{"id":30570,"date":"2023-05-03T08:05:58","date_gmt":"2023-05-03T12:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=30570"},"modified":"2023-06-14T10:16:41","modified_gmt":"2023-06-14T14:16:41","slug":"achtung-german-klezmer-musician-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/03\/achtung-german-klezmer-musician-here\/","title":{"rendered":"ACHTUNG. GERMAN KLEZMER MUSICIAN HERE"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #993366;\"><strong>I\u2019m a<\/strong><\/span> German klezmer musician. Everyone thinks that fascinating. Everyone has questions for me.<\/p>\n<p>Here are the answers:<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t know any Jews. I just liked the music. My aunt told me, \u201cWhy do you play that silly music? You\u2019re German!\u201d I don\u2019t think klezmer is silly music! I\u2019ve studied Yiddish and I\u2019ve been to klezmer conferences, and I have Jewish friends now.<\/p>\n<p>Every year I play memorial programs, and each time at the Kristallnacht commemoration in my town there is always at least one Jewish tourist who comes up to me and says, &#8220;Are you Jewish?\u201d And I say no, and he\u2019s says, \u201cYou have to be!\u201d Sometimes I tell him my grandfather is Romanian. It\u2019s not true; I am German, but if a Jewish person insists I\u2019m Jewish, who am I to disappoint him?<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993366;\"><strong>I am<\/strong><\/span> a klezmer musician, or a German klezmer musician. Your choice. I never wanted to be a Jew, and I never wanted to be <em>not <\/em>a Jew. Somebody once said, \u201cYou\u2019re not really a Jew unless at one point in your life you didn\u2019t want to be a Jew.\u201d So maybe I <em>am<\/em> Jewish.<\/p>\n<p>An American once called me a &#8220;poseur.&#8221; I had to look that word up. He claimed to be a klezmer musician from Cleveland, Ohio. He told me I shouldn\u2019t play klezmer music because I&#8217;m not Jewish. He was emphatic about that. The middle of the United States is too red, I think.<\/p>\n<p>Do I feel guilty about the Holocaust? Why should I? I don\u2019t follow the tradition of my great-grandparents. If you think I&#8217;m a bad person for playing music from somewhere else, then you know damn little about music.<\/p>\n<p><small><em>[fake profile]<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; I\u2019m a German klezmer musician. Everyone thinks that fascinating. Everyone has questions for me. Here are the answers: I didn&#8217;t know any Jews. I just liked the music. My aunt told me, \u201cWhy do you play that silly music? You\u2019re German!\u201d I don\u2019t think klezmer is silly music! I\u2019ve studied Yiddish and I\u2019ve been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fake-profiles","category-klezfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30570"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30745,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30570\/revisions\/30745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}