Discussion: Song Searcher

Join us for a panel discussion on Song Searcher, a documentary about Moyshe Beregovsky, a musician and scholar, who traveled across Ukraine during the most dramatic years of Soviet history with a phonograph to record and study the traditional music of Ukrainian Jews. His work began in the 1920s and ended with his arrest and imprisonment in a Stalinist labor camp in 1950. Most of the songs he recorded on hundreds of fragile wax cylinders were deemed destroyed. But Beregovsky succeeded in saving the musical heritage of the centuries-old Yiddish civilization. He rescued the living voice of Ukrainian Jews from the flames of the Holocaust but paid for it with his life.

Panelists

• Anna Shternishis, University of Toronto
• Lyudmila Sholokhova, New York Public Library Dorot Jewish Division
• Mark Slobin, Wesleyan University
• Gennady Estraikh, New York University

A password-protected link to a virtual screening of the film and a Zoom link to the panel discussion will be provided upon registration.