In November 2007, the Jewish Culture Festival Association in Cracow, the other music association from Weimar (organizer of the Yiddish Summer Weimar festival), and the   KlezMORE festival in Vienna inaugurated a joint program titled The Other Europeans. Towards an intercultural dialogue between Jews and Roma in a European context. Planned for two years, the program is partially funded by the European Union under its Culture 2007 - 2012 community program.

The goal of this program is to promote cooperation between Jewish and Roma musicians in order to enrich both cultures and to show where the common elements and the differences lie. At the same time, it is a contribution to the ongoing discussion on the identity of Europeans and European culture.

For many years, Jews and Roma played an important but insecure economic, political, and cultural role in European societies. In the face of domination by the surrounding cultures, both Jews and Roma evolved very complicated models of cultural identification. Some of them remained faithful to their own culture, cherishing their distinctness, while others, in the face of constant confrontations with other cultures, yielded to assimilation.

The contemporary reception of Jewish and Roma culture is burdened, on the one hand, with a large number of stereotypes and fallacious ideas, and, on the other, with overly sentimental images that do not necessarily have much in common with reality, and instead create a romanticized image of both the Jew and the Roma.

Although they are completely distinct and rooted in different historical, political, and religious contexts, the two cultures have a great deal in common.

In the communities where they lived, Roma and Jewish musicians had very similar roles, contributing to the development of multicultural dialogue transcending linguistic, social, and cultural boundaries.

In contemporary times, we can observe a renaissance of both traditional Jewish and traditional Roma music, which are frequently blended for commercial purposes into effective, best selling products created for merchandising to a mass audience. These products have little, in fact, to say about the real musical interaction between the two cultures.

We have invited Roma and Jewish musicians to join in this program, in which they will be able to trace the elements that connect, as well as the elements that divide these two worlds and musical traditions, and present them to audiences in Cracow, Weimar, and Vienna.

This project will also teach the community how to recognize an authentic dialogue of cultures, and to differentiate it from commercial substitutes created only for merchandising purposes.

Our partners:

• Other music e.V., Weimar - Yiddish Summer Weimar
• KlezMORE Festival, Vienna

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The Other Europeans
Seminar in Krakow

[2007-11-27] The Other Europeans - a common project of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, Klezmore Festival in Vienna and Yiddish Summer in Weimar, was launched on November 22nd and 23rd in Krakow. This project is to examine relations and mutual inspirations between Jewish and Roma cultures. More >>>