Who knew?

… Charles Krauthammer’s Gift to Jewish Music - Jewish Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

To my surprise, their inspiration derived from a chance encounter with the very same group of obscure early 20^th-century Jewish composers—Joseph Achron, Joel Engel, Alexander Krein, and others—that I was about to research in the archives. These musical men and women had labored alongside the likes of Marc Chagall, Sholem Aleichem, and Chaim Nachman Bialik to transform Yiddish folk traditions into modern art: the first Jewish operas, violin concertos, art songs, and the like. I was en route to the newly opened former Soviet archives to recover their forgotten musical legacies. Charles and Robyn had embarked on ambitious plans to launch a semiannual concert series at the Kennedy Center focused on unknown Jewish classical music.