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An ahead-of-its-time klezmer album will be performed live for the first time
(New York Jewish Week) — In 1955, a group of musicians gathered in a Manhattan recording studio and committed to tape 16 tunes. When the LP, “Tanz,” was released the following year, it barely made a splash.
Over the years, however, the recording would gain a reputation as a landmark klezmer album, years before the klezmer revival of the 1970s and ’80s. Recorded by the klezmer virtuoso Dave Tarras and a handful of respected New York jazz players, including brothers Sam and Ray Musiker, the record was a groundbreaking mix of the traditional Eastern European Jewish dance music and a jazz and big band sound.
And now, nearly seven decades later, the entire album will be performed before a live audience for the first time ever. On Thursday, Brooklyn-based clarinetist Michael Winograd will lead a band of klezmer all-stars as they play the music from “Tanz” (Yiddish for “dance”) at the Marlene Meyerson JCC on the Upper West Side.
“One of the things that I love about his compositions on ‘Tanz,’ is that they feel like they are both inside and outside the klezmer box,” Winograd told the New York Jewish Week. “They are so clearly klezmer, but they’re also pushing the boundaries so much and I think that came from his work as a jazz musician.”
Winograd completed the herculean task of transcribing all the instrumental parts of the album several years ago. He said that he originally transcribed “Tanz” as a technical exercise and initially had no plans to record or perform the material. But trumpeter Frank London of The Klezmatics convinced him to reconsider, Winograd said.
“Frank told me, ‘You have the music, you might as well perform it. It would be amazing,’” Winograd recalled.
In December 2018, he performed some of the tracks with two different klezmer bands in Berlin and New York. The upcoming JCC performance, however, is the debut performance of the album in full. Winograd is working with Aaron Bendich from the Borscht Beat record label and hopes to release a film of the JCC concert, which is co-presented by the Ashkenaz Festival, the Center for Cultural Vibrancy, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance and the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History.
The driving force behind “Tanz” was the late Sam Musiker, a fourth-generation klezmer musician born in New York. He and his younger brother, Ray, also a member of the “Tanz” ensemble, performed klezmer extensively starting as young musicians. On the album cover, the Musiker brothers got second billing to Sam Musiker’s father-in-law, the clarinetist Dave Tarras, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine and the undisputed king of klezmer at the time.
Also playing on the album were drummer Irving Gratz, Tarras’s regular drummer; pianist Moe Wechsler, a Juilliard-trained musician who played in the big bands of Benny Goodman and Louis Prima; accordion player Seymour Megenheimer, a pianist who later became known as Sy Mann and is credited with recording “Switched-On Santa,” the first Christmas album to feature a Moog synthesizer; Mack Shopnick, a swing-era jazz bassist who was later active in the American Federation of Musicians union; and trumpeter Melvin Soloman, who played on a couple of Sarah Vaughan albums.
The musicians gathered at the former church that became Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio to make the record. The studio opened after World War II and, until it closed in 1981, it was graced by some of the greatest musical talent of the 20th century, including Vladimir Horowitz, Dizzy Gillespie and Bob Dylan. Rehearsal and recording took place over two days, according to Ray Musiker, who had to take off a couple of days from his regular gig: teaching music at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.
Ray Musiker is the only surviving member of the original band, and earlier this month Winograd interviewed the 96-year-old at his home on Long Island, where they discussed how the record flopped when it was released by Epic Records in 1956. “It didn’t make an impact — there were too many things going on in the world of pop music,” Musiker told Winograd. “Judaism was Americanizing, the whole thrust was to assimilate. Klezmer music started to dwindle. They’re not living in the shtetl and they don’t want to hear shtetl music. It died out like [the Yiddish theater on] Second Avenue died out.”
And yet, in recent years, “Tanz” has been reexamined and reappraised. According to Uri Schreter, a PhD student at Harvard who studies Jewish music during the postwar period, “Tanz” is one of the most important klezmer recordings of the latter half of the 20th century. With its brass-heavy big band arrangements, “Tanz” was klezmer’s “very significant and very deep step into the world of American popular music, specifically jazz and swing,” he told the New York Jewish Week.
“Tanz” was also unique in that it featured two lead clarinetists who were both virtuosos with distinctly different styles: Sam Musiker was the American-born klezmer jazzman who could swing — he played in the Gene Krupa Orchestra and served as a sideman to Roy Eldridge and Sarah Vaughan. Dave Tarras was the epitome of the Old World klezmer tradition, Schreter said. The two styles are in a kind of a competition, Schreter said, but are also in collaboration.
Winograd, 40, is capable of pulling off both styles, he added. “You can hear when he’s playing Sam Musiker and you can hear when he’s playing Dave Tarras,” Schreter said. “He’s always playing Michael Winograd, of course. And he doesn’t sound identical to them. He doesn’t want to.”
According to Hankus Netsky, founder of the Klezmer Conservatory Band of Boston and co-chair of the New England Conservatory of Music’s Contemporary Musical Arts program, Winograd is one of the most inspired klezmer musicians of his generation. “His current band is the best thing going at the moment,” said Netsky. “The level of Winograd’s cadre of musicians is kind of astronomical.”
The line-up for the JCC performance includes Marine Goldwasser on clarinet; Alec Spiegelman on saxophone and bass clarinet; Frank London on trumpet; Will Holshouser on accordion; Carmen Staaf on piano; Zoe Guigueno on bass; David Licht on drums, and Katie Scheele on English horn.
Virtuoso jazz and classical clarinetist Don Byron was in the Klezmer Conservatory Band from 1981 to 1987. He recalled when he first heard “Tanz”: in 1981, when his roommate, KCB bassist Jim Guttman, brought the LP from a used record store in Boston and asked him to have a listen.
“I listened to it once and I was, like, ‘We gotta play this,’” said Byron, who attended the Manhattan School of Music with Ray Musiker’s son, Lee. “Nobody [in the klezmer scene] knew anything about that record.”
The KCB played two selections from “Tanz” at every performance while Byron was in the band, though they removed the tunes from its repertoire when he left in 1987. Now, with Thursday’s performance, the full album will finally get its due. “Sam [Musiker] was one of my heroes,” Byron said. “To me, the tunes that he did [on ‘Tanz’] were some of the great achievements of modernism in the [klezmer] idiom.”
“Michael Winograd Plays ‘Tanz’: A Live Album Recreation” will take place at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on Thursday, Feb. 16 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets, $10, and information here.
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Canadian Senate Report on Antisemitism Calls for Hate Crime Units Nationwide, Guarding Synagogues From Protesters
People attend Canada’s Rally for the Jewish People at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, in December 2023. Photo: Shawn Goldberg via Reuters Connect
Canada’s Senate on Tuesday released a report which offered a comprehensive roadmap for countering rising Jew-hatred across the country, urging multiple reforms including an expansion of law enforcement resources to investigate hate crimes, a boost in Holocaust education, and implementation of a digital literacy program for youth.
Jews remain the top targets of religiously motivated hate crimes, with Deborah Lyons, the former special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, reporting that the Jewish community comprises one percent of the Canadian population but experiences 70 percent of all such hate crimes.
Jews are also the top targets for hate crimes overall in Canada.
Public Safety Canada documented 1,345 hate crimes targeting religious groups in 2023, a 75 percent leap from 2022, with 71 percent targeting Jews.
“Standing United Against Antisemitism: Protecting Communities and Strengthening Canadian Democracy,” the report from the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights (RIDR), cites an alarming update from the Jewish Parents of Ottawa Students Association.
“Jewish students opt to conceal their identity rather than confront the distressing realities of derogatory name-calling, character assassinations, isolation, and peer rejection,” the group says. “In more extreme circumstances, children as young as seven years old have encountered harassment, intimidation, physical assault, threats of both physical and sexual violence, and even death threats.”
Justin Hebert, a former student and a former president of the Jewish Law Students Association at the University of Windsor, discussed encountering peers who advocated for atrocities. As documented by the Senate report, he asked, “How can I be expected to have a meaningful conversation with the student who told me the murder of Israelis is always justified while Israeli students are actively enrolled at the school, or that rape is a legitimate form of resistance, or that babies can be taken hostage if their parents are colonizers?”
The report also describes antisemitic incidents in medical settings and even at rape crisis centers.
According to a written brief submitted by Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism, in one example “staff physicians at a major children’s hospital [were] being told to remove pins expressing solidarity with civilians held by Hamas in Gaza, but that pins expressing opposition to Israel were not restricted in the same way. The organization also cited examples of medical residents refusing to work with their Jewish colleagues, and of movements to boycott Israeli-produced pharmaceuticals, ‘compromis[ing] patient care and professional ethics.’”
Revi Mula, vice-president of Canadian Women Against Antisemitism, said that “rape crisis centers, shelters, and women’s organizations have” excluded Jewish women, linking their identity with Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Jewish women also face gendered antisemitism. They are subjected to slurs,” Mula said.
The report offers 22 recommendations to counter this revival of the world’s oldest hatred. Foremost among them is the reinstating of a “Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism.” Other key steps the report emphasizes include establishing a Digital Safety Commission and ensuring that the Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion includes a focus on antisemitism in its mandate.
The commission also explores expanding efforts to counter hate crimes through growing law enforcement resources.
The 15th recommendation calls for the Canadian government and Royal Canadian Mounted Police to “work with provincial and territorial governments to establish and effectively resource specialized hate crime units in all major cities and regions across Canada, with a focus on education, community outreach, investigation, disaggregated data collection, information sharing, prosecution, and deradicalization efforts.”
Nearly a third of the recommendations reference education. The 10th urges the Canadian government to “develop and support digital literacy and social media education initiatives, including model materials and funding for programs, that help young Canadians recognize misinformation, disinformation, radicalization, extremist narratives, and online hate.”
Independent Senator Paulette Senior chaired the committee which drafted the 73 pages of analysis and recommendations.
“Canadians must stand united against antisemitism,” she said in a statement. “It is only by coming together to celebrate our shared values that we can thrive as a country. Antisemitism is a clear and present danger to our free and democratic society.”
Richard Robertson, director of research and advocacy at B’nai Brith Canada, praised the report, noting the inclusion of the organization’s ideas.
“B’nai Brith Canada applauds RIDR for elevating our recommendations to confront hate in this country,” he said. “We will continue to work with the Senate to ensure that these recommendations result in changes on the ground that benefit everyone in our society.”
According to the group’s latest audit of antisemitism in Canada released last year, antisemitic incidents in 2024 rose 7.4 percent from 2023, with 6,219 adding up to the highest total recorded since it began tracking such data in 1982. Seventeen incidents occurred on average every day, while online antisemitism exploded a harrowing 161 percent since 2022. As standalone provinces, Quebec and Alberta saw the largest percentage increases, by 215 percent and 160 percent, respectively.
B’nai Brith Canada cited four of its recommendations appearing in the Senate report: the call for an interdepartmental task force to address antisemitism in Canada, the digital literacy program for youth, the antisemitism focus on the Advisory Council, and an increase in antisemitism education for students.
“The Senate has listened to the community and produced pertinent and tangible recommendations to confront antisemitism in this country,” Simon Wolle, the Jewish advocacy group’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “Now, it falls on the government to translate these recommendations into action.”
Noah Shack, CEO of the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), also urged swift implementation.
“The Senate’s report on antisemitism comes at a moment of crisis. As Jewish institutions face violent attacks and Jewish Canadians experience unparalleled levels of hate crimes, antisemitism is no longer confined to the margins — it has spread across our society and institutions,” Shack said. “In fact, the committee’s report and the hearings platform extremist voices calling for the destruction of those who support Israel.”
Shack emphasized that CIJA especially appreciated “the rooting of recommendations in agencies dedicated to law enforcement and intelligence, as this is crucial to combat antisemitism and the growth of radicalism both at our borders and inside our country.”
The 17th recommendation calls for the establishment of “narrowly tailored ‘safe access’ or ‘bubble zone’ measures where appropriate to protect access to certain religious institutions, places of worship, and community spaces.” This instruction came following years of objections by Jews attending synagogues when anti-Israel demonstrators would specifically disrupt and intimidate services.
Conservative Senator Mary Jane McCallum noted this problem, saying that “everyone in Canada deserves to feel safe. The increase in antisemitic rhetoric and attacks at places of worship and education is beyond troubling — it is a cry for action.”
The commissioners also considered the threat of antisemitism spreading on social media.
“Social media has been a conduit for antisemitic ideas, exposing young people, who may lack an understanding of history, to an unregulated and unverified source of information,” said Independent Senator Mary Robinson. “Education, by ensuring students know how to critically evaluate online content, is a powerful inoculant against the cheap pull of hatred.”
At a press conference on Tuesday morning announcing the report, Independent Saskatchewan Senator David Arnot insisted on “no dithering,” adding, “We have to have action. The time is now.”
“The plain truth is that Jewish Canadians are under attack in this country,” added Conservative Senator Leo Housakos. “They are under attack where they live, where they worship, and in their schools. And it seems that every day seems to bring in new events that might have been unthinkable just a few short years ago.”
Emphasizing the role law enforcement plays in the fight, Housakos said the report also recommends “training for police and judges to improve their ability to identify and respond to hate crimes and to better react when mobs of protesters feel entitled to march through Jewish neighborhoods chanting hateful slogans, and when synagogues and schools get shot at.”
Housakos added, “To be a Jew in Canada should not mean that you become a target. It’s time to acknowledge this and to swiftly respond, so that Jews in Canada no longer have to live in fear.”
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An Orthodox Jewish hooper famous for viral dunks aims to break Division-I boundaries
A yarmulke-wearing basketball prospect who gained online fans with highlight-reel dunks announced his next major leap Wednesday: He’ll try to be the first Orthodox player to play four years of Division-I college basketball.
Chaim Galbut, a 6-foot-7 wing who played high school basketball for Miami Country Day School, a nondenominational Jewish K-12 school, before graduating in 2025, announced in an Instagram post that he will attend Duquesne University in the fall.
A post from the basketball outlet DraftExpress reported that Duquesne, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, had discovered Galbut on social media.
Galbut said last year that his refusal to compete on Shabbat had meant turning down offers from other colleges.
“I’m like, I don’t play on Shabbos, they’re like, ‘Well, we don’t want you,’” Galbut told the Yeshiva League Pass Tip Off podcast in September. “It’s happened so many times, I can’t tell you. I’m like, ‘All right, that’s cool. Like, don’t worry, you’ll see me soon.’”
Galbut did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
Largely unknown outside of the Orthodox world during high school, Galbut’s moment in the spotlight did not come until after he graduated, when video of him throwing down dunks on the summer travel circuit, posted by a popular basketball channel, received more than 100,000 likes on TikTok.
He spent the next school year studying at a yeshiva in Israel.
Duquesne finished last season with 18 wins and 15 losses. The university last appeared in the NCAA Tournament in 2024, when they lost in the round of 32.
At least one other Orthodox hooper has played in Division I: Tamir Goodman, who started his career at Towson University in 2000 but left the program after two years.
And other Orthodox players have played for Christian schools in Division III — Ze’ev Remer played four years at California Lutheran University, graduating this year.
The post An Orthodox Jewish hooper famous for viral dunks aims to break Division-I boundaries appeared first on The Forward.
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Former Columbia professor tells NYU students to learn from Hamas at off-campus event
A group called Shut it Down NYU hosted an off-campus event near New York University on Tuesday that featured a lecture by Mohamed Abdou, a former Columbia University professor at the Middle East Studies Institute. During his two-hour-long lecture, Abdou told students they had much to learn from Hamas and other armed groups, including lessons from the planning of the Oct. 7 attacks and even martyrdom.
Abdou, whose employment at Columbia drew criticism during 2024 congressional hearings about campus antisemitism, leading to a contentious split between him and the university, has taught at numerous other universities, including Cornell University and the University of Toronto. He appeared via Zoom at the Tuesday event as the sole speaker. Roughly 10 people attended the gathering in person at a park near campus, with about 30 more joining online. A meal was provided for in-person attendees.
The event was part of a campus tour series titled “Death to the Akademy.” In March, Abdou lectured a student group at the Union Theological Seminary, a Columbia affiliate, where he encouraged students to engage in jihad.
Shut it Down NYU describes itself as being made up of NYU “students, faculty, staff, and organizers who are a community in but not of NYU.” The group is not formally affiliated with the university.
During his lecture, Abdou offered advice on campus organizing and said the Mujahideen, Muslim guerrilla fighters who engage in jihad, had referred to pro-Palestinian student groups as a “branch of the resistance.” Abdou described the Mujahideen as “the greatest people on the face of the earth,” telling participants that this designation is “a great honor,” but added that students could be doing more to live up to that role.
At several points, Abdou appeared to urge students toward violence. He criticized the 2024 student-run encampments for marginalizing radical voices who sought to use violence. “We need to understand that violence is a tactic and not a strategy,” he said. “The question of violence, there wasn’t even consensus about that! Students within the encampment fetishizing non‑violence,” he said, adding, “We don’t understand that there are revolutionary forms of violence, that there’s a need for sacrifice.”
The event included a question-and-answer session in which one attendee asked in the Zoom chat about balancing “the longevity of our movement with the violent urgency that our conditions require.”
Abdou said that if student activists see themselves as part of the axis of resistance, they should see themselves as coming from a group of people who believe in martyrdom. “If we are to meet Muhammad, then our blood serves as a testimony,” he said. “We do not fear death.”
An NYU official said that the university contacted Shut it Down NYU organizers to make clear that they did not have permission to hold the event on NYU grounds or to use university resources, Wiley Norvell, NYU’s senior vice president for university relations and public affairs, told the Forward.
“This event was not sanctioned by NYU, nor did we allow it to take place on campus,” Norvell said. “It was not affiliated with any university group and was attended by fewer than 10 people in a city park. NYU strongly condemns the brazen use of threatening language used in promoting the event and the encouragement of violence expressed by speakers. We are investigating several potential University policy violations associated with it.”
The flyer for the event was widely circulated on social media, featuring drawings of what appear to be armed Hamas militants. At the bottom of the flyer, a message reads, “want us to come to your campus? DM for details.”
During the Q&A, a participant who identified herself as a student asked Abdou about the lessons student organizers can take from foreign resistance movements.
Abdou responded that students can learn from the Oct. 7 attacks, stating, “There’s much that one can learn, again from the cunningness of our Mujahideen, particularly Sinwar.” He additionally described at length the way Hamas methodically “studied the Zionist entity and how to break through the barrier siege.”
In remarks about the United States, Abdou said, “If you think somehow you’re going to free Palestine and keep America, forget it…You need to actively work to destroy.”
“Be proud of your hate for America,” he said. “You love Islam, and you should be loving Islam more than this barbarous colony. It’s a plague upon the earth. And yeah, in that sense, you need to be a threat. We all need to be a threat.”
Shut it Down NYU did not immediately respond to comment.
The post Former Columbia professor tells NYU students to learn from Hamas at off-campus event appeared first on The Forward.