Description
Trailer
Synopsis
Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience traces Yiddish theater from its origins in Eastern Europe under pioneering figures such as Avrom Goldfaden and Boris Thomashefsky, through its golden age in the 1920s and 1930s centered on Manhattan’s Second Avenue, to its mid-century decline and remarkable modern revival. Through archival footage, original music, and testimony from more than 20 leading scholars and performers, the film makes the case that Yiddish theater was a formative force in American Jewish life—one whose roots ran deep and whose music gave voice to an entire world in the process of transformation.
Director
Jeff Janeczko holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a B.A. in music from Metropolitan State College (now University) of Denver. His doctoral research examined how contemporary Jewish musicians affiliated with the New York avant-garde and the Tzadik record label’s Radical Jewish Culture series engaged with ideas about Jewish music and Jewish identity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
He has served as Curator of the Milken Archive of Jewish Music since 2009 and is also involved in teaching and research as an adjunct assistant professor with the UCLA Lowell Milken Center for American Jewish Music. He co-created and teaches, with Mark Kligman, “The Jewish American Experience Through Music,” and codirects the Center’s digital humanities project, the “Discography of Recorded Jewish Music.” His most recent publication, titled “Curating the Virtual Museum,” appeared in Voices of the Field: Pathways in Public Ethnomusicology in 2021. He is the director and co-writer of Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience and is currently developing additional material for a multipart series on the topic.
