For Some Jews, Yiddish History Is Sanctuary. For Others, It’s ‘Dangerous.’
If you ask, Alex Weiser smiles and says it’s definitely a coincidence: When he planned the release party for his debut Yiddish-themed album and all the days were purple, he had no idea it would fall on the same night as Israel’s general election.
And so on the night of April 9, while the world watched Bibi Netanyahu win an election against, well, some odds, Weiser orchestrated a night of live music to introduce the world to his latest work. Some of the performance was his own creation and some he’d brought in from the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan, where he works by day as director of public programs. Weiser wrote all of the music for the album and chose the Jewish texts and poems accompanying each selection, the words sourced from famed Yiddish poets like Anna Margolin and Avrom Sutzkever. He wasn’t thinking much about Netanyahu that night, and that’s somewhat the point of his passion project: to seek truth and meaning “amidst life’s transience and tumult, with secular Jewish poetry as a departure point,” he wrote in a blog about the album.
“I think that people don't understand Jewish identity,” Weiser told me last week when we spoke in his office at YIVO, one of five organizations making up New York City’s Center for Jewish History. Not only did he aim to distinguish Yiddish culture as art in the form of composition and sung poetry, but he would also emphasize that much of its output in past centuries—from literature to theater and philosophy—was secular.