Past projects

The project “Challenging the Theater of Memory. Yiddish Song beyond Kitsch and Stereotype” attempts to explore and deconstruct the ways that Jewishness is portrayed and embodied in the performance of Yiddish song through ethnographic research and musical performance.

In Germany and in Austria, there are scores of expectations regarding performer, repertoire and the type of Jew represented on stage. Sociologist Michal Y. Bodemann has called this phenomenon, in which Jewish participation in public life fulfills a role on the German post-Nazi national narrative, the Theater of Memory (Bodemann 1996). In the Theater of Memory the diversity and complexity of Jewish life is instrumentalized and reduced to a supporting role in the German or Austrian political narrative. The performance of Yiddish song and more broadly the cultural heritage of Ashkenazi Jews, are not exempt from this phenomenon. Often Yiddish culture and music is portrayed through the nostalgic tropes of traditional shtetl life, stereotypical images of “Ostjuden” and the destruction of the Shoah. Such performances of Yiddish music often reinforce hegemonic narratives rather than creating empowerment for Jewish minorities in Germany and Austria.

In this artistic research project Yiddish musicians and researchers Isabel Frey and Benjy Fox-Rosen reflect on their attempts to challenge the Theater of Memory in their artistic practice. Drawing from their experience of past performances, theory from both performance and Jewish studies as well as ethnomusicology, they develop an artistic performance which weaves together music, texts and visuals. This performance is situated at the center of this artistic research project; it will be presented in multiple settings, and to diverse audiences. The project will be documented through auto-ethnographic (see Bartleet 2021) research methods and audio/visual recordings, published in the Research Catalogue. The final goal of the project is to complete an application for the PEEK program of the FWF in Spring 2023 that will build on and expand upon the topics explored in the present pilot project.

Bartleet, Brydie-Leigh. “Artistic Autoethnography: Exploring the Interface between Autoethnography and Artistic Research.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones and Carolyn Ellis, pp. 133-145. New York: Routledge, 2021.

Bodemann, Y. Michal. Gedächtnistheater: die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung. Hamburg: Rotbuch-Verlag., 1996.

https://musicandminorities.org/projekte/challenging-the-theater-of-memory/

Benjy Fox-Rosen (Los Angeles, 1984) is a musician and researcher based in Vienna, Austria. He is the conductor of the Vienna Stadttempel Choir accompanying Cantor Shmuel Barzilai weekly. As a singer and bass player, Fox-Rosen has performed at Celebrate Brooklyn (USA), the Chicago World Music Festival (USA), Wiener Festwochen (AU), and Krakow Jewish Festival (PL) as well as many other festivals and venues throughout the Americas and Europe. He has taught workshops at the New England Conservatory, Tufts University, the University of Performing Arts Vienna (mdw) and other institutions. As a composer, Fox-Rosen has been commissioned to write works for choirs, artistic interventions, and audio-installations. He has produced three recordings of his own music, two of which were recognized by the Forward in the top-five Jewish music album of the year category.

Fox-Rosen is currently finishing his Masters thesis on the musical practice of the choir of the Stadttempel synagogue at the Institute for Musicology of the University of Vienna. This project uses ethnographic research methods to address questions of musical change, meaning and continuity. Fox-Rosen has also published scholarly reflections on his own artistic practice, focusing on questions of translation in the performance of Yiddish song, particularly in the German speaking world.

Isabel Frey is a Yiddish singer and PhD candidate in the Structured Doctoral Program “Music Matters” at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. She has a background in medical anthropology and sociology, a field that she has also published peer-reviewed articles in. Her current research deals with the politics of Yiddish folksong, the practices of oral transmission and the current developments in creating new Yiddish songs. Her project combines her passion for Yiddish music with the anthropology of the voice and the body and ethnomusicological minority research. It is located between the disciplines of ethnomusicology, cultural studies and gender studies, but also draws on theories from Jewish, Yiddish and diaspora studies. In her PhD project, she also combines her artistic work with her research, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Yiddish music workshops and master classes that she also received artistic scholarships for. The artistic research pilot project “Challenging the Theater of Memory. Yiddish Song beyond Kitsch and Stereotype” is a further step in this direction to link research with artistic practice.

As a performer, Isabel Frey specializes in Yiddish revolutionary songs and continuing the tradition of Jewish social justice activism both on stages and at political protests. She regularly performs Yiddish music either as a soloist, in the duo Soveles or with the Isabel Frey Trio. She has performed at various international festivals and venues, such as the KlezMORE Festival Bratislava, the Singera Festival in Warsaw or the Willy Brandt Center in Jerusalem. In September 2020 she released her debut album “Millenial Bundist” with Yiddish revolutionary and resistance songs. For the time period of 2023/2024 she has been selected for the New Sound of Austrian Music (NASOM) support program by the Austrian foreign ministry. She has also been interviewed and featured by national and international media such as radio Ö1, ORF2, Deutschlandfunk, Ha’aretz or InGeveb. Additionally, she is the founder and general secretary of the Yiddish cultural association “Friling.”