About me
Henry Sapoznik (history) is an award winning record and radio producer, author, ethnomusicologist in the fields of Yiddish and American popular and traditional culture. Sapoznik, a native Yiddish speaker and child of Holocaust survivors, helped jump-start the klezmer “revival” founding “Kapelye” in 1979 and “The Youngers of Zion” with Cookie Segelstein and Mark Rubin. Sapoznik was the founding director of the YIVO Sound Archives 1982-1995 and through it founded and ran “KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program” in 1985 for its 30 year life. Sapoznik co-authored “The Compleat Klezmer” and “The Klezmer Plus Folio” with Pete Sokolow with whom he ran “Klezmer Plus” with Sid Beckerman and Howie Lees (1982-1993) Sapoznik, a five-time Grammy nominated producer won the 2002 Peabody award for his 13-part NPR series “The Yiddish Radio Project” the collection of which was acquired by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in 2011 and was also the final on-air host (1990-1995) of the long-running Yiddish radio show “The Forward Hour” on radio station WEVD. Sapoznik’s 2015 reissue of the earliest known Yiddish sound recordings, “Attractive Hebrews: The Lambert Yiddish Cylinders 1901-1905” won the coveted Certificate of Merit from The Association for Recorded Sound Collections with the original recordings named to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry of important sound recordings. Sapoznik’s recent box set “Protobilly: The Minstrel and Tin Pan Alley Roots of Country Music 1892-2017” is in 2020 Grammy consideration. Sapoznik is currently co-producing a new reissue box set for Smithsonian-Folkways (2021).