Night Songs from a Neighboring Village
Michael Alpert
2.6.2026, 18:30
Conference Room of the Center for Urban History
The Second World War, the Holocaust, and post-war assimilations have caused a dramatic rupture in the social and everyday practices of multinational communities that used to live, celebrate and work together. One of the community glues for East European jews has been Klezmer music — a musical tradition that includes traditional dance tunes and virtuosic instrumental improvisations. Yiddish song and Klezmer music were taken to the Americas with those traveling there searching for work and safety from persecution from the late 19th century onwards. Beginning in the 1970s, Yiddish and klezmer culture has been revitalized within the circles of jazz, bluegrass and old-timey and classical musicians, who have been drawn to this heritage and have been researching its roots and continuity among immigrant generations abroad, as well as in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
We invite you to the presentation by researcher and musician Michael Alpert, during which he will share his reflections on a fifty-year journey through landscapes, soundscapes, and mindscapes of Jewish Eastern Europe. He will focus on explorations of the expressive culture — musical, choreographic, linguistic, and social, both Jewish and non-Jewish, — that are native to Ukraine and have been carried throughout the world. Carried especially to North America, which is primarily where his life and work have intersected with these traditions.
Focusing on Alper's field research in Soviet and independent Ukraine,as well as North America, the lecture will include several key songs in Yiddish and Ukrainian that he learned during his ethnographic fieldwork and which have become an integral part of his life and work as an international performer and teacher of Eastern European Jewish cultural arts.
He has been a transformative figure in the international renaissance of East European Jewish klezmer music and Yiddish culture since the 1970s, and is a National Heritage Fellow of the United States – the US’s highest honor in the traditional arts. He is known worldwide for performances and recordings with Brave Old World, Itzhak Perlman, Ethel Raim, Daniel Kahn, Frank London and others. A native Yiddish speaker and cultural arts educator, he is a foremost traditional Yiddish singer and composer of new Yiddish song, and his ethnomusicological fieldwork archive resides at the US Library of Congress. With grandparents from Zolochiv and Chernivtsi, he grew up in California and New England and lives now on the coast of Scotland. Moderator of the event. Historian, researcher and archivist at Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History, the PhD candidate at the Ukrainian Catholic University. Her research interests include oral history, documentary practices and community archives in war, intellectual history, and digital humanities.
Michael Alpert
Liana Blicharska
Center for Urban History
"Weaving the Heritage" series is a public program of the "REHERIT 2.0: Common Responsibility for Shared Heritage" project. "REHERIT 2.0 is implemented by the Center for Urban History and the Regional Development Center of the PPV Economic Development Agency with the financial support of the European Union.
This publication was created with the financial assistance of the European Union. Its content is the sole responsibility of the partners of the REHERIT 2.0 project and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
Credits
Cover Image: provided by Michael Alpert