Scope and Content
The Michael Alpert collection includes field recordings of interviews, conversations, social events, rehearsals, and performances of klezmer music and Yiddish folk songs primarily in New York City, Los Angeles, and Eastern Europe. The collection focuses on the expressive culture of Eastern European Jews in the later nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries and documents immigrant generation and U.S. born practitioners from that period. With recordings in both English and Yiddish, the collection thoroughly documents aspects of vernacular culture and history, especially in light of the cataclysmic displacement and dispersion of Eastern European Jews in the twentieth century.
The analog materials that were digitized at CTMD are available as both WAV and MP3 files. Cassette liners were also digitized at CTMD and are available as PDF files.