Josh Lambert is the Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide (2009) and Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (2014), which won a Canadian Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought and Culture. He serves as contributing editor to Tablet, and publishes reviews and essays in publications including Haaretz, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Globe & Mail, and the Forward.
Hankus Netsky is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and ethnomusicologist. He chairs the Contemporary Improvisation Departments at the New England Conservatory. Netsky is founder and director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, an internationally renowned Yiddish music ensemble, and serves as research director of the Klezmer Conservatory Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and perpetuation of traditional Eastern European Jewish music. He has taught Yiddish music at New England Conservatory, Hebrew College, McGill University, and Wesleyan University and has lectured extensively on the subject in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. He has also designed numerous Yiddish culture exhibits for the Yiddish Book Center, where he served as Vice President for Education.
Both Josh Lambert and Hankus Netsky join us to talk about Yiddish music and literature.
