About me
Josh Waletzky**(vocals, film) is a leading contemporary Yiddish songwriter and an award-winning documentary filmmaker.He co-produced the Grammy-nominated album of Jewish songs of resistance, Partisans of Vilna (1989), and his groundbreaking CD of original Yiddish songs, Crossing the Shadows (2001), was greeted as “a classic of the American-Jewish folk revival;” his 2017 collection PASAZHIRN / Passengers and his 2019 song cycle PLEYTEM TSUZAMEN / Refugees Together—hailed at its theatrical world premiere earlier this year at the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene—have established him as “the poet-laureate of new Yiddish songwriting.” Waletzky has been involved as a director and editor of a number of acclaimed films, including Image Before My Eyes (1981), Partisans of Vilna (1986), and the Academy Award-nominated Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (1992). He recently completed a series of four films on Yiddish writers for the League for Yiddish. Waletzky’s editing credits include the Emmy Award-winning documentary Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler’s House (1995). He was additionally a consultant to Barbra Streisand on her production of Yentl. He has served as a master teacher to a number of Yiddish singers and songwriters through the Center for Traditional Music and Dance and New York State Council on the Arts’ Folk Arts Apprenticeship program. He now leads a weekly Yiddish Singing Society. Waletzky was for a number of years the music director at Camp Boiberik. His father, Sholom, was a noted Yiddish singer and his mother, Tsirl, was a master visual artist.
