the KlezmerShack

This last KlezmerShack 10th Anniversary event is, in some ways, the most important. Combined with the diversity of last spring's events (Khevre, Charming Hostess, Workman's Circle Chorus, Becky Kaplan and Pete Rushefsky, di bostoner klezmer), this is the closest Boston has come to an actual Jewish Music Festival in over a decade. We want it to succeed, so that we can maybe make this a habit. It seems so important that Jewish culture be extended beyond the intellectual and the religious. If we do not provide opportunities to experience and to create Jewish culture, we lose it. The way we live our lives can include a wide variety of Jewish components, or not. But if we don't ensure that this is a living culture, it will be gone, along with much else.

I'll be writing more and more about this—I feel so strongly about this issue that I have hesitated to put it online. There is so much going through my head that I worry about it coming out as an incoherent stream of consciousness. And, my feelings of anger about the lack of support for Jewish music, visual arts, theatre are most unseemly.