Lecture Recital | Zisl Slepovitch (New York) | In Many Tongues: Jewish Macaronic Songs of Eastern Europe and Beyond

The ScienceCampus is delighted to invite you to a lecture recital, organized by Prof. Dr. Katelijne Schiltz (Chair of Musicology) and Prof. Dr. Sabine Koller (Professor of Slavic-Jewish Studies) in cooperation with the Center for Commemorative Culture and the Leibniz ScienceCampus. 

Zisl Slepovitch talks about and performs the multifaceted and truly fascinating phenomenon of the macaronic (multilingual) songs by Eastern European Jews and their Slavic and Baltic neighbors in Eastern Europe, as well as secondary diaspora (primarily North and South Americas).

Dr. D. Zisl Slepovitch is a native of Minsk, Belarus, who has resided in the United States (New York) since 2008. He has earned Ph.D. in musicology at the Belarusian State Academy of Music. His primary research focus is on the traditional Jewish music in Eastern Europe. Slepovitch is a multi-instrumentalist klezmer, classical, and improvisational musician (woodwinds, keyboards); a composer, arranger, conductor, a music and Yiddish educator.

Dr Slepovitch is a founding member of the critically acclaimed klezmer collective Litvakus and Zisl Slepovitch Ensemble. He has served in multiple performance and creative roles in numerous productions by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (New York), State Jewish Theatre (Bucharest). He serves as the Musician-in-Residence at Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and in that capacity produced three critically acclaimed records. Among Slepovitch’s numerous theatre, film, and TV credits are the Defiance movie, Eternal Echoes album (Sony Classical), Rejoice with Itzhak Perlman and Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot (PBS), and Fiddler on the Roof  in Yiddish (off-Broadway).

The lecture recital is part of a lecture series with Dr Slepovitch:

01.07.2025 | 16:15 | Workshop „Zingt oyf Yiddish“
03.07.2025 | 10:15 | Masterclass „Voices from the Ghetto“