Yiddishland on the Move

Join us Sunday, December 6, at 4 pm for Yiddishland on the Move. Electronic composer Chaia, whose work is in the exhibition Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move, will be in dialogue with Molly Crabapple, author of the bestselling history Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund, about the radical twentieth-century socialist group at the heart of each artist’s recent projects.

This event is co-sponsored by the Jacob Perlow Series and the Tang. It is free and open to the public.

About the Artists

Chaia is an electronic composer working at the intersection of Yiddish culture and electronic club music. She weaves archival Yiddish samples with techno and ambient frameworks, creating hybrid folkloric-electronic compositions that situate ancestral sound within global and liberatory rave ecologies. In live performance she weaves accordion, vocals, and samples, inviting audiences to engage with ritual, intergenerational trauma, and the echoes of ancestral memory.

Chaia works closely with Yiddish archives, including the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, The Yiddish Book Center, Yiddish Song of the Week, and the personal archives of Hankus Netsky and the Hoffman Family. She has performed internationally at The NAMM Show, Pop Montreal, KlezMore Vienna, Shtetl Berlin, and Sonic Territories. Her mixes have been featured on The Lot Radio, Refuge Worldwide, dublab, and Res Radio, and she has been profiled by Grammy.com, NPR’s Art of the Story, Annabel Ross, and others. Chaia has collaborated with Russell Elevado, Dan Tombs, Sidney Mills and the Klezmatics, and her work has been supported by New York State’s Council for the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Goethe Institute, and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. On June 1, 2025, Chaia released her debut album, Yiddish Electronic.

Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer whose inspirations include Toulouse Lautrec, Diego Rivera, and Goya’s The Disasters of War. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (One World/Random House, 2026).

Her two previous books are Brothers of the Gun, an illustrated collaboration with Syrian war journalist Marwan Hisham that was long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award, and her memoir Drawing Blood. Her animated films have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award.

Crabapple’s reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. She was artist-in-residence at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in 2019, a New America fellow in 2020, and the winner of the Bernhardt Labor Journalism Award in 2022. In 2023 she was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.