Yiddish music has always evolved — from the shtetl to the stage, and now to the synth. For some time now a  new wave of artists has been bringing its spirit into the digital age. Across clubs from Montreal to New York, artists are remixing old-world melodies into the digital soundscape of the 21st century. It’s not nostalgia. It’s a pulse.

Two of the most innovative voices in this movement, Josh “Socalled” Dolgin and Chaia, are proving that Yiddish isn’t just surviving — it’s vibrating with life. Dolgin, the Canadian producer and musician who pioneered Yiddish hip-hop, began his journey far from any shtetl. Growing up in Chelsea, Quebec, as the only Jewish kid in school, he fell in love with funk and hip hop in the early 1990s. It was a subculture that felt both strange and electric, and he saw it as funk for a new era. When he discovered sampling he found his voice.

One day in a thrift store, he stumbled upon a record by Aaron Lebedeff, the Yiddish theater composer and singer best known for the song “Romania, Romania.”Between each verse were beautiful, hooky orchestral bars that inspired him to blend Yiddish music with hip hop. Mixing those breaks into beats became a way of reclaiming Jewish identity and discovering his own culture.

Two decades later, Dolgin teaches at McGill University while continuing to perform and record. He notes that Yiddish electronica isn’t a new wave — it has existed for more than 20 years — but access has transformed it. Back then, he worked with a sampler that could record only a few seconds of sound; now, everyone has a studio on their phone, able to explore Yiddish identity anywhere and at anytime.

Dolgin doesn’t see the music as a gimmick or cultural experiment. “I don’t want to force-feed audiences my work to make a point,” he explained. “The music does the speaking. If it slaps, it slaps.” His listeners range from non-Jewish Europeans to Jews rediscovering their roots. Creating a contemporary sound infused with history, he said, is rewarding — even if most Jews today aren’t deeply engaged with Yiddish culture.“I just wanted to show that this music can be on the same level as any of the great world music traditions.”

For a younger generation, including Brooklyn-based producer and accordionist Chaia, that same impulse has taken on new urgency and political resonance. Like Dolgin, she began in klezmer before turning toward electronic sound. In her teens, she played accordion in a community klezmer band. Later, while studying under klezmer revival pioneer Hankus Netsky at the New England Conservatory, she began experimenting with his vast archive of field recordings. Netsky had dozens of laptops filled with interviews and Yiddish songs, and Chaia started digitally altering them and blending them with the techno she heard in Boston’s underground clubs.

Her first track, “Oy Mamenyu,” reworked short clips of people talking that she took from real recordings or archives and mixed them to music (in Chaia’s case, a clip about women in the shtetl). The sound was hypnotic — traditional Yiddish phrasing layered over minimalist electronic beats. Soon, other musicians were following suit. In 2022, Chaia launched a festival afterparty called Kleztronica, a night devoted to Yiddish-electronic fusion. She expected just a few friends; instead, hundreds of people showed up.

The event was intentionally political and unapologetically queer. “We sang songs from the Jewish Labor Bund and shouted ‘Down with the police’ in Yiddish,” she said. Since then, she has hosted a dozen Kleztronica nights and expanded into a broader series called Diasporic Techno Night, where each artist samples music from their own heritage. “By celebrating our own diasporas, we can be in solidarity with one another,” she explained.

She describes her tracks not as futuristic but as portals. “I’m pulling voices of people who are no longer here and using them like time travel machines,” she said. “If our ancestors envisioned solidarity and liberation, why can’t we say the same now?”

Her most recent album, Yiddish Electronic, released this year, takes that idea to new height. Each track reimagines a folk song through layers of archival sound — recordings of singers, drummers, cantors and even spoken reflections on trauma. She hopes listeners can “feel the ancestral magic” in her songs, hearing “something they recognize and something they’ve never imagined together.”

Both Dolgin and Chaia are clear about one thing: fusion isn’t easy. “Fusion is dangerous and mostly sucks,” Dolgin said bluntly. “To make it work, you have to love both genres and know them deeply. You can’t just slap one onto the other.” Dolgin also stresses that to mess with tradition, you have to know it first. Chaia agrees, noting that her approach is grounded in years of study and respect for source material. “We both make sure the Yiddish is exact — the intonation, the phrasing,” she said.

Despite their different generations, the two musicians share a common mission: to keep Yiddish vibrant without turning it into a museum piece. Dolgin does it through funk and humor; Chaia through radical techno and activism. Both see Yiddish as a living language of resistance.

“Music can be fun and funny, but also tragic and heart-wrenching,” Dolgin reflected. “That mix of laughter and tears — it’s what klezmer always did best.”

Related article: https://forward.com/culture/554470/kaia-berman-peters-klezmer-edm-jewish-dance-music-kleztronica/

 

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Holocaust movies have become such a genre of their own that it is hard for them to find anything new to say. Yet directors keep trying — perhaps out of a sense of duty, or the assumed prestige of the subject matter — to keep the atrocities front of mind.

Nuremberg, a star-studded new film written and directed by James Vanderbilt (the writer of Zodiac and both installations of the Adam Sandler-Jennifer Anniston hit Murder Mystery), focuses on  the trial of Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command. The drama distinguishes itself from previous treatments of the trial by centering Douglass Kelley, the psychiatrist charged with assessing Nazis’ readiness to take the stand. Based on the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai, the film stars Russell Crowe as Goering and Rami Malek as Kelley.

But Nuremberg’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime attempts to take on more than Kelley’s observations about the nature of evil; the entire second half is a courtroom drama, which follows the beats of the unfolding trial. The movie fits in the backstories of some of Goering’s co-defendants, the establishment of a new model of international law and a romantic subplot touching on the media circus surrounding it all. A late reveal in this overcrowded movie shows Kelley’s translator to be a German Jew, and we hear the story of his escape from the Nazi regime.

It’s a big project, with the cast to match, and it’s full of factoids designed to make its message about the horrors of the Nazis unmistakeable. But Nuremberg is an entry into a field crowded with Holocaust content. Is this the new Holocaust movie we needed?

Why now for a Nuremberg movie?

On the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and the start of the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis and their crimes remain topical. In October, a leaked group chat of the Young Republicans showed members openly joking about gassing Jews and proclaiming their “love” for Hitler; many of the members of the chat worked in state governments. (Vice President JD Vance defended them as “kids” making “edgy, offensive jokes.”) Tucker Carlson just interviewed avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes, legitimizing a man whose extremist rhetoric once relegated him to the fringe, and moving him into the mainstream. The current administration is engaged in a campaign of deportations, at least some of which have caught citizens in their dragnet.

The movie was in production long before any of these stories broke. But the rise of antisemitism, neo-Nazism and fascism in the U.S. — and Europe — has been apparent for at least a decade, fueled by social media and online forums where conspiracy theories and a resurgent white nationalism and nativism fester, sometimes breaking the internet’s containment to appear on political daises and in white supremacist marches.

“I think it’s important to not forget the past,” James Vanderbilt offered in an interview with The Catholic Review, adding that, “we have to be able to look backwards in order to move forwards.”

In this context, Nuremberg feels more like an urgent history lesson than a work of cinema, despite its aspirations to artistry; its clumsy exposition doesn’t help its schoolmarmish tone.

Why the psychiatrist?

In the film, Douglas Kelley arrives in Nuremberg hoping to discover what made the Nazis, and Germans, uniquely predisposed to, and capable of, great evils. “If we could psychologically define evil, we could make sure something like this never happens again!” he asserts. What Kelley found, in lieu of a diagnosis, was normal people. It’s the banality of evil, years before Arendt coined the phrase — and presents an opportunity for the movie to tee up a clear moral message.

Given that the Nuremberg trials lasted years and were extremely complex, narrowing the focus to Kelley and Goering’s dynamic could have helped to prevent overwhelming the audience while offering viewers a window into the minds of the Nazi leadership.

But we walk away with little insight into Goering’s own motivations. Kelley repeatedly emphasizes the Reichsmarschall’s manipulativeness and exhorts Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor played here by Michael Shannon, to prey on the Nazi’s narcissism in his cross-examination. But we don’t see Goering do much manipulating beyond initially pretending not to speak any English, nor do we see much narcissism beyond remarking that he thinks he will escape the hangman’s noose.

Kelley mostly comes off as incompetent and eager for a book deal, not a masterful observer of the human condition, so we are given little reason to trust his insights.

How does this compare to other portrayals of Goering? Of the trial?

The most famous narrative film about the Nuremberg trials is Stanley Kramer’s 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg. Its characters are fictionalized and the action takes place at a later stage of the trial, years after Goering has escaped his hanging via a cyanide pill. Its focus is not on the high command, but the Nazi judicial system and everyday Germans. (It’s rooted in the 1947 Judges’ Trial, but reduces the number of defendants in the dock considerably.)

Much closer to Nuremberg is a 2000 TV miniseries, also called Nuremberg, starring Alec Baldwin as Jackson, the American prosecutor, and Brian Cox as Goering. Cox’s Goering is quite a bit more brash than Crowe’s, but, with his charm and chattiness with the guards, hits many of the same beats.

The main difference between the two Nurembergs comes in the portrayal of Goering’s motivations. In the movie, the Reichsmarschall displays no antisemitism and speaks only of his patriotic duty to Germany; he insists he had no knowledge of the Final Solution. His weakness, it seems, and his evil, is encapsulated in his devotion to Hitler.

In the miniseries, though Kelley does not feature,  the psychiatrist Gustave Gilbert — who also briefly appears in Vanderbilt’s film played by Colin Hanks — serves much of the same function. In one memorable scene, Goering calls out the hypocrisy of America, with its segregation, trying Nazis for their race laws, and explains how Jews exploited Germans.

When Gilbert doesn’t see his logic, Cox’s Goering barks back: “You will never understand antisemitism. Why? Because you are a Jew.”

The moment implies, more than any scene in the movie version, that Goering could have been a true believer, rather than a career military man and opportunist.

How did the movie deploy its archival footage?

Despite the subject matter, the film mostly dodges direct discussion of the Holocaust — until it inserts archival footage of the concentration camps.

During the actual Nuremberg trials, a 52-minute film, directed by John Ford, showing the crematoriums, death pits, and abysmal conditions of the camps was played for the courtroom. The film uses an excerpt of the film in the trial scene. Vanderbilt chose to show the footage to the actors for the first time on set, wanting to capture their real, unfiltered reactions.

The use of archival footage reminds viewers that this story is not some Hollywood fantasy, but the rest of the film lacks this emotional power. Even when Kelley’s German-Jewish translator, Howard Triest (Leo Woodall), reveals his heritage to Kelley, a scene meant as an affecting turning point for the protagonist, its execution gives it the feel of something out of an afterschool special. The documentary footage gives the movie weight, but feels out of place in a film that otherwise has the sheen, waxy makeup and shallow characterizations of a Hollywood blockbuster.

What was the movie trying to do?

Nuremberg tries, often didactically, to spread the warning Kelley himself hoped to convey in his book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals that all men have capacity for heinous deeds.

Highlighting the banality of evil has become a trend in recent Holocaust dramas like Zone of Interest. But unlike that film, Nuremberg relies on didactic expository dialogue. (“Jesus Christ, that’s Hermann Goering!” says an American soldier in the opening scene, before his comrade asks “Who?” and he responds with a Wikipedia precis.) It is much less interested in setting up a compelling story with deep characters than it is in lecturing the audience.

And though, by the end, the movie disavows the idea that morality — or immorality — is inherited, it gives more airtime to Kelley’s pursuit of a diagnosis of evil than it does to his conclusion that such a thing does not exist. Though a brief final scene shows the psychiatrist on a radio show warning that evil is just as possible in the U.S., we don’t see him arrive at that conclusion in the movie.

Is this an effective Holocaust movie?

At their best, Holocaust movies are able to force audiences to feel the horror of the concentration camps or make the inhumanity of the Nazis palpable. The Zone of Interest‘s most impactful scenes showed Rudolph Höss’ children playing cheerfully in the garden with the smoky plumes of Auschwitz’s crematoria in the background.

Vanderbilt tries to pack too much information into Nuremberg, leaving us with a movie that has to tell rather than show. The result is something more educational than evocative, providing a hurried overview of how the Nuremberg trials came about and a crash course on the Third Reich’s hierarchy. Its lack of focus makes it, at times, feel like a slog, and the movie depends on its star-studded cast and the inherent solemnity of its subject matter for viewers’ attention.

For those hoping to understand more about Goering’s psyche, Kelley’s own book — or The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, on which the movie was based — might be a better resource. For those hoping to delve into the entire history of the Holocaust, no one movie can capture it.

The post Is ‘Nuremberg’ the Holocaust movie we need right now? appeared first on The Forward.

“The beautiful little synagogue was filled to capacity,” the Tupper Lake Herald reported on February 12, 1915. “Many were there who had known Mr. Cohn for the past twenty years — old Adirondack pioneers… The air was heavy with tears as Rev. Boyd of the Episcopal Church lifted a Hebrew prayer book given him by Mr. Cohn a few years ago.”

The man they gathered to honor was Harris Cohn, an early Jewish resident of Tupper Lake, New York. His funeral filled the small Beth Joseph Synagogue, the same wooden building that still stands today, now celebrating its 120th anniversary.

Just a decade earlier, in 1904 or 1905, local families — peddlers, merchants, and new immigrants — had pooled roughly $450 to build it, holding Hebrew school classes in the town hall while waiting for carpenters to finish the sanctuary. In 1911 they purchased an acre for a cemetery beside the Methodist burial ground.

Cohn, the paper wrote, was “the personification of honor, truth, and integrity” — a man of “deep religious convictions… the firm believer of righteousness, benevolence, charity and prayers.” His “belief in God,” the editor added, “was so ideal, so far elevated above all earthly things, that no sacrifice was too great to show and prove his devotion to his Maker.”

Rabbi S. Freedman of Beth Joseph led the prayers, chanting the memorial service in Hebrew. Then the local Episcopal minister rose to speak.

He held up the worn Hebrew prayer book Cohn had given him and said, “I prize this book so much, for Mr. Cohn was a man whom I admired and with whom I established a strong and lasting friendship.” Then he turned to the young people present and urged them “to hold fast to whatever denomination they were reared under,” reminding them that conviction and faith come from devotion to one’s own tradition.

The rabbi had spoken of religion not as a convenience but as “a deep solace to the soul.” The minister, moved also by faith, echoed it in his own words. Jews and Christians mourned together. When the eulogies ended, the mourners recited kaddish, an ancient prayer offering comfort and acknowledging God.

I came across this article, digitized through the New York State Historic Newspapers archive, while researching Jewish life in nearby Ogdensburg and Massena. I paused to hold this memory. I had been tracing the histories of small-town synagogues — some now closed, others still standing in places like New York’s North Country and across the Midwest. In Tupper Lake, as in so many places, Jewish life grew quickly and then thinned with time: by 1913 a Sisterhood had formed; by 1914, a lodge of the Independent Order of Brith Abraham met in the synagogue twice a month; and by 1918, Beth Joseph had joined the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Each step spoke to a community that saw itself as part of something enduring, even in a place far removed from America’s largest Jewish centers.

The story of Harris Cohn’s funeral felt familiar. I had come across many such moments in small-town American history, and it revealed something essential that runs through so many of these places: a moral imagination larger than their size.

These were communities where faith was not theoretical. Jews and their neighbors depended on one another — through long winters, economic hardship, and the isolation of distance. Synagogues, often built by peddlers and storekeepers, became civic landmarks as much as houses of worship. A century later, when we look back at the geography of American Jewish life, we see that its reach was far wider than today’s metropolitan map suggests. For every major center of Jewish population, there were dozens of smaller congregations that carried the same prayers into fields, factory towns, and forest settlements.

It’s easy to forget that these rural sanctuaries once embodied outposts of Jewish belonging. Their stories are rarely told, overshadowed by the better-known narratives of New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. Yet in towns like Tupper Lake, Judaism became part of the spiritual language of the whole community.

That is what moved me about the 1915 funeral. The newspaper account wasn’t written for a Jewish audience. It was published for the whole town, describing the service with reverence and curiosity but without exoticism. The boundaries between communities blurred, and what emerged was shared moral clarity: the belief that dignity, faith, and friendship can withstand every division.

There is something profoundly Jewish in the humility of that service. The simplicity of the synagogue, the equality of all before death, the act of remembrance itself — all mirror the same values I have seen in Jewish life today. In Tupper Lake, that ethos endured. By the 1930s, Beth Joseph opened its doors to patients from the nearby state hospital for Passover Seders, and in 1925 Rabbi Freedman — the same clergyman who eulogized Cohn — offered words of comfort at a Masonic memorial for a Presbyterian pastor. The boundaries were always more porous than history remembers.

Beth Joseph’s continued presence in Tupper Lake is a kind of quiet miracle. This year marks its 120th anniversary — a milestone few rural synagogues reach. The synagogue testifies that Jewish life has, at various times and places, reached into nearly every corner of America, leaving behind something worth remembering: the habit of neighborliness, the belief that God is present wherever people honor one another.

When Rev. Boyd lifted that Hebrew book at a funeral in 1915, he could not have known how far that gesture would travel. But in reading it more than a century later, I think of it as an act of faith in its own right. A Christian minister, holding the sacred words of another tradition, showing them to his townspeople with tenderness. That is a kind of sermon that still preaches.

The story of Harris Cohn’s funeral is not about a vanished world. It is about a world that, at least for one afternoon in the Adirondacks, revealed its best self.

The prayer book may no longer exist, but its lesson remains open: that the sacred is never confined by walls, and that remembering each other is itself a holy act.

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