immigrant experience. The theatre brought to life immigrants’ dreams, their difficulties in the new world, and their nostalgia for the Old Country.

You will learn songs and their backgrounds and most importantly, you will sing! This course will provide you with recordings, video clips, sheet music, and song sheets in transliteration and English translation. You will receive immediate links to class videos for your review and as a "make-up" in case you cannot participate live. By singing songs repeatedly over four classes you will remember them (and learn Yiddish vocabulary, too)!

Co-presented by Jewish Folk Chorus of San Francisco.
Tuition: $80. Register NOW to ensure we have enough students!

WORKSHOP SERIES

Presented by KlezCalifornia
Sunday, November 13, 11am-12:45pm PT (calculate your local time HERE).
Learn songs of Yiddish gangsters, petty thieves, anarchists, freethinkers, assassins, unmarried mothers, and sex workers. We’ll include songs about turn-of-the-century sex traffic in Buenos Aires, where prostitutes famously organized their own burial society and graveyard. We’ll learn from Roman-alphabet transcriptions, by ear, with time for questions and discussion. We’ll also enjoy some original recordings, with new insights! These songs were often sung among cronies, far from the respectable world!

No charge. Donations encouraged!
Indecent in San Francisco

Through Saturday, November 5, PT (in-person only)
In a first-time collaboration, Yiddish Theatre Ensemble (YTE) and San Francisco Playhouse are co-producing the Tony Award-winning Broadway play, Indecent by Paula Vogel.
Indecent portrays the real-life events and controversy surrounding God of Vengeance when it first ran on Broadway in 1923. The show is getting rave reviews and standing ovations!

KlezCalifornia audiences can save 20% off tickets to Indecent. Click here and enter code YTE20 at checkout to receive the discount.

Yiddish Theatre Ensemble is a fiscally-sponsored project of KlezCalifornia and KlezCalifornia is a community co-sponsor of Indecent.


At the same time, YTE’s award-winning 2021 video adaptation of God of Vengeance (94 min.) is again available for online viewing at your leisure (multiple times through Tuesday, November 15) for $18 (per household). Link and password will be sent after GofV ticket purchase.]
Three Thursdays, November 3 - 17, 7pm PT (calculate your local time HERE).
Co-presented by KlezCalifornia
Memoirs of Jewish life in the East European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. In three sessions, Natan Meir will examine the place of these marginalized figures in the Jewish community from the dawn of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust. The course will include sessions on the history of the hekdesh, mentally ill people and so-called “town fools,” the conscription of marginal people into the Russian military, and the cholera wedding, a magical ritual to end an epidemic in which the community would marry its most vulnerable and marginalized members to each other.
Presented by New Lehrhaus.
Tuition: $36 for all three sessions.

Sunday, November 6, 3-4:30pm PT (calculate your local time HERE).
Co-presented by KlezCalifornia
If you attended a typical American Jewish wedding in the 1950s, you probably wouldn't have heard much traditional Jewish music. American dances conquered the scene, and whatever space they left for the Jewish dance set was likely to have been filled by Israeli hits. These songs might have displaced the traditional klezmer repertoire, but how did they get there and what did they mean? Learn about the musical relationship between klezmer and Israeli folk music.
Presented by New Lehrhaus. Tuition: $12.

Sunday, November 20, 2pm PT (calculate your local time HERE).
Co-presented by KlezCalifornia
Join YIVO Sound Archivist Lorin Sklamberg for a look at the holdings of one of the world’s largest repositories of audio materials pertaining to the Ashkenazic experience. This talk will feature examples from the dawn of the commercial recording industry through the present day: cantorial music, theater songs, comedy routines, Yiddish radio and, of course, klezmer. In addition to a display of one-of-a-kind artifacts (piano rolls, vintage shellac discs, working gramophones and period artwork), the talk will give insight into YIVO’s online collections of field recordings of Yiddish songs.
Presented by Jewish Community Library. No charge.

TASTES OF YIDDISH CULTURE SERIES
Presented by KlezCalifornia
Sunday, November 20, 2-3pm Pacific Time (calculate your local time HERE).
This monthly online conversation Salon is for fluent (flisik) Yiddish speakers. No charge.

Di teme far november vet zayn: Ven ir volt gehat ayer eygene televizye program, vegn vos volt es geven?

Klezmer & Yiddish Music Links
Watch Peter Seeger sing in Yiddish and interview (and sing with) Ruth Rubin, one of the foremost folklorists of Yiddish music. The first song he sings is Zhankoye.

The first scene of Indecent with klezmer themes, from PBS' Great Performances.
Yiddish Language Links
Peking University is the first in China to offer a Yiddish-language course. The instructor says learning Yiddish offers her students a way to explore a different culture. Listen to the five-minute story broadcast on National Public Radio.
Other Yiddish Culture Links
A group of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn is reviving the golden age of cantorial music. Jeremiah Lockwood, pictured above left, lives in New York, but was in the San Francisco Bay Area for several years recently while in graduate school.

Free animated 8-minute film, "The Fiddle," based on a Sholem Aleichem short story. The story of Sholom, the boy destined to become the fiddler on the roof. In Yiddish, with English and Hebrew subtitles. Available from Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival. "Unlock" the film by Sunday, November 6, enter your email and name, then you have 72 hours to watch it.
Nu, What Else?
Gail Rubman:
In honor of Renee Enteen who gives so generously of her time and energy to numerous refugee and other social causes, as well as to the Jewish Folk Chorus of San Francisco.
Laura Sheppard:
In honor of my mother Hilda Sheppard on her 98th birthday!
Moreen Libet:
In memory of Elaine Fingerett, our band's accordionista. In the process of sharing out her klezmer sheet music. It is now going out into the world, where she has gone.
View KlezCalifornia's Honor Wall. Become a donor to post your tribute.
Donate
Help us continue our mission to connect people and communities around the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond with Yiddish culture.
Or mail a check to the address below.
Please join KlezCalifornia's Goldene Pave Society by including a bequest in your will.

A sheynem dank! Thank you very much!
A bisl mer (a little bit more)
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