A fascinating mosaic of music, theatre, and storytelling, Josh Dolgin’s “An Evening of Learning and Playing Jewish Music” on Thursday, March 12th offered a window into various layers of Jewish artistic expression. Moving fluidly between song, history, and commentary, Dolgin infused the evening with his signature theatrical electricity, filling the room with energy and a shared sense of rhythm.
Dolgin began the event with a nigun, a wordless melody rooted in the 18th-century Hasidic tradition, setting a reflective tone and prompting the audience to consider the role music plays in Jewish life. At this performance, Dolgin invited the audience to join him, and soon the room filled with yai-lai-lais. The absence of words in nigunim allows singers, as Dolgin explained, to become “spiritually amped up,” reaching towards a more direct, mystical connection with God. This belief is linked to the teaching of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder and first Rebbe of Chabad, who stated that “if words are the pen of the heart, then music is the pen of the soul,” expressing the Hasidic belief that music can transcend language. Dolgin noted that the melody may feel familiar to some because nigunim serve as the foundation of much contemporary Jewish music. They are almost “vast storehouses of melodies” that later genres and generations continue to draw from.
Dolgin then transitioned from the spiritual to the theatrical. He performed a piece called Klingen glockn (Bells are Ringing) by Noach Nachbush, a member of the Vilna Troupe, the influential Yiddish theatre company that staged the first production of The Dybbuk (Der dibek) by S. An-sky. As Dolgin introduced Nachbush’s song, he provided historical context that transported the audience to the early 20th century, when Jewish folklorist and playwright S. An-sky was writing The Dybbuk. In the play, a young bride is possessed by the disembodied soul of her deceased ex-lover — a dybbuk, as it is known in Jewish folklore. An-sky’s writing was shaped by the folk tales and artifacts he collected during his ethnographic expeditions between 1912 and 1914 from shtetls across the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). The goal of the expeditions was to preserve the vibrancy of Jewish tradition in a rapidly modernizing world. Since its debut in 1920, The Dybbuk has been adapted into ten languages and inspired several movies, an opera, and a ballet. It is nice to believe that both writer and performer would have been pleased by Dolgin’s lively performance of Nachbush’s song.
One of the evening’s most striking moments came with “Di Frosh,” a song by Yehoash (also known as Solomon Blumgarten), a Yiddish poet, scholar, and translator. With its cheerful melody and playful accompaniment, “Di Frosh” sounds like a typical nursery rhyme. Yet, as Dolgin pointed out, it takes a dark turn: a frog lives peacefully in its creek for the first few verses, until a stork suddenly devours it in the later verses. This elicited laughs among the event-goers, as many nodded, resonating with the common theme of tragedy in even the lightest-toned Jewish art.
Dolgin continued this exploration of tone and narrative with “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” originally by Jewish-American musician, mathematician, and satirist Tom Lehrer. Accompanied by pianist and McGill professor Sara Laimon, Dolgin delivered the song with a cheerful flair, juxtaposing its bright melody against its unsettling subject. The lyrics describe a pleasant spring outing alongside the casual poisoning of pigeons by the City of Boston —an absurd and darkly comic premise. Beneath the humour lies a sharper critique: a portrayal of indifference resulting in Jewish suffering. The song further calls on us, as Jews, to be vigilant of others’ agony, and to abandon our indifference to tragedy.
All the pieces performed had an unmistakable thread of tragedy and humor that bound them together. What is it that makes these themes of atrocity and comedy so Jewish? These are questions we may not be able to answer, but they encourage us to explore our Jewish values and artistic worlds. Dolgin did not try to resolve these varying aspects of Jewish expression, but he invited us to ponder Jewish narratives and art.
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