Welcome
The Klezmer Institute supports Ashkenazic expressive culture through research, teaching, publishing, and programming.
Our Vision
We envision a constantly expanding and interconnected community of researchers, performers, teachers, students, and heritage practitioners supported by authoritative resources and innovative projects.
Our Philosophy
Klezmer and Ashkenazic cultural community empowerment leads to creativity, growth and continuity. Commitment to high academic and creative standards contributes to a community of excellence among performers, researchers, educators, and practitioners.
Our Mission
The Klezmer Institute is a digital-first organization founded to support Ashkenazic expressive culture through research, teaching, publishing, and programming. Ashkenazic expressive culture encompasses the musical and physical expression of eastern European Jewish culture through music, song, and dance. Klezmer Institute projects use digital humanities tools to define and document the unique musical heritage of the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe, and to increase communication and collaboration between professional and amateur musicians, dancers, and scholars throughout the world. Klezmer Institute champions Ashkenazic expressive culture through digital preservation and contemporary performance as an important means to understand Jewish culture in the past, and as a springboard to inspire new generations to engage with an essential cultural legacy.
Quick Links
Research
The Institute is a digital-first research powerhouse that is creating and maintaining projects that are both advancing scholarship in our subject areas and developing new digital humanities tools that will benefit heritage communities seeking to document their own expressive cultures.
Publishing
The Klezmer Institute has begun a series of music folios by authors with specialized knowledge about klezmer music and its relationship to Ashkenazic dance. These folios will highlight the specialized repertoire of klezmer families and to document the repertoires of important klezmer musicians.
Programming
Klezmer Institute is a network-based organization that creates in-person programming across North America and in Europe while seeking partnerships and connections across the globe.
News & Events
Rescued: An ARC Magazine Podcast about KMDMP
or 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.
We’re Hiring!
The Klezmer Archive Project is looking to hire a UI Designer and a Front End Developer for contract positions with our team!
Zamlers Concert — Philipse Manor Hall, Yonkers — May 19, 2024
Join the Zamlers Trio for a concert of Chamber klezmer music at Phillipse Manor Hall in Yonkers on May 19, 2024.
Priceless treasures from the An-Ski Expeditions
A CommunityExpedition into klezmer manuscripts from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine
Join the KMDMP Commons
Everyone is welcome to join our "Community Expedition" to explore the the musical treasures contained in the Kiselgof and Makonovetsky manuscripts. The "KMDMP Commons" is the online gathering space for a growing community of musicians and scholars who are working together to unlock the secrets contained in these pages, and to bring this music to new life.
Meet the Directors
Our team of directors oversees day to day operations of the Klezmer Institute. Our work exists as the means to support the work of the many volunteers who have contributed their knowledge, artistry, and research to the projects we are working on. Find their names and their work throughout our project and resource pages!
Clara Byom, Development Director
Clara Byom is a versatile multi-instrumentalist, musicologist, arts administrator, and tunesmith based in Albuquerque, NM. As Development Director, Clara coordinates grant writing for Institute projects, develops membership and fundraising drives, and oversees traditional outreach and social media campaigns for the Institute.
Christina Crowder, Executive Director
Christina is the Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute. She is a klezmer accordionist, music researcher, and most recently music director and performing artist in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of the Broadway play “Indecent.”
Walter Zev Feldman, Academic Director
Walter Zev Feldman is widely considered the leading scholar of European klezmer music, viewed both in historical perspective and as an integral part of the music of the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe. As Academic Director of the Institute, Zev will guide the research, publishing, and performance programming.
