On the night of May 31st, 300 New Yorkers—Jewish, gentile, religious, spiritual, and secular—gathered at Public Records for DJ Chaia’s Yiddish Electronic album release party. The long-awaited album is her first full-length work of kleztronica. “An emerging genre” spearheaded by Chaia, kleztronica “combines techno with Yiddish music to create a joyous rave-space infused with Yiddish culture.” The event featured Jewish anti-Zionist, anti-capitalist, queer organizations including Making Mensches, as well as the Workers Circle, a secular Yiddish diasporist organization advocating for economic and social justice. Elana, an organizer at Making Mensches described the event and its cosponsors as, “complementary pieces in the mosaic of Jewish diaspora.” As they passed out flyers for mutual aid to support Palestinians in Gaza, Elana invited the audience members to join their movement, not out of a shallow desire to help in that moment, but out of a deep-rooted understanding that collective liberation is wrought through sustained solidarity.
It was in this spirit of collective liberation that Chaia opened her set with the third track on Yiddish Electronic—A Naye Geshikhte (or in English, a new story)—because, in her words, “that is precisely what we are here to tell.” Through sampling archival Yiddish songs, Chaia restores to the present the Yiddish culture that has been suppressed by dominant Jewish Zionist institutions in the US which center modern Hebrew and Israeli culture at the expense of the diversity of diasporic Jewish cultures—Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, and more. Kleztronica is not only part of the New York City nightlife and underground, it is the soundtrack to the growing resistance against the Zionist cultural dominance in American Jewish life.
Between each song, Chaia told the story of each sample, highlighting the origins and context of the audio and honoring the historians of modern Yiddish language and culture who carefully archived them, making her work possible. During one especially poignant interlude, Chaia situated herself and the broader audience within the storied history of Jewish anti-Zionism. She told the story of the Bund, a Jewish socialist movement that emerged in Eastern Europe in the late 19th century aiming to cultivate secular Yiddish culture, a strong diasporic Jewish identity, and firm opposition to Zionism. The Bundist concept of doikayt, or hereness—the notion that rather than immigrate to the Land of Israel, diaspora Jewry ought to cultivate a future wherever they reside—echoes throughout Yiddish Electronic.
While the Bund held that all forms of religion, including spirituality, “had no space in the movement,” Chaia described how it is precisely her “belief in solidarity and opposition to hierarchy,” two core tenets of Bundism, that “stem from spirituality.” She went on, “there is no one more wonderful than the wonder of the universe, not a cop, not a state; it is precisely because of a higher power, that there can be no police, there can be no government, there can only be the collectivity of our embrace.” Enveloped in kleztronica that night, we were all one in awe of the Divine Presence. We danced the hora, we laughed, we cried, but most importantly, we partied at what can only be termed a mix between a hedonistic rave and every Ashkenazi wedding reception ever.
Chaia’s tour is still going! If you haven’t had a chance to see her live, catch her in Detroit, Chicago, or Toronto.
