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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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The post An ahead-of-its-time klezmer album will be performed live for the first time appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Al Jazeera Forum Platforms Terrorist Leaders and Their Sympathizers

The Al Jazeera Media Network logo is seen on its headquarters building in Doha, Qatar, June 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Naseem Zeitoon

At the 17th annual Al Jazeera Forum in Doha, Qatar, familiar faces took the stage to discuss the aftermath of October 7 and its broader regional and global implications. These figures are familiar not for their credibility, but because the lineup included terrorist leaders and their sympathizers.

Upon entrance to the forum, an “in memoriam” lined the halls filled with faces of Al Jazeera journalists who died during the Israel-Hamas war.

Eitan Fischberger, who first exposed the terror-filled line up of speakers at the conference, found that five of these so-called journalists are also familiar faces. These “journalists” didn’t become well-known for trustworthy and accurate reporting, but rather because all five of them had well-established ties with terrorist organizations such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas terrorist leader Khaled Meshaal and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi were two of the biggest attractions at the event. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, sanctioned by the US for her pro-terror rhetoric, also took part in a session via video call.

Despite the mass slaughter of Iranian civilians, the focus of every speaker at the conference was laser-focused on Israel. This was not accidental. After all, Abbas Araghchi, who, given his position in the Iranian regime, has stood by as thousands of Iranian citizens were murdered, was given a spotlight.

From that platform, Araghchi blamed Israel for regional instability, saying that “Israel’s expansionist project requires that neighboring countries be weakened” and amounts to the “enforcement of permanent inequality.”

For this, he called for Israel to be “punished.” The irony would be laughable if it weren’t so grotesque. A senior official of a regime that jails dissidents, executes protesters, and bankrolls terrorist proxies across the region stood before an audience and positioned himself as a moral authority on justice and stability.

Predictably, in Hamas terrorist leader Khaled Meshaal’s session, he similarly dodged any blame for the ensuing war. What he did was suggest that “the flood” — the operation name chosen for the October 7 massacre — successfully brought the Palestinian cause back to global consciousness. He specifically praised the outrage seen on university campuses and across social media, treating international unrest as a strategic victory.

Naturally, as a terrorist leader, Meshaal deflected the requirement for Hamas to disarm, saying “criminalizing the resistance” is not something it can accept. As long as Israel exists, Hamas will not disarm.

It is the most recent example of Hamas leaders being explicit in their absolute unwillingness to adhere to the ceasefire agreement to which they signed.

Beyond actual terrorists, terrorist sympathizer Francesca Albanese was invited to speak, joining a session abroad via video. Unsurprisingly, her words echoed those of the terrorist leaders listed above, as she spoke of Israel as the “common enemy” of the world.

It is dangerous enough that a UN Rapporteur shared a platform at the same conference as terrorists. That her language is barely distinguishable from that of designated terrorists should probably come as little surprise given Albanese’s previous actions.

Mustafa Barghouti, who has similarly expressed support for Palestinian terrorism in the past, discussed how the Palestinian will could not be broken, and how the fact that people stayed in Gaza throughout the war displayed the “failure of Israel” despite the “genocide.” In reality, this only goes to show that Palestinian civilians were never the target of Israel, which fought tirelessly to root out Hamas and other terrorists, while doing its utmost to avoid harming civilians.

Al Jazeera’s support for terrorism is not new. What makes this moment particularly alarming is the scale of its influence on the world, and how it brings terrorists and their sympathizers onto a stage in light of global events. This was not a conference about the future of the Middle East. It was an echo chamber where terrorism got the platform.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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Erdogan’s Atomic Ambition: Why Turkey Is the Middle East’s Next Proliferation Crisis

Riot police walk outside the Istanbul provincial office of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), as CHP supporters gather near the office, after a recent court ruling that ousted the CHP’s Istanbul provincial leadership, in Istanbul, Turkey, Sept. 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dilara Acikgoz

As the global community remains transfixed by the diplomatic theater in Oman, a more ominous atomic shadow is lengthening across the Eastern Mediterranean.

While Western envoys chase a “nuclear framework” with a defiant Iran, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is quietly executing a multi-decade roadmap to transform Turkey into the region’s next nuclear-threshold state.

We are witnessing the birth of a sophisticated, NATO-embedded “Iran 2.0” — yet the international community continues to treat Ankara as a standard ally rather than the primary proliferation risk it has become.

Unit 1 of the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant stands at 99 percent completion. While marketed as a civilian energy panacea, Akkuyu represents a strategic Trojan Horse of unprecedented proportions. It is the world’s first “Build-Own-Operate” nuclear project, entirely financed and controlled by Russia’s Rosatom. This arrangement has not only granted the Kremlin a permanent nuclear anchor on NATO’s southern flank, but has also provided the Turkish state with the technical laboratory necessary to master the full nuclear fuel cycle under the guise of commercial cooperation.

The most alarming development in Turkey’s nuclear trajectory is not found in its power reactors, but in its naval shipyards. By officially prioritizing the “NUKDEN” initiative — Turkey’s nuclear-powered submarine program — Erdogan has discovered the ultimate legal loophole for domestic uranium enrichment. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, “peaceful” enrichment remains a contentious grey area, but the production of highly enriched uranium for naval propulsion is a recognized military necessity that bypasses many traditional civilian safeguards.

By pursuing a nuclear navy, Ankara is signaling its intent to stockpile the very fissile material required for a warhead, all while maintaining a veneer of maritime sovereignty. This is a tactical evolution of the “Iran Model.” Where Tehran chose a path of open defiance, Ankara is choosing a path of “Legalist Proliferation,” using its status as a naval power to justify a fuel cycle that would otherwise trigger immediate international sanctions.

This “Stealth Proliferation” is backed by a massive, nine-billion-dollar cash injection from Moscow, ensuring that the infrastructure for this “naval requirement” is built with the highest Russian expertise.

A nuclear reactor is merely a forge; its true threat is realized only when paired with a delivery system. In June 2025, Erdogan issued a decree to massively expand Turkey’s production of medium- and long-range missiles. This was not a random military upgrade. When paired with the 2026 commissioning of Akkuyu, the picture becomes clear: Turkey is building the two halves of a nuclear deterrent in parallel.

The “Araghchi Doctrine” currently being debated in Doha — Iran’s refusal to negotiate on its own missile program — finds a mirror image in Ankara’s “National Missile Program.” Erdogan has been vocal in his disdain for the “nuclear OPEC,” arguing that it is unfair for some nations to possess nuclear-tipped missiles while others are barred from the club. By developing indigenous missile technology capable of reaching any capital in the Middle East or Europe, Turkey is ensuring that once its “breakout” occurs, the delivery mechanism will already be in place, tested, and ready.

For too long, Turkey has been granted what can only be described as a “NATO Pass.” Washington has consistently hesitated to enforce the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act with the necessary vigor, fearing the loss of the Incirlik airbase or a total rupture in the alliance. This hesitation has been read in Ankara as a green light. Erdogan views the international order not as a set of rules to follow, but as a set of constraints to be dismantled.

The strategic reality is that Turkey is no longer content to sit under the American nuclear umbrella. It seeks to build its own, potentially in a trilateral partnership with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This “Islamic Nuclear Axis” would combine Turkish high-tech delivery systems, Saudi capital, and Pakistani technical blueprints to create a new center of gravity that is entirely independent of Western control.

Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx

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Map of Israeli targets goes up in Tehran as tensions simmer ahead of Netanyahu’s White House visit

(JTA) — Iran has erected a map showing Israeli targets for potential strikes in a prominent propaganda spot as another week dawns with uncertainty over whether it will face a U.S. attack.

The map went up over the weekend in Tehran’s Palestine Square, a frequent site for billboards meant to broadcast the Islamic Republic’s bravado when it comes to Israel and the United States. It includes the words “You start, we finish!”

It comes as President Donald Trump continues to weigh military intervention against Iran and as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to visit the White House to press for his demands in Trump’s negotiations with Iran.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to meet with US President Donald Trump this Wednesday in Washington, and will discuss with him the negotiations with Iran,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Saturday. “The Prime Minister believes any negotiations must include limitations on ballistic missiles and a halting of the support for the Iranian axis.”

A will-he-or-won’t-he air has pervaded for weeks as Trump has considered different strategies for dealing with Iran, which has said it would view both U.S. and Israeli targets as legitimate if the United States strikes to curb its nuclear ambitions, less than a year after the last U.S. attack on Iranian sites, which came during a war between Iran and Israel.

On Friday, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East advisor, and Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, met directly with Iran’s foreign minister in Oman. The foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, said the talks had gotten off to a “good start” but that Iran was willing to negotiate only about the nuclear program, not the missiles that concern Israel.

Trump, too, told reporters that there had been “very good talks” that indicated that Iran was prepared to make more concessions than it had offered in the past. Still, he said, “They know that if they don’t make a deal the consequences are very steep.”

The next day, Kushner and Witkoff also visited a U.S. naval carrier that has been moved to the region as part of what Trump has called an “armada” that would enable U.S. military action in the event that Trump decides it is needed. Netanyahu has moved up his planned White House visit — which will be his fourth since Trump retook office last year — to advocate for Israel’s interests in the negotiations. It was at a previous visit, last April, that Trump disclosed for the first time that the United States had opened direct talks with Iran. Just over two months later, Trump joined Israel’s campaign against Iran with a bombing attack that came a day after he said he had not decided whether to strike.

The post Map of Israeli targets goes up in Tehran as tensions simmer ahead of Netanyahu’s White House visit appeared first on The Forward.

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