Yiddish Summer Weimar is an annual summer institute and festival for Yiddish music, language and culture which takes place in
Weimar
Weimar is a city in the state of Thuringia, Germany. It is located in Central Germany between Erfurt in the west and Jena in the east, approximately southwest of Leipzig, north of Nuremberg and west of Dresden. Together with the neighbouri ...
, Germany. Starting as a 3-day workshop in 1998, it was officially founded in its current form in 2006 and has grown to become one of the most important festivals and educational organizations for
Klezmer
Klezmer ( yi, קלעזמער or ) is an instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The essential elements of the tradition include dance tunes, ritual melodies, and virtuosic improvisations played for l ...
Yiddish Language
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ver ...
, dance and culture. It is known for its transcultural and transnational perspective, for the pedagogical approach of its founder, Alan Bern, and for its commitment to the creation and presentation of historically informed, contemporary Yiddish artistic production.
History
In 1998, the band
Brave Old World
Brave Old World is an American and German klezmer band. It formed in 1989.
Members hail from the US and Germany. ''The Washington Post'' called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup. Every player is a virtuoso.”
In 1992, the group w ...
was invited by the European Summer Academy to teach a 3-day workshop in Yiddish music and dance in Weimar, Germany, followed by a concert. The following year, the city of Weimar was designated a European Capital of Culture and Brave Old World was invited back to teach a week-long workshop followed by a concert. Klezmer music, a genre originating in Eastern Europe and repopularized in the United States in the 1980s, had become popular in Germany in the 1990s due to foreign artists such as Brave Old World, The Klezmatics, and Giora Feidman, as well as German groups like Kasbek,
Zupfgeigenhansel
Zupfgeigenhansel was a German folk duo, one of the most successful groups to emerge on the German folk scene in the 1970s. It consisted of Erich Schmeckenbecher and Thomas Friz. The group was named after the collection of folk songs of the same nam ...
,
Karsten Troyke
Karsten Troyke (born ''Karsten Bertolt Sellhorn'' on 14 August 1960 in Berlin) is a German singer of Jewish songs, as well as an actor and speaker.
Early life
Troyke was born to a non-Jewish family, though his father Werner "Josh" Sellhorn had ...
. A number of American and ex-Soviet klezmer and Yiddish musicians settled in Germany during his time, including Alan Bern (in 1989) and
Joel Rubin
Joel Rubin is an American clarinetist, Klezmer musician, ethnomusicologist, and scholar of Jewish music. Since becoming involved in the Klezmer revival in the late 1970s, he has been researching, teaching and performing Klezmer music and related g ...
.
Because of the success of the 1999 Brave Old World workshop, the idea of an annual workshop and festival emerged. In 2000, the , run by Julia Draganovic, took over the festival management, under the umbrella of the , a non-profit organization that made it possible to apply for public funding for the festival. At the same time, Bern became the Artistic Director, and the festival was officially named (Weimar Klezmer Weeks).
In 2002 Draganovic's role was taken over by Stephanie Erben. Between 2000 and 2005, the festival grew from one week to four weeks through the addition of further week-long workshops dedicated to individual genres of Yiddish expressive culture and language. During this time, public evening jam sessions in cafés became a prominent feature of the festival, giving students rich opportunities for informal learning and creating close connections with the general Weimar community. This integrated urban setting also distinguishes the festival from festivals such as
KlezKanada
KlezKanada () is a Canadian organization for the promotion of klezmer music and Yiddish culture. Its principal program is a week-long Jewish music festival founded in 1996 that takes place annually in August at Camp B'nai B'rith in Lantier, Quebec ...
or KlezKamp, which have operated as rural retreats. In 2005, Bern decided that workshops and concerts would be unified by an annual special topic, and committed the festival to a transcultural and transnational perspective, understanding Yiddish culture as fundamentally related to other cultures in a complex matrix.
By 2006, the festival had outgrown both its original focus on klezmer music and the infrastructure provided by the and the . It was decided to create a new nonprofit organization to run the festival, called Other Music e.V. (changed in 2018 to Other Music Academy e.V.). At the same time, the festival was re-named Yiddish Summer Weimar (YSW). It has since grown to become one of the main Yiddish music and cultural festivals in Germany and worldwide.
In 2008-9, YSW launched its first major international project, The Other Europeans. Funded by the
European Union
The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been des ...
and in partnership with the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków and the KlezMore Festival in Vienna, The Other Europeans brought together 14 musicians from the USA, Moldova, Bulgaria, Hungary, Germany and Belgium to explore the common repertoire of klezmer and lautari musicians who were active in Moldova from the 18th through the late 20th centuries. This project was given the Best Practices Award in Favor of the Roma Community award by the European Commission in 2010 and was the subject of the documentary film ''The Broken Sound'' (german: Der Zerbrochene Klang).
In 2010, Erben left the organization and the festival management was taken over by a team that included Katrin Petlusch, Katrin Füllsack and Johannes Paul Gräßer. In 2013, in cooperation with the tourism initiative (Weimar Summer), Yiddish Summer Weimar introduced a special Festival Week featuring nightly concerts and a daytime program of free, hands-on introductory workshops open to everyone. Whereas concerts had previously taken place as part of the workshops, the Festival Week constituted a new platform for concerts, films and other public events in a concentrated period of time, and it remains a central feature of YSW.
In 2016, YSW received project funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation for the creation of two major new works: ''Bobe Mayses: Jewish Knights & Other Legends,'' a collaborative puppet theater production directed by Jenny Romaine, and ''Gilgul'', a contemporary dance work created and directed by Steven Weintraub. The following year, Andreas Schmitges became Curator of YSW, with Bern continuing as Artistic Director. Under Schmitges’ curatorship, YSW rapidly expanded to include international youth exchange projects such as the Caravan Orchestra, the Kadya Choir, and the Triangle Orchestra, concerts in Erfurt, Eisenach and other cities and towns in Thuringia (YSW goes Thuringia), and a new emphasis on in-house productions of New Yiddish Culture. 2019 represented the pre-pandemic high point of this development, when, once again with the support of the Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany, Yiddish Summer Weimar was able to produce seven major original, international artistic projects in the framework of "The Weimar Republic of Yiddishland": (led by Alan Bern), (led by
Josh Dolgin
Joshua Dolgin (born December 28, 1976), better known by his stage name Socalled, is a Canadian rapper and record producer, known for his eclectic mix of hip hop, klezmer, and other styles such as drum & bass and folk music. A pianist and accordion ...
), ''Waxband'' (led by Amit Weisberger), (led by
Michael Wex
Michael Wex (born September 12, 1954) is a Canadian novelist, playwright, translator, lecturer, performer, and author of books on language and literature.Josh Waletzky), (led by Yuri Vedenyapin), and (led by Polina Shepherd, Daniel Kahn and Efim Chorny).
Since 2019, YSW has explicitly embraced a four-fold mission: the research, transmission, creation and presentation of historically-informed New Yiddish Culture. In 2020 and 2021, YSW took place outdoors and in special formats due to the Covid pandemic and dance events were cancelled. In 2022 and 2023, it has returned to its pre-pandemic format of mixed indoors and outdoors venues, workshops, concerts, the Festival Week and other special events.
Stefan Wolf, the Lord Mayor of Weimar from 2006 to 2018, has been a major supporter of the festival. In 2009 gave the nonprofit organization a 33-year, low cost lease on an unused, former school building; it became the home of the Other Music Academy (OMA), conceived as a new kind of cultural center dedicated to diversity, inclusion, individual and social empowerment and creativity. People from all walks of life are invited to co-create interdisciplary, hands-on projects with the goal of learning to appreciate more their own and other people’s diverse sensibilities and sets of skills, and to understand differences and even conflicts as potential for co-creativity rather than antagonism. The OMA is the physical home base for Yiddish Summer Weimar and al of its other projects. Peter Kleine, the current Lord Mayor of Weimar, is also a major supporter of both YSW and the OMA. The festival has received recognition and occasional support from the
European Commission
The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...
, the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Ministries of Education and Culture of
Thuringia
Thuringia (; german: Thüringen ), officially the Free State of Thuringia ( ), is a state of central Germany, covering , the sixth smallest of the sixteen German states. It has a population of about 2.1 million.
Erfurt is the capital and larg ...
, the German Music Council, the city government of Weimar as well many other public agencies, private foundations and individuals.
Pedagogy
The festival's pedagogical approach has been developed by its founder Alan Bern, and distinguishes it from other annual Jewish or Yiddish music workshops. Bern was inspired by his work in the mid-1980s with
Ted Sizer
Theodore Ryland Sizer (June 23, 1932 – October 21, 2009) was a leader of educational reform in the United States, the founder (and eventually President Emeritus) of the Essential school movement and was known for challenging longstanding practi ...
's
Coalition of Essential Schools
The Coalition of Essential Schools is a US organization created to further a type of whole-school reform originally envisioned by founder Ted Sizer in his book, ''Horace's Compromise.'' The group began in 1984 with twelve schools and grew to 600 m ...
, which emphasized the need for teachers to model learning rather than to impart knowledge, and that the lifelong creativity and enthusiasm of teachers is essential to inspiring students. To achieve this, teachers teach in teams and act as project leaders, helping to guide a process of discovery along with their students. Bern applied this principle to the YSW workshops, leading to the atmosphere of a learning community. Workshop teachers engage in an ongoing exchange with each other as well as with the participants, with flexible scheduling, project-based learning, and an emphasis on learning and playing by ear and other kinds of embodied knowledge, rather than score- or text-based knowledge.
In the festival, Bern and his collaborators aimed to strike a balance between teaching the specific techniques and aesthetics of Yiddish music, and to allow participants the freedom to experiment within an intentional music community. Special attention is also paid to issues of identity, authenticity, and intercultural interactions. The level of expectation on participants is at a high level, especially in the advanced workshops; music is taught by ear. While the courses investigate Jewish culture and traditions, they are open to non-Jewish participants who often make up a significant portion. The festival's intercultural approach goes beyond the personal background of the participants, as many of the courses explore the links between Yiddish music and those of other nationalities (Greek, Moldovan, German, etc.) As the theme of the festival changes each year, many of the participants return on a yearly basis.