Opera performance and chat with Pulitzer Prize Finalist composer Alex Weiser, acclaimed librettist Ben Kaplan, and renowned Yiddish theatre scholar Nahma Sandrow
Sunday, March 2, 2025, 3:00-5:00 pm Pacific Time
Save this date for the first in a multipart exploration of the 2024 operaThe Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language. We will explore, through its words and music, post-Holocaust efforts to ensure Yiddish cultural survival, Jewish theatre history, linguistics, and what it means to collaborate creatively in cultural work given the contemporary Yiddish and Yiddish-adjacent performance landscape.
T H E F E A T U R E D P R E S E N T E R S
Alex Weiser’s (above, L) musical education began in earnest while attending New York City's Stuyvesant High School in pieces for their symphonic orchestra, studying theory and conducting with Joseph Tamosaitis, and studying composition with Paul Alan Levi. Weiser then continued his studies at Yale University and New York University. Weiser is now the Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research where he curates and produces programs that combine a fascination with and curiosity for historical context, with an eye toward influential Jewish contributions to the culture of today and tomorrow. At YIVO Weiser has commissioned over fifteen works from some of today’s leading composers that were featured in concerts he curated. . . . Source: https://www.alexweiser.com/about
Born in Brooklyn, NY, Ben Kaplan (above, R) studied literature and theater at Williams College. He currently serves as Director of Education at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where he directs programs that teach Jewish history and culture to a broad and diverse audience. These programs include the Uriel Weinreich Summer Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture and the YIVO-Bard Winter Program on Ashkenazi Civilization. Ben wrote the libretto for State of the Jews, an opera collaboration with composer Alex Weiser based on the life of Theodor Herzl. As a librettist, he creates historically-informed dramatic works that chronicle turning points in history lost to contemporary cultural discourse. Source: https://www.benkaplanlibrettist.com/about
S P E C I A L G U E S T
Born in 1940, Nahma Sandrow (above) is a world renowned scholar of theater - particularly, Yiddish theater - and cultural history. She is a prize-winning author whose works include: "Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater"; "God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation"; "Surrealism: Theater, Arts, Ideas"; and "Kuni-Leml and Vagabond Stars." She has also written off-broadway musicals based on Yiddish theater material and feature articles for the "New York Times," the "New York Sun," "ARTnews," and other newspapers, magazines, and journals. Source: http://www.yivoarchives.org/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=33203
T H E O P E R A
The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language is a 60 minute concert that tells the tragi-comic story of Yiddish linguist Yudel Mark’s unfinished effort to create the first comprehensive Yiddish dictionary.
The Great Dictionary invites audiences to contemplate the surprisingly grand ambition of Yiddish culture after its decimation during the Holocaust and to consider the power of language to transform and shape us.
Yudel Mark (above, L) and Max Weinreich (above, R) were collaborators in the project to create a comprehensive Yiddish dictionary. They succeeded in getting as far as the letter "alef." Source: https://www.instagram.com/aopopera/p/C6JgXcKrS7c/
For viewers and listeners familiar with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, the towering figure of Max Weinreich will draw particular interest. YIVO (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) was founded in 1925 in Berlin, Germany, and began its work in Vilna, then in Poland, now Lithuania. Longer-term members of our group, the Yiddish Shmoozers (in Translation), will remember reading the wonderful stories by Abraham Karpinowitz in the collection Vilna, My Vilna. In the story "The Folklorist," Rubinshteyn the Folklorist collects curses and imprecations from Chana-Merke the Fishwife. This is a playful account of a zamler, one of the many roving scholarly collectors of ethnographic and linguistic data under YIVO's director Max Weinreich.
Weinreich (1894-1969) "was first and foremost a linguist, but other topics he wrote about included psychology (he translated Freud into Yiddish), sociology, economics, theater studies, literary history, education, ethnography, and philosophy. He had a second career as a writer of popular articles in the Yiddish newspaper Der Forverts, frequently under the pseudonym Sore Brener. His linguistic interests included the history of linguistics, orthography, grammar, etymology, dialectology, stylistics, and the influence of traditional Jewish culture in all its facets on the development of the Yiddish language." Source: https://www.yivo.org/Max-Weinreich-1894-1969 Also go to: https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/1015
E X C E R P T S F R O M T H E 2 0 2 4 P R E M I E R E
"Gather Every Spark" (2:09 min)
"We Are Fire" (2:50 min)
"In Vilna" (3:14 min)
V I S I T
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