Art is My Weapon:
The Radical Musical Life of Lin Jaldati
Shneer and Eisenberg singing A Khandl oyf shabes
This project tells the story of Lin Jaldati, a Dutch Jewish Communist cabaret performer in the 1930s, Nazi death camp survivor, postwar immigrant to East Germany, and global Yiddish singing sensation until her death in 1988. Shneer examines how Jaldati’s Yiddish music and her compelling biography made her one of if not the key player in shaping Holocaust memory in East Germany, where Soviet-inspired Communist cultural politics about war commemoration intersected with the fact of Germany’s role as the perpetrator of war crimes. Jaldati’s Yiddish music sat at that intersection.
Mixed Media Projects
Art is My Weapon: The Life and Work of Lin Jaldati, incubated by Yiddishkayt
The work most recently was performed at Indiana University and the Center for Jewish History. View the full performance here.
You can learn more about artist Jewlia Eisenberg, the founder of Charming Hostess.
Read an interview with Shneer and Eisenberg
Yiddish Forward review of Alexis Aeang's Yiddish radio hour, "Yiddishists Anonymous," on KVCU 1190 with write up of Art is My Weapon
Books:
Lin Jaldati: Trümmerfrau der Seele (Hentrich: Berlin, 2014)
This book is a short German-language mini-biography about Jaldati, a Dutch Jewish Communist Yiddish singer, who survived the Holocaust and was the last person to see Anne Frank alive. After the war, she and her husband, Eberhard Rebling, moved to East Berlin where she became the Yiddish diva of the Communist world, including a 1965 concert including Yiddish music in North Korea, and a 1983 concert in Yad Vashem, where she was a representative of her adopted home in East Germany. While primarily in Yiddish, the Yad Vashem concert included German-language anti-fascist songs by Hans Eisler, the first time German music was heard in the hallowed halls of Israel's Holocaust memorial.
The book had its formal launch in Germany at the Leipzig Book Fair, Friday, March 13, 2015 at 2pm, along with other events in Duisberg and Berlin.
Shneer and Jaldati's daughter presented the Jaldati's life story through word and song at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in November 2015.
Articles:
Mixed Media Projects
Art is My Weapon: The Life and Work of Lin Jaldati, incubated by Yiddishkayt
The work most recently was performed at Indiana University and the Center for Jewish History. View the full performance here.
You can learn more about artist Jewlia Eisenberg, the founder of Charming Hostess.
Read an interview with Shneer and Eisenberg
Yiddish Forward review of Alexis Aeang's Yiddish radio hour, "Yiddishists Anonymous," on KVCU 1190 with write up of Art is My Weapon
Books:
Lin Jaldati: Trümmerfrau der Seele (Hentrich: Berlin, 2014)
This book is a short German-language mini-biography about Jaldati, a Dutch Jewish Communist Yiddish singer, who survived the Holocaust and was the last person to see Anne Frank alive. After the war, she and her husband, Eberhard Rebling, moved to East Berlin where she became the Yiddish diva of the Communist world, including a 1965 concert including Yiddish music in North Korea, and a 1983 concert in Yad Vashem, where she was a representative of her adopted home in East Germany. While primarily in Yiddish, the Yad Vashem concert included German-language anti-fascist songs by Hans Eisler, the first time German music was heard in the hallowed halls of Israel's Holocaust memorial.
The book had its formal launch in Germany at the Leipzig Book Fair, Friday, March 13, 2015 at 2pm, along with other events in Duisberg and Berlin.
Shneer and Jaldati's daughter presented the Jaldati's life story through word and song at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in November 2015.
Articles:
- “Singing Between Two Worlds: Lin Jaldati and Yiddish Music in Cold War Europe and Divided Berlin, 1945-1953,” in Jan Schwarz, Shlomo Berger, and Marion Aptroot, eds., Explorations in Modern Yiddish Culture (Dusseldorf: Dusseldorf University Press, 2018).
- "How Eastern European Jewish immigrants, modernist Yiddish culture, and anti-fascist politics dragged the Netherlands into the twentieth century," East European Jewish Affairs 2016 (2).
- "Yiddish Music and East German Antifascism: Lin Jaldati, Post-Holocaust Jewish Culture, and the Cold War," in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 2015.
- "Eberhard Rebling, Lin Jaldati, and Yiddish Music in East Germany, 1949-1962," in Tina Frühauf and Lily Hirsch, eds., Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 161-186. Winner of Best Anthology, 2015 award.
- In Front of the Iron Curtain: Yiddish in East Germany in Pakntreger
- When Yiddish Came to North Korea in the Forward
- Genghis Cohen/Yiddishkayt, February 3, 2018
- Cal State University Long Beach/Alpert Jewish Community Center, February 5, 2018
- University of Toronto, November 6, 2017
- Temple University, Philadelphia, and Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, November 7-10, 2016.
- August 8 2016, London, UK, Ot Azoy Music Festival: Shneer gave a multimedia presentation, Crossdressing and Communism, about Yiddish cabaret in interwar Europe .