Isle of Klezbos

Our cultural programs include both the live band cine-concert Music from Yiddish Cinema program (as seen at NYC's Lincoln Center and film festivals from Detroit to DC), and bandleader/film scholar Eve Sicular's clips-lecture Music of the Yiddish Silver Screen — recently premiered for Harvard University's Center for Jewish Studies.

We are happy to customize these offerings.

“a stirring talk -- to a good crowd!” - Saul Noam Zaritt, Professor of Yiddish Literature, Harvard University

“Interesting, engaging and full of such knowledge and passion. Fabulous!” — Maura Gould, Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University

For more information about our Music from Yiddish Cinema programs visit Metropolitan Klezmer.

Eve Sicular’s research article Once upon a time, a Yiddish-ish ‘Mikado’… published in the Forward explores how Danny Kaye, Jerome Robbins and eventually Judy Garland were part of a showbiz legend which began in the fraught summer of 1939. (The Forward 4/17/2024)

The Summer of 1939 brought an unprecedented Saturday night entertainment to Camp Tamiment, the cosmopolitan Jewish socialist singles resort in bucolic Pennsylvania. Famous for its high quality original live shows and parodies, Tamiment featured a talent pool of rising stars that year including both Danny Kaye [ne David Daniel Kaminski] and Jerome [Rabinowitz] Robbins, both of whom crafted their showbiz names during their stints in the mountains where they polished material that also largely left their ethnic roots behind. Their seemingly unlikely hit emerged in response to recent feuding African-American-cast productions of The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado on Broadway, as well as The Red Mikado staged across their shared Poconos lake by earnest International Ladies Garment Workers theatricals. Nu? The culturally assimilated Tamiment satirists took Gilbert & Sullivan into a highly topical realm of fluent, politically charged and hilarious mameloshn. Just a few years later, this legendary “too Jewish” take-off was reprised in semi-private performance with all-new Yiddish in-jokes for a wartime after-hours audience sprinkled with screenwriters and movie moguls.

The Yinglish Mikado, from the Poconos to MGM was presented by Eve Sicular at the Yiddish New York Festival (Dec 2021). Her updated program was hosted online for the Ner Shalom Yiddish Tish, from New York to California (Feb 2/2/2022).

Der Richtiga Mikado — Eve Sicular presents ongoing research in a zoom program also featuring cameos by luminary Yiddish Tish participants, from Congregation Ner Shalom - Sonoma.

In December 2021 for Yiddish New York Film Festival, Eve Sicular curated the screening and moderated the panel discussion of Brussels Transit aka Bruxelles-transit; aka Dakh Brisel / דאַך בריסעל This 1980 Belgian Yiddish film was the only full-length feature by director Samy Szlingerbaum (who died of AIDS in 1986), and is the story of his Polish Jewish parents coming to Brussels in 1947. The word "transit" in the title refers to this trip which brought them to a new land yet seemingly never to a new home. Szlingerbaum was close personally and artistically to avant garde feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman, whose Paradise Films co-produced this work.

The movie had been a passion of Eve's since she viewed it while working on the landmark 1991-92 MoMA Yiddish cinema retrospective, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds. Following Akerman's death in 2015, Eve championed Brussels Transit for inclusion at the New York Jewish Film Festival, where J. Hoberman declared at the 2019 screening that henceforth this 'orphan' film should be considered part of the Akerman cinema canon. For Yiddish New York 2021, Eve organized an online talk-back panel featuring Boris Lehman (the film's lead actor) as well as cineastes Amy Taubin and Lynne Tillman.

An essay on the use of Yiddish language in Szlingerbaum's work by Eve, Samy Szlingerbaum’s Heymish Avant-Garde Kino der Mamen: Mysteries, Music, & Immigrant Life in “Brussels Transit”, was published and is available at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.