_This past Thursday, I had the privilege of attending a remarkable night of Klezmer music and thought. I say thought because in many ways, Klezmer music in the modern era is implicitly political, just like any attempt at cultural revival. This particular concert had a slightly more explicit political and intellectual bend to it, one that, looking across the eclectic audience at the Manhattan JCC, alternately made people laugh, cringe, and erupt with spontaneous outbursts of nakhes - a visceral, very Yiddish joy.

_I, and a friend from home, had made the pilgrimage to what seemed like at least the symbolic center of North American Jewry for a gathering of the Unternationale, a collaborative musical project between Berlin-based songwriter Daniel Kahn (as in The Painted Bird), and Psoy Korolenko (also known as Pavel 'Pasha' Lion, a Muscovite scholar-cum-performance artist). In 2008, the pair released an album together with Israeli klezmorim Oy Division - whose sher is so catchy that the Yale Klezmer Band is currently working on an arrangement - and their multilingual repertoire draws on historical (songs sung by Jewish conscripts in the Russian army...enhanced by 5-minute-long raps in Russian) and ahistorical (an almost unrecognizable Yiddish/Russian translation of the Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy for the Devil') Jewish folk music. They call this music 'dialectical,' in that the songs 'fight with each other' thematically. Thus they played a song called 'Oy Ir Narishe Tsienistn' ('Oh You Foolish Little Zionists'), and at the song's call to 'stay in the diaspora/to fight for our liberation' a man in his 60s and sitting in the front row burst into applause, while many in the audience, likely never having heard a Jewish song criticizing Zionism, sat in uncomfortable silence. Of course, the dialectic as practiced by the Unternationale is more a challenging intellectual exercise than the pushing of any specific political agenda. One of highlights of their first set was a Hasidic nign ('Dunai, Dunai, Dunai'), given new Yiddish and English lyrics by Daniel and rebranded as 'Dumai!' ('Think!' in Russian). The lyrics are certainly thought-provoking, if intentionally vague:
nisht keyn tzedek, nisht keyn sholem                                                        Without justice, without peace
nor a kholem gevorn a golem                                                                         Just a dream become a beast
voser folk on a medineh -                                                                                Where will exile draw the line -
sei yisroel, sei palestineh?                                                                              In Israel or Palestine?
As Psoy told us, the song can be interpreted many ways: "You need both the right wing and the left wing so the bird can fly." Ain't that the truth? And then they did an electro-rap song about pizza.

_There were plenty of musical gems to go around, as many as the seemingly endless shots of vodka (served with peppercorns and chased with pickle juice, if you'd like it Russian-style) being given out by the door: one of my favorites was Psoy's rearrangement of 'Oyfn Pripetchik' (hitherto blacklisted from the Yale Klezmer Band repertoire for being just too sad) to turn the song's original message about the importance of book-learnin' on its head (See? Dialectics? Hegel? Marx? Unternationale? Get it!?). instead of the rabbi teaching the little children their 'Alef-Beys' (the Hebrew alphabet) he now instructs them 'S'iz Ale Beyz' ('everything is evil'), to which the children respond with the familiar 'we don't need no education/we don't need no thought control...'" And towards the end of the show, the guys brought two more great klezmorim onto the stage: fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment and Michael 'Misha' Alpert, who together have recently begun collaborating as the 'Brothers Nazaroff', performing from the catalog of a mysterious, Belf-like klezmer from the 50s named Nathan 'Prince' Nazaroff.

_Intriguing, certainly, but to be in the presence of these great musicians, more Yiddish than I've ever heard spoken or sung, and a community of people jamming to Prince Nazaroff's 'Mazildiker Yid' - 'oy bin ikh a mazeldiker yid' indeed!

And after the concert I, like the Klezmer fanboy that I am, went to the merch table to meet Dan and get the requisite picture. But, feeling emboldened by the concert and the refreshments, I asked for my photo in Yiddish, and a brief, wonderful conversation ensued, ending with a request, this time from Daniel Kahn: "Could we play a show at Yale?" I told him I'd see what I could do. Just kidding. "Yes!" I cried. "Absolutely!" And then I ran, leibedik and freilekh and nor a bisl shiker, into the Manhattan night.