Yiddish Tangos and Klezmer Mambos
This panel discussion will explore the remarkable influence of Latin American music and dance on the culture of Yiddish speaking communities in the United States. Ronald Robboy will discuss Latin American musical influences upon Yiddish theater composers, including Sholom Secunda, Abraham Ellstein, and Alexander Olshanetsky; Sonia Gollance will discuss the popularity of dances like the Tango and Mambo in the Borscht Belt, as exemplified by movies like Dirty Dancing and Mamboniks; and Josh Kun will discuss the influence of Latin American music on post-war Jewish music and the influence of Jewish music on U.S. Latino/a artists.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Admission: Free
About the Speakers
Sonia Gollance is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at University College London. Her work focuses on Yiddish and German literature, dance, theatre, and gender. She is the author of It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2021), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards. She has taught at the University of Vienna, The Ohio State University, and the University of Göttingen, as well as at klezmer festivals in Europe and North America.
Josh Kun is a cultural historian, author, curator, and MacArthur Fellow. He is Vice Provost for the Arts at the University of Southern California, where he is Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication in the USC Annenberg School.
Ronald Robboy is a musician and independent scholar based in San Diego, where he was a professional cellist for many years and, beginning in the 1970s, an early West Coast experimentalist in the klezmer revival. He has written and lectured extensively on Yiddish theater music, and in 1998 was named Senior Researcher for Michael Tilson Thomas’s Thomashefsky Project. In 2023, Robboy led YIVO Institute’s reconstruction of the score to composer Joseph Rumshinsky’s operetta Shir-hashirim (1911).
