Klezmer Institute Governance:
Board of Directors & Advisory Board
Board of Directors
Mark Slobin
Mark Slobin is the Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Emeritus at Wesleyan University and the author or editor of books on Afghanistan and Central Asia, eastern European Jewish music, film music, and ethnomusicology theory, two of which have received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award: “Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World” and “Tenement Songs: Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants. His most recent book (2018) is “Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back.” He has been President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for Asian Music and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Rozsa Daniel Lang/Levitsky
Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky is a cultural worker and organizer based at Brooklyn’s Glitter House. Can’t stop picking things up on the street and making other things out of them; never figured out how to make art for art’s sake; rarely wants to work alone. Just another gendertreyf diasporist mischling who identifies with, not as.
In the Yiddish svive, a singer, dancer, theater-maker, and teacher. Founding member of the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee (creators of NYC’s largest non-hasidic purimshpil); singer with Koyt Far Dayn Fardakht and solo as soroke | voron; collaborating designer/builder on “Soul Songs: Inspiring Women of Klezmer”, “Bobe-Mayses: Yiddish Knights & Other Impossibilities”, the Folksbiene’s “Itzik Manger’s Megile”, and more; co-editor of “The Oysters of Yiddish Song” (a forthcoming collection of contemporary Yiddish songs, with Adah Hetko & Zoë Aqua); Advisory Council member for Linke Fligl (queer land-based diasporism, with chickens). More: https://meansof.org
Ethel Raim
Ethel Raim is co-founder and Artistic Director emeritus of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. A pioneering figure in public sector folklore, she has been a national leader in revitalizing diverse ethnic traditions and was recognized for her achievements in 2018 as a Bess Lomax Hawes NEA National Heritage Fellow. In 2012, Raim was awarded the American Folklore Society’s Benjamin Botkin Award for her career impact in furthering the field of public sector folklore. Raim is also a renowned singer/ethnographer of Yiddish and Slavic music from Eastern Europe. One of the Bulgarian field recordings she made with CTMD co-founder Martin Koenig was featured on NASA’s 1977 Voyager “Golden Record,” a collection of music specially curated to represent the music of humankind throughout the galaxy.
Ilya Shneyveys
Ilya Shneyveys is an international performer, accordionist and multi-instrumentalist, teacher, composer, arranger and producer of contemporary Jewish music, from klezmer and Yiddish folk song to fusion and experimental projects. He is an artistic director of the German-Israeli student exchange project The Caravan Orchestra, for which he was awarded the 2017 Shimon-Peres-Prize. Ilya is artistic director of the Yiddish psychedelic rock band Forshpil (LV-RU-DE), and received the 2014 RUTH World Music Award as part of the Yiddish-Bavarian fusion project Alpen Klezmer (DE). He tours with the klezmer-balkan band Dobranotch (RU), and received the Eiserne Eversteiner Preis in 2017. He has performed and collaborated with Opa! (RU), The Klezmatics (US), Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird (DE) among others. He is a co-founder of Berlin’s Neukölln Klezmer Sessions and Shtetl Neukölln festival, and a long-time faculty member at Yiddish Summer Weimar. More here.
Jordan Hirsch
Jordan Hirsch learned to play Klezmer music the old-fashioned way: on the bandstand. From early in his career, he was privileged to play with some of the greatest American Klezmorim, like Ray Musiker, Howie Leess, Danny Rubinstein, Rudy Tepel, and Pete Sokolow. His experience in the chasidic wedding scene has informed his understanding of the rich and wide repertoire shared by klezmorim and chasidim alike. Jordan spent many years playing in the Catskills Borscht Belt, including six years as Musical Director of The Homowack Lodge. He has performed with the Folksbiene National Yiddish Theater since 2010, most recently as 1st Trumpet for the critically acclaimed production of Fiddler Afn Dakh, Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish. Jordan currently teaches music at SAR High School. His latest project is the NY Simcha Heritage Ensemble, (Overnight Kugel), exploring the interplay of the Klezmer and Chasidic musical traditions.
Lisa Frankel — Treasurer
Lisa F. Frankel is the founder and principal of Track Changes Consulting, specializing in historical research and writing. She studied the double bass at the Hartford Conservatory and the Hartt School of Music before earning a B.F.A. in Applied Art from the University of Connecticut and a M.A. in Public History from Arizona State University. Her experience includes more than 20 years guiding organizations in a variety of roles, especially focused on organizational development and strategic planning for small nonprofits. She is the president of the board of directors of Foothill Country Dancers, a CDSS affiliated contra dance organization, as well as serving on several local nonprofit boards in her local community in Northern California. In her spare time she enjoys contra dancing her way around the world, playing music, hiking and camping.
Advisory Board
Avia Moore
Avia is a maker, producer, scholar, and dance leader. She grew up dancing, a child of the folk music scene in Western Canada. First introduced to Yiddish dance at KlezKanada, Avia has become acclaimed for her workshops and leading; she teaches Yiddish dance at festivals and events internationally.
Avia has worked extensively as a creative producer with festivals and cultural organizations across North America as well as on individual artistic projects in North America and Europe. A PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University, Avia’s research examines the ways in which heritage and traditional cultural practices are performed on modern stages and in contemporary life.
Judit Frigyesi Niran
Judit Frigyesi Niran is a teacher, poet, musicologist and ethnomusicologist. One of her expertise is the music of the twentieth century (e.g. Béla Bartók and turn-of-the-century Budapest, California University Press); another is the music of Felix Mendelssohn. Her main ethnomusicological work deals with the prayer chant of the Eastern European Jews. She was the only scholar carrying out fieldwork in Communist East-Europe after WWII. Apart from scholarly publications, she recently completed a documentary novel treating this topic (Writing on Water –The Sounds of Jewish Prayer, CEU Press). As a writer and photographer, she published short stories and poems, created photo exhibitions and multimedia projects; her theatrical montage “Fleeting Resonances”, which combines poetry, film, audio, and live performance, has been staged in Germany, Hungary, and Israel.
Laura Wetzler
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ph.D.
Barbara is Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, Core Exhibition, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. She is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt), and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (with Jeffrey Shandler). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she received an award for lifetime achievement from the Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Yosl Mlotek Prize for Yiddish and Yiddish Culture, honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the University of Haifa, and the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland from the President of Poland. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She currently serves on Advisory Boards for the Council of American Jewish Museums, Vienna Jewish Museum, Berlin Jewish Museum, and Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, and consults on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania and Israel.
Zoë Aqua
Zoë Aqua is an American violinist currently based in Romania. She was awarded a Fulbright research grant for the 2021-’22 and 2022-’23 academic years to study Transylvanian folk music pedagogy in Cluj, Romania. In September 2022, she released a full-length album of original compositions recorded with Eastern European musicians entitled “In Vald Arayn” (Into the Forest). “In Vald Arayn” mixes influences from klezmer, Transylvanian music, Hasidic music, lautarească and more to meditate on the ways that Jewish and non-Jewish music from Eastern Europe are in conversation with each other. Zoë is a co-founder of klezmer bands Tsibele and Farnakht and served as the full-time understudy for the Klezmatics’ Lisa Gutkin in the Broadway production of “Indecent”. She has presented concerts in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Romania, as well as the US and Canada. Long passionate about teaching, Zoë holds two degrees in music education.
James Loeffler
James Loeffler is Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia. He is the author ofRooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2018), which won the American Historical Association’s Rosenberg Prize for Best Book of 2019 in Jewish History. His other publications include The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Yale, 2010) andThe Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2019). His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Tablet, and Slate. His current projects a political biography of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish creator of the UN Genocide Convention; a co-edited special issue of the journal Shofar, with Walter Zvi Feldman, on JEeish Musical Aesthetics in Modern Eastern Europe; and, with Edwin Seroussi, a study of ethnomusicologist, composer, and musician Avraham Zvi Idelsohn.
Michael Winograd
Fresh off an abruptly-cancelled European tour with his band the Honorable Mentshn, Michael Winograd (clarinet) has spent much of the last 7 months exploring different parts of his basement studio apartment in Brooklyn. He’s grown particularly fond of the front area “the music space / office” because it’s near the window. In 2019 he spent much of the year touring North America and Europe promoting his newest album “Kosher Style,” with memorable performances at the National Opera in Lyon, the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, and Lincoln Center in NYC. He also played at Central Park Summer Stage, Carnegie Hall, and performed a solo Doina in front of 14,000 confused but appreciative Vulfpeck fans at Madison Square Garden. He is a founding organizer of Yiddish New York.