Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

By Arc MagazineReligion & SpiritualityHistory
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Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer episodes

  • 3. Dancing in a Jewish Way

    Klezmer activist Christina Crowder finds something personal in the music she helped return to the klezmer community. Plus, a klezmer concert in a church. From Arc magazine and Washington University in St. Louis.

    Image from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.

    18 min
  • 2. Klezmerland

    A fateful Tokyo subway ride delivers hundreds of tunes to klezmerland, transforming the genre—and kugel etiquette. From Arc magazine and Washington University in St. Louis. 

    Image from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.

    26 min
  • 1. The Expedition

    As Jewish Eastern Europe crumbles, ethnographer S. An-sky races to save klezmer music. His recordings and notebooks barely survive the 1900s, landing deep in a Soviet archive. This is the story of their rescue. From Arc magazine and Washington University in St. Louis.

    Image from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.

    22 min

About Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer

From the publisher's feed

For decades, klezmer musicians have kept traditional Jewish music alive despite war, genocide, and erasure. They’ve done so by playing a small handful of surviving songs again and again. Many more songs—a trove of tunes with the potential to redefine the genre—have sat just out of reach, in a former Soviet archive. This music was unseen, unheard, unknown. But now, newly rescued, it’s transforming the klezmer world, the people who work in it, and our picture of 20th-century Jewish life in a destabilized Europe. Rescued: The Lost Treasures of Klezmer tells the story of that music.