Carnegie Hall Celebrates YIVO's 100th Birthday

In May 2026, Carnegie Hall celebrated YIVO’s centennial with a special concert featuring clarinetist David Krakauer and Ensemble Connect. The program, curated by Krakauer, ranged from works by Alexander Krein and Osvaldo Golijov to Krakauer’s compositions and arrangements. A fitting tribute to the breadth of YIVO’s music collections, the concert explored Jewish and other folk traditions and crossed boundaries between folk music, liturgical music, and classical composition.

Spring 2026 also included YIVO’s participation in Carnegie Hall’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival, celebrating Jewish contributions to American music. This included four events: a concert performance of Joseph Rumshinsky’s Khantshe in Amerike by students of the Bard Graduate Vocal Arts Program and a webinar lecture series with Walter Zev Feldman (Klezmer and Other Displaced Musics in America), Jeremiah Lockwood (The Cantorial “Golden Age” in America), and Ronald Robboy (Yiddish Theater, George Gershwin, and the Birth of an American Sound).

This year’s collaborations with Carnegie Hall mark the latest iteration of an ongoing institutional partnership. Over the past decade, YIVO has regularly joined Carnegie Hall’s citywide festival programming—tracing the intertwined threads of Yiddish and Latin American music during the Nuestros Sonidos festival (2025) including a performance with Arturo O’Farrill and his Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble; spotlighting Yiddish writers, Little Magazines, and Yiddish and Hebrew songs of the Weimar Republic for the Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice festival (2024); offering scholarly context on Jewish women in opera, a discussion of Molly Picon’s work as a lyricist, and a musical celebration of the legacy of Chana Mlotek during Carnegie Hall’s season-long celebration of the many contributions that women have made to the world of music (2023); presenting Holocaust survivor testimony songs and Holocaust literature during their Voices of Hope: Artists in Times of Oppression festival (2021); exploring Yiddish’s place in the Beethoven Celebration festival (2020); and bringing historical perspective to the Migrations: The Making of America festival (2019).