AMHERST, Mass.– Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music is back at the Yiddish Book Center from Thursday, July 11 through Sunday, July 14. Now in its 12th year, Yidstock is a celebration of klezmer and new Yiddish music, featuring luminaries and rising stars in the genre. In addition to seven concerts, the four-day festival includes four workshops, nine talks, and one special film screening, all in celebration of Yiddish music, language, and culture.
This year’s lineup is curated by Yidstock artistic director Seth Rogovoy,
The Klezmatics, the Grammy Award-winning modern klezmer outfit, will kick off the festival on Thursday, July 11, at 7:30 p.m. The internationally acclaimed group was founded in New York City in 1986 and has been performing its trailblazing blend of traditional and progressive klezmer and Yiddish music around the world since then.
Hankus Netsky, founder of the pathbreaking Klezmer Conservatory Band, will reunite with the group’s founding vocalist, Judy Bressler, for a special duo concert featuring an intimate, cabaret-style performance of Yiddish folk and theater songs on Friday, July 12, at 2:00 p.m. Judy Bressler will also be in residence throughout the festival, leading a dance workshop and fostering dancing during the concerts whenever appropriate.
Levyosn, a new quartet specializing in Yiddish song and klezmer, will make its Yidstock debut on Friday, July 12, at 5 p.m. Levyosn’s repertoire includes traditional music and original songs presented in intricate arrangements with rich vocal harmonies. Levyosn is vocalist/guitarist Adah Hetko, violinist/vocalist Lysander Jaffe, accordionist/vocalist Kaia Berman Peters, and cellist/vocalist Raffi Boden.
Socalled will bring his Montreal-based group, Gephilte, a jam-band experiment in Yiddish funk, on Saturday, July 13, at 8 p.m. Gephilte is the latest boundary-busting project from Canadian Yiddish hip-hop provocateur Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. Taking cues from his funk/klezmer supergroup, Abraham Inc, Socalled has brought together an ensemble of fellow Canadian virtuosos to explore Yiddish repertoire in a freewheeling, borderless style, using the Yiddish repertoire to groove out and make audiences move. The ensemble of unrivalled adaptability and swing draws its repertoire from Yiddish theatre music, Chasidic nigunim, klezmer, and Jewish popular song.
Detroit-born, Hamburg-based troubadour and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Kahn returns to Yidstock on Sunday, July 14, at noon, in a concert featuring master fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment and klezmer percussionist Richie Barshay, who have been playing and traveling together in various collaborations for 20 years. Drawing on their 2023 duo album “The Building & Other Songs,” and their work together in both The Painted Bird and Brothers Nazaroff, this intimate and powerful program ranges from original polyglot ballads, radical treatments of modern Yiddish songs from Gebirtig to Schaechter-Gottesman to new Yiddish translations of lyricists such as Dylan, Cohen, Brecht, Springsteen, Guthrie, and Waits.
Basya Schechter and Avi Fox-Rosen have been busy composing settings for 20th-century Eastern European Yiddish poet Itzik Manger’s collection of “khumesh lider,” tragicomic retellings of Bible stories set to original music. The music weaves together a singer-songwriter aesthetic with theater, pop, and world music influences, arranged with vocal harmonies throughout. Basya and Avi are joined by Yoshie Fruchter on bass, guitar, and voice; Eleonore Weill on flutes and voice; Shai Wetzer on percussion; and Kaia Berman Peters on accordion, voice, and electronics, for their concert on Sunday, July 14, at 3 p.m.
The festival will culminate on Sunday, July 14, at 7:30 p.m, with the return of the soulful Yiddish vocalist Eleanor Reissa and the great Klezmer Brass Allstars as they explore the world of Yiddish song from the obscure to the chestnuts, from the sacred to the profane.
Tickets for Yidstock include a concert pass, which allows admission to all concerts and the two dance workshops. They are already sold out.Yidstock festival goers may also build their own itinerary by purchasing individual tickets to concerts, talks, workshops, and film screenings. A Livestream Concert Pass providing access to all seven concerts is also offered for those who are unable to attend in person. Tickets, if available, may be obtained at yiddishbookcenter.org/yidstock or by calling 413-256-4900.
