Yiddish Stars Turn Out for Adrienne Cooper
Image by adriennecooper.com
Stars of contemporary Yiddish culture turned out for an emotional gala memorial concert honoring Yiddish diva Adrienne Cooper, an influential performer, teacher and composer.
Image by adriennecooper.com
Cooper died one year ago of cancer at the age of 65.
A powerful stage presence, Cooper worked at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in the 1970s and 1980s, and in 1985, with Henry Sapoznik, co-founded Klezkamp, an annual, multi-generational Yiddish folk arts program that takes place at the end of December.
Called A Kholem/Dreaming in Yiddish, the memorial concert was held Saturday night at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in New York and streamed live on the internet.
Its line-up included pioneers of the Klezmer and Yiddish music revival such as the Klezmatics, Zalmen Mlotek, Michael Alpert, Eleanor Reissa, Frank London and Henry Sapoznik, as well as younger performers, such as DJ Socalled, Daniel Kahn, and Michael Winograd, who have channeled traditional Jewish roots music into contemporary art forms.
Also appearing were Cooper’s partner, the pianist Marilyn Lerner; her daughter, the singer Sarah Gordon; the poet Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, who in 2005 became the first Yiddish poet or musical figure to receive a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship; Yiddishist writer and humorist Michael Wex; and many other top performers in the field.
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.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
