Announcing Klezmer Institute’s 2022 Fundraising Appeal
The Klezmer Institute has continued to grow in 2022, and we have been deeply honored to be awarded a second NEH grant to plan a Scholarly Edition Series for the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript corpus. We have been active in spreading the word about our work through conferences and presentations, and now we’re excited to begin adding live performances to our lineup! We would be grateful for your support this year so that we can continue to expand our projects, resources, and programming.
If you’d like to see more about donation premiums, dedicated funds, and our 501c3 information visit our Support Page here.
The Klezmer Institute is revolutionizing access to everything about the Yiddish instrumental music tradition. It is creating an online research powerhouse that will finally allow one-stop shopping for resources.
Klezmer Institute exists as an organization in service to the community of practitioners, scholars, culture bearers, and organizations who are invested in Ashkenazic expressive culture and as a hub for year-round coordinated advocacy, projects, and programing in our subject areas. We are committed to developing and maintaining projects that advance knowledge, support creativity, and build community.
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. As a research hub, Klezmer Institute connects scholars in many disciplines, and provides project mentorship for practitioners and researchers at all levels. Klezmer Institute projects seek to center practitioners and culture bearers as active participants in research projects alongside scholars and archivists, and to provide resources for musicians, singers, and dancers who are deeply invested in Ashkenazic expressive culture, but don’t have academic institutional affiliations.
The Klezmer Institute isn’t just inventing powerful new ways to bring key Yiddish cultural materials out of the archives and into our lives. It’s making the creation of new, innovative Yiddish culture possible by helping us understand the incredible range of what was created by the musicians, singers, and dancers who came before us. By transforming our understanding of what Yiddish expressive culture has been, the Klezmer Institute is opening exciting new doors to our expansive Yiddish future.
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. Our distributed team structure gives us an in-house model to work from to bring the international community together through digital gatherings and helps us bring programs to small interested communities that are otherwise underserved. Our teams are capitalizing on rapid developments in Digital Humanities and to contribute to open source technology ecosystems and to realize longstanding dreams from our community such as a comprehensive database for klezmer tunes.
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Klezmer Institute takes its name from the klezmer revival, an ongoing creative engagement with the unique musical heritage of the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe that today includes dance, song, and Hasidic repertoire under a broad umbrella of performance and study. Defining expressive culture in this context is a way to understand these forms as non-textual artistic expression, and to observe the overarching unity connecting Yiddish language and speech gesture; the sung Hebrew/Aramaic of liturgical prayer; communicative and competitive dance forms; and the gesture and movement of vocal and instrumental repertoires. Klezmer Institute projects use digital humanities tools to define and document this legacy, and to increase communication and collaboration between professional and amateur musicians, dancers, and scholars throughout the world. Though deeply entwined with Jewish religious practice, Ashkenazic expressive culture reflects a secular expression of Jewish culture that resonates deeply for many people.
