Yiddish Summer Weimar

The tradition & historical record

Yiddish Summer Weimar is an annual summer institute and festival for Yiddish music, language and culture which takes place in Weimar, Germany. Starting as a 3-day workshop in 1998, it was officially founded in its current form in 2006 and has grown to become one of the most important festivals and educational organizations for Klezmer, Yiddish song, Yiddish Language, dance and culture. It is known for its transcultural and transnational perspective which supports an international learning community, for the pedagogical approach of its founder, Alan Bern, and for its commitment to the creation and presentation of historically informed, contemporary Yiddish artistic production. ¹

In 1998, the band Brave Old World was invited by the European Summer Academy to teach a 3-day workshop in Yiddish music and dance in Weimar, Germany, followed by a concert. The following year, the city of Weimar was designated a European Capital of Culture and Brave Old World was invited back to teach a week-long workshop followed by a concert. Klezmer music, a genre originating in Eastern Europe and repopularized in the United States in the 1980s, had become popular in Germany in the 1990s due to foreign artists such as Brave Old World, The Klezmatics, Alex Jacobowitz and Giora Feidman, as well as German groups like Kasbek, Aufwind, Zupfgeigenhansel, and Karsten Troyke. A number of American and ex-Soviet klezmer and Yiddish musicians settled in Germany during this time, including Alan Bern (in 1989) and Joel Rubin. Because of the success of the 1999 Brave Old World workshop, the idea of an annual workshop and festival emerged. In 2000, the Kulturbüro LaRete, run by Julia Draganović, took over the festival management, under the umbrella of the Kuratorium Schloß Ettersburg, a non-profit organization that made it possible to apply for public funding for the festival. At the same time, Bern became the Artistic Director, and the festival was officially named Klezmer Wochen Weimar (Weimar Klezmer Weeks). ¹

In 2002 Draganović's role was taken over by Stephanie Erben. Between 2000 and 2005, the festival grew from one week to four weeks through the addition of further week-long workshops dedicated to individual genres of Yiddish expressive culture and language. ¹

The festival's pedagogical approach has been developed by its founder Alan Bern, and distinguishes it from other annual Jewish or Yiddish music workshops. The ethnomusicologist Phil Alexander has described it as having four main elements: "looseness of structure and process, continuity between music and physical movement, organic connection between all stages of music making, and integration into the city and community." Special attention is also paid to issues of identity, authenticity, and intercultural interactions. While the courses investigate Jewish culture and traditions, they are open to non-Jewish participants who often make up a significant portion of attendees, coming not only from Germany but a number of other countries. ¹

In developing the teaching method at YSW, Bern was inspired by his work in the mid-1980s with Ted Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schools, which emphasized the need for teachers to model learning rather than to impart knowledge, and that the lifelong creativity and enthusiasm of teachers is essential to inspiring students. To achieve this, teachers teach in teams and act as project leaders, helping to guide a process of discovery along with their students. Bern applied this principle to the YSW workshops, leading to the atmosphere of a learning community. Workshop teachers engage in an ongoing exchange with each other as well as with the participants, with flexible scheduling, project-based learning, and an emphasis on learning and playing by ear and other kinds of embodied knowledge, rather than score- or text-based knowledge. For this reason, workshop teachers are either artists with an ongoing practice of research and performance, or scholars who work closely with active artists. ¹

The festival has been appeared in various documentary films.The Broken Sound (German: Der Zerbrochene Klang), 2012, focused on The Other Europeans project, while The Young Kadyas (2020) examined the Kadya Choir Project. Two other documentaries are still in production: Beyond All Memories (2024, about the Semer Ensemble), and Yiddishland (2024, by Ros Horin). ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Yiddish Summer Weimar”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Yiddish Summer Weimar is Jewish music festival in Weimar, Germany, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²