Jam-packed June at YIVO: Radical Yiddish puppet theater; Theodore Bikel, Yiddish & Ukrainian music, and the opening of a new exhibition

The week of June 15, 2015 set the heads of Yiddish and Jewish culture aficionados in New York City spinning: Kulturfest, a week-long celebration of Jewish performing arts, offered an almost overwhelming array of concerts, theatrical performances, and lectures across the city, with sometimes more than one event taking place simultaneously.

YIVO’s contribution to Kulturfest was the world premiere of the Modicut Project, a reinterpretation of the first Yiddish language puppet theater in the U.S., which flourished in the 1920s-1930s in New York City. An artist-scholar collaboration between Great Small Works and Rutgers Professor Edward Portnoy, the new, original play brings together the sensibilities of 1920s avant garde puppet theater, socialism, political activism, Yiddish, ethnographic fieldwork, and identity politics with the stagecraft of Great Small Works.

Great Small Works performing "Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls" as part of the Modicut Project on June 16. Photo by Erik McGregor.

On June 18, YIVO’s 13th Annual Heritage Luncheon honored world-famous musician, actor, and activist Theodore Bikel with a lifetime achievement award in an event that included tributes by Leon Wieseltier and Dr. Ruth Westheimer and performances by Lorin Sklamberg, Daniel Kahn, and Shura Lipovsky.

Theodore Bikel singing at the 13th Annual Heritage Luncheon (background: Daniel Kahn; Shura Lipovsky). Photo by Melanie Einzig.

Read coverage of the event in the Forward.
Read Leon Wieseltier’s speech in Tablet.

That same day, in the evening, YIVO, the Center for Jewish History, and the Center for  Traditional Music and Dance were host to Night Songs from a Neighboring Village, a concert program pairing two musical traditions—East European Jewish and Ukrainian—that have existed side by side and nourished each other for centuries. Master musicians Michael Alpert and Julian Kytasty drew on Ukrainian folk and liturgical songs, and the art of the bandura (Ukrainian lute-harp), as well as three Jewish musical genres that reached their greatest European flowering in Ukraine: klezmer music, Yiddish folk song, and the music of the Hasidic world.  Alpert, a past YIVO archivist, was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship.

The week was rounded out on Sunday, June 21, with the opening of a new YIVO exhibition: Shtetl: Graphic Works And Sketches of Solomon Yudovin (1920-1940). Presented in collaboration with the Russian American Foundation and the Russian Museum of Ethnography, this exhibit features works of the renowned Russian-Jewish artist, ethnographer and scholar of Jewish traditional art, Solomon Yudovin. The exhibition is on view through September 30, 2015.

Photo by Ross Den Photography.

Print by Solomon Yudovin. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.