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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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Israeli ambassador meets with France’s Marine Le Pen, extending outreach to Europe’s far-right
(JTA) — Israeli Ambassador to France Joshua Zarka held a meeting on Wednesday with far-right French leader Marine Le Pen, marking the latest instance in a recent trend of Israeli outreach to Europe’s nationalist right.
The meeting, which was not publicly announced by either leader, was confirmed by the Israeli embassy to the French outlet Le Parisien. It was unclear what the pair discussed.
The meeting between Zarka and Le Pen, who is the former president of France’s far-right National Rally party, comes over a year since Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced that the country would lift its longstanding boycott of far-right parties in Sweden, France and Spain.
Israel continues not to engage with far-right parties in Germany, and Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli, who has invited leaders of parties with a history of antisemitism to conferences he has organized in Israel, has cited the Alternative for Germany party as an example of one that had not adequately shed its antisemitic roots.
National Rally was founded as the National Front in 1972 by Le Pen’s father, Jean Marie le Pen, who frequently espoused racist and antisemitic rhetoric and was convicted of Holocaust denial in 1987.
The party has since tried to distance itself from its antisemitic history, with its current leader, Jordan Bardella, visiting Jerusalem last March for the country’s International Conference on Combating Antisemitism, where he delivered the keynote speech.
Diplomatic relations between Israel and France have soured in recent years, with French President Emmanuel Macron voicing public criticism of Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza and formally recognizing Palestinian statehood at the United Nations General Assembly in September.
Last May, Le Pen shot back at Macron after he said during a television appearance that “what Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is doing today is unacceptable” and “a disgrace.”
“I find this statement unworthy of the President of the French Republic,” Le Pen responded. “He keeps increasing his criticism of Israel, perhaps because he is incapable of providing a solution to facilitate the fight against Islamist fundamentalism.”
While Le Pen has long voiced her support for Israel, last week she threw her support behind Macron’s proposal to include Lebanon in a regional ceasefire, which Israel has previously opposed.
“It is our country’s duty to protect Lebanon, its people, and its sovereignty,” wrote Le Pen in a post on X. “This country is once again a collateral victim of the tensions in the region, suffering massive bombings on its capital. I support France’s proposal to include Lebanon in the framework of the regional ceasefire.”
Israeli leaders have pushed back on Macron’s requests and refused to allow the country to be involved in direct talks between Israel and Lebanon, which was formerly a French mandate.
“We’d like to keep the French as far away as possible from pretty much everything, but particularly when it comes to peace negotiations,” Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, told reporters earlier this week following ceasefire talks between Israel and Lebanon on Tuesday.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to a 10-day ceasefire.
Le Pen has also been critical of the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, telling Le Parisien last month that Trump “clearly did not fully appreciate the impact of his intervention.”
Le Pen is currently awaiting a July court ruling that will determine whether she can run in France’s presidential election next year, following her conviction last year for misusing European Parliament funds for political purposes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Italian opposition leader Elly Schlein, whose father is Jewish, backs Giorgia Meloni in Trump split over Israel
(JTA) — Until this week, Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, was allies with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and adversaries with Elly Schlein, Italy’s opposition leader.
Now, Meloni is at odds with Trump and Netanyahu, her fellow conservatives in the United States and Israel, and getting a boost from Schlein, a liberal whose father is an American Jew.
The causes of the breach: the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, and the pope.
Schlein threw her support between Meloni after Trump attacked her for defending Pope Leo XIV, who said on Friday that “God does not bless any conflict” and that Christians should never be on the side of those who drop bombs. The criticism triggered a strong response from Trump, who said on Sunday that the Catholic leader was “terrible on foreign policy” and accused him of “catering to the radical left.”
That did not go over well in Italy, where about three-quarters of people are Catholic. In a statement Monday, Meloni came to Pope Leo’s defense, calling Trump’s remarks “unacceptable,” and adding, “The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and proper that he call for peace and condemn all forms of war.”
The break between Trump and Meloni marked a notable public rift between the two leaders, as Meloni has long been one of Trump’s closest political allies in Europe. The rift deepened the next day, when Meloni announced that Italy had ended its defense agreement with Israel, marking another significant shift in the right-wing government’s international relations.
“In light of the current situation, the government has decided to suspend the automatic renewal of the defense agreement with Israel,” Meloni told reporters in Verona, adding, “When there are things we don’t agree with, we act accordingly.”
Trump wasn’t happy that Meloni had rebuffed his pressure to join the Iran conflict and said as much on Wednesday on Fox News.
“She’s been negative,” Trump said. “Anybody that turned us down to helping with this Iran situation, we do not have the same relationship.”
Enter Schlein and a rare moment of cross-party unity in Italy.
Schlein has led Italy’s Democratic Party since 2023. She has said she is “very proudly the daughter of a Jewish father,” the American-Italian scholar Melvin Schlein, and that she has faced antisemitism even though she herself is not Jewish.
Her father grew up in New Jersey and lived on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, one of the communities ravaged on Oct. 7, 2023, during the 1960s. He has joined his daughter in criticizing Netanyahu but told an Italian paper that while she believes in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he does not. The relative of Jews murdered in the Holocaust, he also has said he is concerned about rising antisemitism in Europe — and that while he generally shares his daughter’s politics, he is concerned that some on the left have joined with the right in adopting antisemitic ideas.
On Wednesday, speaking in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Schlein, said she wished to express her “strongest condemnation” of Trump’s “attack on Meloni for having dutifully expressed solidarity with Pope Leo.”
She also emphasized her own opposition to the Iran war.
“I want to reiterate that Italy is a free and sovereign country, and our Constitution is clear: Italy repudiates war.” Schlein said during her speech to a standing ovation. “No foreign head of state can allow himself to attack, threaten, or disrespect our country and our government. We are adversaries in this chamber, but we are all Italian citizens and representatives of Italians, and we will not accept attacks or threats against the government and our country.”
Schlein had welcomed the suspension of the defense agreement and called on Italy to “stop obstructing” the suspension of the Association Agreement between Israel and the European Union, which governs trade and political relations between the entities.
This week, a petition by the European Citizens’ Initiative to end the agreement reached the required 1 million signatures needed to trigger a formal review by the European Commission.
“We, along with other progressive forces, have been calling for this for some time, because the dignity of this country is also measured by its respect for international law,” Schlein said.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry dismissed the suspension. While Italy is the third-biggest arms exporter to Israel, following the United States and Germany, it only accounted for 1.3% of Israeli arms imports between 2021 and 2025, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
“We have no security agreement with Italy. We have a memorandum of understanding from many years ago that has never contained any substantive content,” the ministry said in a statement. “This will not affect Israel’s security.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Our pioneering Reform synagogue has shrunk, but remains as vibrant as ever
To the editors:
As President of Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, I read Lauren Hakimi’s recent article “A pioneering Reform synagogue makes way for a booming Iranian Jewish community,” with both appreciation and concern. While the piece captures certain facts, it presents our congregation primarily through the lens of decline and demographic change. In doing so, it misses an important story.
Yes, we are preparing to sell the building that has been our home for decades, and our membership is smaller than it once was. But Temple Beth-El today is a vibrant, diverse, and deeply engaged congregation. Even a cursory look at our calendar would have shown the depth and breadth of the activities — worship, study, Israel engagement, social action and adult education — taking place at TBE.
Size is one measure of a synagogue’s success, but it is far from the only one. Even on that front, this story is incomplete. The sale of our building is not simply a response to changing numbers; it is a strategic step that will allow us to align our physical space with our mission and ensure long-term sustainability. This is a story not of retreat, but of reinvention. Further, after the sale, Temple Beth-El will be one of, if not the, most financially secure synagogues on Long Island.
We are proud of our role in the larger Great Neck community, and we cherish our values more than any building. Temple Beth-El has long been a strong voice for social justice, as Hakimi notes in mentioning our past hosting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Today, we carry that legacy forward in our current work with interfaith food pantries and supporting undocumented immigrants.
These aren’t just social activities; they are religious imperatives. Hakimi notes that she herself received her COVID vaccine at TBE. When we opened our doors as a vaccine hub, we were not just providing a service — we were advancing our values by practicing the preservation of life for the benefit of our entire Great Neck family.
Finally, we are concerned that the reporter’s conclusion — “This is the most compelling thing anyone has told me for this story: that even Orthodox Jews benefit from having a Reform synagogue for a neighbor” — is misleading. We are proud to be good neighbors in a diverse community. But our purpose is not to justify our existence to others — it is to serve our congregants and all who seek a Judaism that is liberal, inclusive and engaged with the world.
Great Neck is not a zero-sum game of demographics, but a rich mosaic. Our synagogue’s commitment to a liberal, inclusive, and socially active Judaism is as essential to our town today as it was at our founding in 1928.
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