Mar. 2, 2017 Night of Love: Inna Barmash Yiddish Love Songs; Naomi Seidman Reading

March 2, 2017NY Klezmer Series Proudly Presents:A Night of Love: Collaborative Multimedia Project:  Music by Inna Barmash and Band interspersed with readings from Yiddish Scholar/Author Naomi Seidman from her new book, ““The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love With Love, and with Literature”

Jalopy Theater and School of Music
315 Columbia Street Brooklyn, New York 11231
phone 718.395.3214 www.jalopy.biz

Inna Picpid_25475

INNA BARMASH | YIDDISH LULLABIES & LOVE SONGSNaomi Seidman

Twinkling Lullabies & Songs of Love and Love Gone Wrong

Inna Barmash will bring her program of Yiddish songs to the New York Klezmer Series. The program explores art songs and folk songs, including rarely heard treasures of old Soviet era anthologies of songs collected in the shtetls of Ukraine in the 1920s and art songs by Soviet composers set to Yiddish poetry.   Joining Inna on stage are Lev ‘Ljova’ Zhurbin (viola/fadolin), Shoko Nagai (piano/accordion), Dmitri Zisl Slepovitch (clarinet/bass clarinet) and Dmitry Ishenko (bass).  With this group of musicians, as part of the BluePrint Fellowship project of COJECO, Inna released a recording, Yiddish Lullabies & Love Songs, in November 2013.

 About Inna Barmash

Inna first started singing in Yiddish back in her home city of Vilnius, Lithuania as a child in the late 80s. After immigrating to the US with her family in 1991, Inna has continued singing in Yiddish, Russian and other languages with numerous klezmer and folk groups in the NY area.  She is the vocalist of the chamber folk band Ljova & the Kontraband and co-leads the gypsy dance party band Romashka.

AUDIO:  http://innabarmash.bandcamp.com   VIDEO:  http://tinyurl.com/youtube-inna

The “Yiddish Lullabies & Love Songs” recording was made possible through a grant by the BluePrint Fellowship project of COJECO, funded by the UJA-Federation of New York and Genesis Philanthropy Group.

 
Readings By Naomi Seidman from her new book “The Marriage Plot; or How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature”

For nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews, modernization entailed the abandonment of arranged marriage in favor of the “love match.” Romantic novels taught Jewish readers the rules of romance and the choreography of courtship. But because these new conceptions of romance were rooted in the Christian and chivalric traditions, the Jewish embrace of “the love religion” was always partial.

In The Marriage Plot, Naomi Seidman considers the evolution of Jewish love and marriage though the literature that provided Jews with a sentimental education, highlighting a persistent ambivalence in the Jewish adoption of European romantic ideologies. Nineteenth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature tempered romantic love with the claims of family and community, and treated the rules of gender complementarity as comedic fodder. Twentieth-century Jewish writers turned back to tradition, finding pleasures in matchmaking, intergenerational ties, and sexual segregation. In the modern Jewish voices of Sigmund Freud, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, and Tony Kushner, the Jewish heretical challenge to the European romantic sublime has become the central sexual ideology of our time.

“Naomi Seidman has written a provocative and important study that deftly theorizes Jewish secular modernity through the lens of sexuality. Moving beyond the paradigms of queer and postcolonial studies, The Marriage Plot locates a changing sexual world that articulated its own sexual and gender norms through an erotic recovery of Jewish tradition. In her lively and insightful readings of the modern Jewish canon, Seidman shows that the secularization of Jewish cultural life was far from a straightforward narrative of sexual progress and liberation for men and women.”—Allison Schachter, Vanderbilt University

About the author

Naomi Seidman is Koret Professor of Jewish Culture at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation(2006) and A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (1997).

*Support for Klezmer Heritage Events at the New York Klezmer Series is provided by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency in partnership with Governor Andrew Cuomo.