The festival features workshops devoted to Yiddish scholars and experts, as well as performances, shows, concerts and cabarets for the general public.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFSoCalled at Yiddish Summer Weimar.(photo credit: ADAM BERRY/YIDDISH SUMMER WEIMAR)
A month-long Yiddish festival kicked off in the city of Weimar in Germany on Friday.Started in 1999 as a workshop by the American New Jewish Music group Brave Old World, the Yiddish Summer Weimar has evolved to become one of the main events in the world focused on Yiddish culture.Since 2019The festival features workshops devoted to Yiddish scholars and experts, as well as performances, shows, concerts and cabarets for the general public, including a series of world premieres with ten large-scale artistic projects commissioned from an international group of artists. marks the centennial from the foundation of the Weimar Republic, this year's edition celebrates the Yiddish creative ferment of the Weimar era, under the motto "The Weimar Republic of Yiddishland.""' The Weimar Republic of Yiddishland' is an encounter between the liberal spirit of the Weimar Republic and the politically virtual, but culturally very real 'republic' of Yiddishland," festival founder and director Alan Bern said in a statement."Yiddish culture in interwar Europe was neither isolated nor nostalgic, but transnational, modernist and dynamic," he added. "Our collective memory of this cultural moment was almost completely erased by the Shoah and has since been overwritten by romanticism and denial."The festival features workshops devoted to Yiddish scholars and experts, as well as performances, shows, concerts and cabarets for the general public, including a series of world premieres with ten large-scale artistic projects commissioned from an international group of artists.Eight of the premiers will take place in the place between July 27 and August 4, including "Di Megile fun Vaymar: The Book of Esther for 21st-century Weimar."The festival is supported by a grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation. It will conclude on August 17.
