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The klezmer world will remember the ‘youngest of the old guys’
(New York Jewish Week) — The late Brooklyn klezmer musician Pete Sokolow would sometimes take the stage as “Klezmer Fats.” But many players used a different sobriquet to refer to the pianist, who served as a link between generations: “the youngest of the old guys.”
Sokolow started playing klezmer in the summer of 1958 with older musicians at resorts in the Catskills. Twenty years later he was part of the klezmer revival.
“When it mattered, Pete was there,” klezmer historian Henry Sapoznik told the New York Jewish Week. “Pete was able to build a bridge” from the old-timers to the klezmer revivalists.
Sokolow died Dec. 4, 2022 at age 80. One year later, on Tuesday, Dec. 19, he’ll be remembered in a Zoom gathering held in conjunction with the upcoming Yiddish New York festival. Sokolow’s musical colleagues and family will join Sapoznik to honor his memory.
Sokolow began his career playing clarinet and saxophone but switched to piano, an instrument that was not originally associated with klezmer. His cramped Brooklyn living room was dominated by a Steinway baby grand from the late 1800s, inherited from his father, a piano teacher. When Sokolow was 17 he picked up one of his father’s old 78s, sat at the piano and taught himself how to play the Fats Waller style — thus, “Klezmer Fats.”
When the the klezmer revival kicked off in the late 197os, he was baffled by its leap from weddings and other “simchas” to the concert hall.
“All klezmer was, was dance music,” he said. “To me, it was the shockaroo of my life at that point that anybody would want to sit and listen to a concert of dance music.”
Throughout his career Sokolow played jazz as well as klezmer. He was particularly talented as a stride piano player. Sokolow led two bands: Klezmer Plus and the Original Klezmer Jazz Band. He also was a member of Sapoznik’s band Kapelye.
The klezmer clarinetist Michael Winograd played with him in the cross-generational Tarras Band, inspired by the music of the late klezmer virtuoso Dave Tarras. In an interview for a radio profile of Sokolow, Winograd said: “He’s a musician’s musician. He has perfect melodic sense, perfect harmonic sense. He’s a great arranger. He has one of those minds that you bump into every once in a while.”
Sokolow was the last regular keyboard player in the Tarras’ ensemble. He was known as the Fifth Epstein Brother because he played with The Four Epsteins, who began performing together as a klezmer ensemble in the late 1940s.
Sapoznik said Sokolow was “unbelievably productive.” In addition to his involvement in klezmer re-issues, writing klezmer tune books and orchestrating music for the Yiddish Radio Project, Sokolow had a hand in reviving the careers of old, retired klezmer musicians.
“It was because of Pete that the Epsteins got rediscovered,” said Sapoznik. In 1996, three surviving brothers performed together in the documentary “A Tickle in the Heart.”
Scores of young klezmer musicians, including Winograd, studied with Sokolow at KlezKamp, the yearly klezmer music and Yiddish culture festival in New York State. He was known as a tough as nails teacher. Sapoznik once joked that if you open up Webster’s dictionary and to look up “irascible,” you’ll see Sokolow’s picture.
“There was sort of an entrance exam” to be his student, said Sapoznik. “If you didn’t mind having your eyebrows singed off the first time, the results of being taken in and encouraged and motivated — no one else could come close to what he could do to fast-track your ability to grok the music.”
“He had a very low boiling point for people who attempted to change the music without understanding it, to change it just to change it. He would not brook that.”
But Sokolow was flexible enough to play pop music at wedding gigs.
“I think my peak personal music moment was hearing Pete sing ‘Love to Love You, Baby’ by Donna Summers,” joked Sapoznik. “And he did a great [version of Madonna’s] ‘Material Girl.’”
Sokolow suffered a stroke in 2015 and ended up missing the last KlezKamp. At the time he said, “Now I’m the oldest old guy. Most of the old guys are gone. Dave [Tarras] is gone. Sidney [Beckerman] is gone. All my old friends. I miss them.”
The online memorial for Pete Sokolow will take place on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Click here to register.
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The post The klezmer world will remember the ‘youngest of the old guys’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Treasure Trove explores the curious case of a stamp from an imaginary land
This 1 V. postage revenue stamp from West Refaim was postmarked in Virikoso in South Giantsland 100 years ago. Problem is—none of these places ever existed. There is a second […]
The post Treasure Trove explores the curious case of a stamp from an imaginary land appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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