Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Forverts in English

Album of Yiddish songs is nominated for a Pulitzer ‬‬

Read this article in Yiddish

‬ The annual Pulitzer Prizes, awarded by Columbia University, are best known for recognizing outstanding journalism. Less known is that Columbia awards equally prestigious Pulitzer prizes for excellence in fiction, poetry, historical writing, drama, general nonfiction, biography and music. Unlike the Oscars or the Grammys, which announce nominees well in advance, and the Nobel Prizes, whose nominees are not revealed for 50 years, Pulitzer nominees are announced when the prizes are awarded.

On Monday the Pulitzer music jury announced that composer Alex Weiser had been nominated for his album “And all the days were purple,” which features his musical settings to avant-garde Yiddish poetry by Anna Margolin, Rokhl Korn and Abraham Sutzkever.

Although “And all the days were purple” received praise in the press, including a laudatory review in the New Yorker, an album of Yiddish art songs is not the type of project that typically gets nominated for a prestigious award. In recent years, however, the Pulitzer music juries have honored a wider range of works than their forbearers, who were decidedly conservative in their selections. In 2018, for instance, rapper Kendrick Lamar became the first non-classical or jazz artist to receive the honor, and this year composer Anthony Davis won for his opera The Central Park Five. Perhaps, this willingness to recognize more diverse musical genres played a role in the jury’s historic decision to nominate an album featuring Yiddish poetry.

Of course, the nomination has far less to do with Yiddish poetry than with Weiser’s stunning compositions, which blend influences from contemporary American classical music and traditional Eastern-European Jewish forms.

Weiser’s deep knowledge of the classical canon and Jewish music has been a great asset to the YIVO Institute, where he works as the director of public programs. In recent years, Weiser has organized concert series highlighting the works of both famed and nearly forgotten Jewish composers whose works, like his own, merge classical with Jewish folk and liturgical music. “And all of the days were purple” was performed at the YIVO Institute last April, a few days before the album was released. Other programs in the series have included an evening dedicated to musical compositions inspired by the Song of Songs and a concert by the violinist Yuval Waldman.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rukhl Schaechter, Yiddish Editor

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.