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Andrea Pancur, singer who bridged German and Yiddish song traditions, dies at 54
(JTA) — Andrea Pancur, a Munich-based singer, teacher and activist who helped bridge the worlds of German and Yiddish song culture — and who served as role model for women in the world of klezmer music — died last week at her home. She was 54.
Her unexpected death due to what a friend said was a brain aneurysm drew an outpouring of grief from the tight-knit world of klezmer musicians, many of whom collaborated with her on recordings and music festivals throughout Europe and North America.
“Impossible to believe this — a huge loss of someone who was such a living, alive part of the Yiddish music community, and a friend I was really happy to reconnect with,” Abigail Wood, author of a book on contemporary Yiddish song, wrote on Facebook.
Although raised Catholic, Pancur (pronounced pan-CHUR) felt an affinity with the Yiddish musical culture that thrived for centuries across Europe before its devastation by the Holocaust. In 2014 she won the main prize from the TFF Rudolstadt music festival for her “Alpen Klezmer” project, a fusion of Yiddish and Bavarian musical traditions. She and her collaborator, Ilya Shneyveys, explored the linguistic and musical motifs shared by the two traditions, finding points of connection between cultures that seemed irreconcilable after the genocide.
On the song “Rhaynlender,” for example, Pancur — accompanied by Lorin Sklamberg, the frontman of the Klezmatics — combined a Jewish polka lyric with a Bavarian folk melody.
Der Neue Tag, a German daily, once called her “the most important representative of Yiddish culture in Germany.”
Alan Bern, founding artistic director of Yiddish Summer Weimar, suggested that growing up with Slovenian roots in southern Germany spurred Pancur’s interest in what he called “transculturalism.”
“Yiddish culture is the transcultural culture of Europe,” said Bern. “If you go in one door in Yiddish culture, you see hundreds of doors that connect to every other culture in Europe. As a result, Yiddish connects to a community of those who are themselves cultural identity seekers.”
Yiddish Summer Weimar, an annual festival of concerts and classes in the German city, is a pilgrimage site for such seekers. Pancur, a student of Bern’s, and Shneyveys, a Latvian-born musician now living in Brooklyn, met in 2011 at Weimar, which at the time was focusing on the German-Jewish cultures known historically as Ashkenaz.
Pancur had been singing in Yiddish for 25 years at that point, having been inspired in the mid-1980s by a recording by Chava Alberstein, the Polish-Israeli singer. But, as she explained in a video, “I also felt that something was missing. I felt that I would like to express myself in my own folk music tradition.”
She and Shneyveys went on to collaborate on three albums, including two “Alpen Klezmer” recordings, and numerous concerts.
“She was a really charismatic performer, activist, a great singer and a great interpreter of Yiddish music,” said Shneyveys.
Until 2017, Pancur served on the board of Other Music E.V., the nonprofit behind Yiddish Summer Weimar. She also organized the biennial Kunstdünger klezmer festival in Munich. Since January 2018 she had been the artistic manager of Musik.vor.Ort, a project that brings musicians from Munich to play with and for clients of a local food bank.
Pancur’s concert tours and teaching took her to Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Great Britain, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Israel, Italy, Switzerland and the United States. Shneyveys said his first visit to New York was on a concert tour that included a stop in the city.
Pancur toured with her own modern klezmer quartet and as a guest with the trio A Tickle in the Heart. Her solo program, “Federmenth,” featured Yiddish music after 1945. On her 2019 album “Weihnukka,” she combined music from a Bavarian Christmas with Hanukkah melodies.
In July 2022, she performed in and wrote the music for a play, “The Troglauer: Robber, Horse Thief, Revolutionary,” at the Vilseck Castle Festival in Bavaria. She collaborated with the Ukrainian-born DJ Yuriy Gurzhy on “Pumpkin Machine,” a project combining folk music and electronic dance music.
In addition to her music, Pancur was active in social justice, gender equality and refugee resettlement projects. According to Bern, she led a community choir for low-income people. During the pandemic, she offered group singing lessons over the phone, connecting people unable to leave their homes.
Pancur was also a strong advocate for women’s recognition in music. With “Alpen Klezmer,” Bern noted, she was a leader of a project that otherwise featured mostly men. She also managed her own career and founded her own music label. In 2020 she organized the first International Network Meeting for Women and Non-binary People in Yiddish Culture in Nuremberg.
In a 2013 interview with the Jüdische Allgemeine, Pancur said her goal in finding common cultural ground between German and Yiddish was not to erase the memory of the Holocaust but to “put the joy of life in the foreground and avoid dismaying music…. No one is just a victim.”
Pancur’s website explained that German and Yiddish folk music feature “songs that are so old that even the ancient Bavarian and the old Klezmer musicians back in the day had no idea they were both playing the same thing.”
Pancur imagined both peoples dancing together, “spinning around up to the summit until the Alps are glowing with the sounds of Klezmer.”
Pancur was divorced. Information about survivors was not immediately available.
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Boston University Rejects Proposal to Divest From Israel
College students in the Boston, Massachusetts area hold dueling demonstrations amid Israel’s war with Hamas in April 2024. Photo: Vincent Ricci via Reuters Connect
Boston University has rejected the group Students for Justice in Palestine’s (SJP) call for its endowment to be divested of holdings in companies which sell armaments to the Israeli military, becoming the latest higher education institution to refuse this key tenet of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
“The endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate; nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community can engage with each other on political issues of our day including the conflict in the Middle East,” university president Melissa Gilliam said on Tuesday in a statement which reported the will of the board of trustees. “Our traditions of free speech and academic freedom are critical to who we are as an institution, and so is our tradition of finding common ground to engage difficult topics while respecting the dignity of every individual.”
Gilliam’s announcement comes amid SJP’s push to hold a student government administered referendum on divestment, a policy goal the group has pursued since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Its hopes were dashed on Tuesday when what SJP described as “technical difficulties” caused the referendum to be postponed indefinitely. However, SJP hinted that the delay may have been caused by its failing to draw a “representative sample of BU’s undergraduate population” to the polls.
SJP’s relationship with the university is poor, according to The Daily Free Press, Boston University’s official campus newspaper. In November, the Student and Activities Office issued the group a “formal warning” following multiple violations of policies on peaceful assembly. SJP, the Free Press said, occupied an area of the Center for Computing and Data Sciences for two days and tacked anti-Zionist propaganda — which included accusations that Boston University profits from “death” — on school property inside the building despite being forewarned that doing so is verboten. Following the disciplinary action, SJP accused the university of being “discriminatory towards SJP and our events.”
American universities have largely rejected demands to divest from Israel and entities at all linked to the Jewish state, delivering a succession of blows to the pro-Hamas protest movement that students and faculty have pushed with dozens of illegal demonstrations aimed at coercing officials into enacting the policy.
Trinity College turned away BDS advocates in November, citing its “fiduciary responsibilities” and “primary objective of maintaining the endowment’s intergeneration equity.” It also noted that acceding to demands for divestment for the sake of “utilizing the endowment to exert political influence” would injure the college financially, stressing that doing so would “compromise our access to fund managers, in turn undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary obligation.”
The University of Minnesota in August pointed to the same reason for spurning divestment while stressing the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes its campus community. It coupled its pronouncement with a new investment policy, a so-called “position of neutrality” which, it says, will be a guardrail protecting university business from the caprices of political opinion.
Colleges and universities will lose tens of billions of dollars collectively from their endowments if they capitulate to demands to divest from Israel, according to a report published in September by JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report presented the potential financial impact of universities adopting the BDS movement, which is widely condemned for being antisemitic.
The losses estimated by JLens are catastrophic. Adopting BDS, it said, would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.
“This groundbreaking report approached the morally problematic BDS movement from an entirely new direction — its negative impact on portfolio returns,” New York University adjunct professor Michael Lustig said in a statement extolling the report. “JLens has done a great job in quantifying the financial effects of implementing the suggestions of this pernicious movement, and importantly, they ‘show their work’ by providing full transparency into their methodology, and properly caveat the points where assumptions must necessarily be made. This report will prove to be an important tool in helping to fight noxious BDS advocacy.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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American Jews Believe Republicans Handling Antisemitism Better Than Democrats, Poll Finds
US Nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations Elise Stefanik addressing the Israeli parliament on May 24, 2024. Photo: Office of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.
American Jews believe the Republican Party is handling antisemitism better than the Democratic Party, according to a new poll conducted by the American Jewish Committee (AJC).
The poll, which collected responses between Oct. 8 and Nov. 29 but was released on Wednesday, revealed that Jewish Americans hold widespread skepticism about how US politicians are handling the ongoing surge in antisemitism across the country.
Among respondents, only 39 percent indicated support for how the Democratic Party “is responding to antisemitism in the United States.” In comparison, 59 percent responded that they were “dissatisfied” with how the Democrats are handling the problem.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party performed better among Jewish American respondents, with 45 percent indicating “approval” and 54 percent indicating “disapproval” with how the GOP has handled antisemitism
Democrats have found themselves embroiled in controversy over their party’s handling of antisemitism following the Hamas-led massacres across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Democratic leaders were harshly criticized for adopting what they deemed a soft approach to combating the rising tide of anti-Jewish hate within left-wing circles. High-profile progressive Democratic lawmakers such as Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Summer Lee (D-PA), have spent the past year launching a barrage of insults against Israel, oftentimes accusing the Jewish state of committing a “genocide” against Palestinians as retribution for the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.
In November, 17 Democratic senators voted to implement a partial arms embargo against Israel, incensing many Jewish American organizations and pro-Israel supporters who view deep hostility and the application of double standards to the world’s lone Jewish state as an indicator of antisemitism.
Republicans in the US Congress have generally adopted a more hardline stance against antisemitism, launching congressional investigations against anti-Jewish bigotry on college campuses and presenting state-level legislation to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
High-profile Republican politicians such as Elise Stefanik, the nominee for US ambassador to the United Nations, have also been elevated into powerful positions within the new Trump administration in part for their strident pro-Israel positions. US President Donald Trump, a Republican, recently passed an executive order to crack down on antisemitism at universities and punish the harassment of Jewish students, including by deporting non-Americans on campuses who promote terrorism and hatred against Jews.
However, conservatives have struggled with surging antisemitism within their own ranks in the 16 months following the Oct. 7 atrocities. Popular conservative podcasters Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have circulated antisemitic content to millions of their subscribers, oftentimes outright accusing Israel of committing “genocide” against Palestinians and promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Jewish people. Both Carlson and Owens have indicated support for the “Christian Nationalist” movement — a form of religious nationalism which seeks to enshrine Christianity’s dominance in American cultural life. According to the AJC poll, 79 percent of American Jews believe Christian Nationalism is an “antisemitic threat.”
An almost identical number of American Jews perceive left-wing and right-wing political extremism as an “antisemitic threat.” According to the poll, 78 percent believe that the “extreme political left” and 79 percent believe that the “extreme political right” are threats to the Jewish community.
The poll also found that 54 percent of American Jews believe antisemitism is a “very serious problem,” a sharp increase from previous years, and another 39 percent said it was “somewhat of a problem.”
More than half, 56 percent, of Jews have also avoided publicly identifying as Jews to shield themselves from dealing with antisemitism, an 18-point increase from 2022.
“Antisemitism has reached a tipping point in America, threatening the freedoms of American Jews and casting an ominous shadow across our society,” AJC CEO Ted Deutch said in a statement. “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for leaders across the US. We must act now to protect Jews — and America — from rising antisemitism. That one-third of American Jews have been the target of antisemitism in the past year should raise red flags for every American and our leaders.”
The survey also revealed that there is still widespread support for Israel among the Jewish community in the United States. According to AJC, 81 percent of American Jews stated that they cared about Israel because it was “important.” The poll also indicated rising pro-Israel sentiment among younger generations, with 40 percent of those aged 18 to 29 claiming Israel was “very important” to them, an 11-point surge from the previous year.
The post American Jews Believe Republicans Handling Antisemitism Better Than Democrats, Poll Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Irish Leftist, Nationalist Party to Boycott St. Patrick’s Day Events at White House Over Trump’s Gaza Plan
Anti-Israel demonstrators stand outside the Israeli embassy after Ireland has announced it will recognize a Palestinian state, in Dublin, Ireland, May 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Molly Darlington
A prominent left-wing and nationalist political party in Ireland has confirmed that it will not attend St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in Washinton, DC next month due to “incompatible values” with US President Donald Trump following the announcement of his plan to “take over” Gaza and rebuild it into an economic hub.
Claire Hanna — leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), the once dominant party of Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland — announced the decision as a stance against Trump’s proposal for the Palestinian enclave, where Israel and the terrorist group Hamas have been fighting for 16 months.
“The SDLP’s values are incompatible with what we are seeing and hearing, and we won’t be endorsing it on St Patrick’s Day,” Hanna, a member of the British parliament, said in a statement on Tuesday. “We understand the importance of the relationship between the US and this island [Ireland], but the politics of the current US administration mean it is essential that we stand up for what is right, and when it comes to Gaza, what is wrong.”
Last year, Hanna’s predecessor also refused to attend the White House festivities as a protest against US support for Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
At the time, then-party leader Colum Eastwood accused Washington of having an “atrocious” response to the Middle Eastern conflict — which began with Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — and refused to celebrate “while the civilian population in Gaza lives in constant fear of eradication.”
In line with her predecessor’s stance, Hanna justified this week’s decision by saying the SDLP “could not endorse the US government while it armed and supported the bombardment of Gaza.”
“We hope the fragile ceasefire will deliver a lasting peace and the return of hostages to their families, but the rhetoric of Donald Trump, around the displacement and ethnic cleansing of millions of people, is absolutely beyond the pale,” she said. “We can’t in good conscience attend parties hosted in that context.”
The SDLP also posted on social media announcing its decision, writing, “Ireland has a proud history of solidarity with Palestine.”
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the war in Gaza when they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during their Oct. 7 onslaught. After 16 months of fighting, both sides agreed to a ceasefire and hostage-release deal last month, with the first phase set to last six weeks.
Trump last week proposed resettling Gaza’s Palestinians in Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab countries while the US “takes over” the coastal enclave and builds it up into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” His comments have been met with immense backlash, with some observers accusing him of supporting an ethnic cleansing plan. However, proponents of the proposal argue that it could offer Palestinians a better future and would mitigate the threat posed by Hamas.
Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Michelle O’Neill, and Deputy First Minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, have yet to announce whether they will attend St Patrick’s Day events in Washington next month.
Traditionally, political leaders from Ireland take part in celebrations at the White House each March, when the Irish premier usually presents a bowl of shamrock to the US President.
Even with its decision, Hanna said the SDLP will maintain relationships with US officials, “particularly with those trying to resist and combat the overreach of the current administration.”
Since the aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities, Ireland has been a fierce critic of the Jewish state.
Last month, Irish President Michael D. Higgins used his platform speaking at a Holocaust commemoration to launch a tirade against Israel’s military campaign targeting Hamas terrorists, seemingly drawing parallels between Israel’s war in Gaza and the Nazis’ genocide of Jews.
Amid a downward spiral in relations between the two countries, Ireland joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In December, Israel closed its embassy in Dublin, accusing the Irish government of undermining Israel at international forums and promoting “extreme anti-Israel policies.”
Irish leaders have previously called on the EU to “review its trade relations” with Israel after the Israeli parliament passed a law banning UNRWA activities in the country due to its ties to Hamas.
Last year, Ireland officially recognized a Palestinian state, claiming the move was accelerated by the Israel-Hamas war and would help foster a two-state solution, which Israeli officials described as a “reward for terrorism.”
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