Thirty Years of Klezmer Photos, Free in Greenwich Village

The show walks through thirty years of one music scene. Seven musicians from the Klez Dispensers jump with horns and fiddles raised in Princeton in 2002. Frank London of the Klezmer Brass Allstars leans into a trumpet in Washington in 2016. Michael Winograd plays clarinet on the Coney Island boardwalk in 2019, the Thunderbolt coaster behind him. A 2024 frame from KlezKanada, a fiddle by a lake, closes the arc.

Klezmer began as celebration music for Eastern European Jewish communities, played at weddings on fiddles, clarinets and hammered dulcimers, and it traveled to the United States with Jewish immigration. Wolf began photographing the revival in the early 1990s, when it was still young, and kept at it for thirty years. Old-school players like Sid Beckerman and Elaine Hoffman Watts hang beside the Klezmatics, Andy Statman and Itzhak Perlman. The Klezmer Institute collected the run as A Joyful Noise in 2025, and the show works from that archive. A second exhibition, Mothers, Prophets, Warriors: Women of the Bible, shares the museum with 24 artists from the 17th century to today.

The museum sits inside Hebrew Union College at One West Fourth Street, between Broadway and Mercer. Entry is free. The run opened August 17 and closes December 17, Monday to Thursday, 9:00 am to 6:30 pm. Docent-led tours are by appointment; ask the museum ahead of time. Security wants a government-issued photo ID, and screening rules can change; confirm with the museum before you travel. The R and W stop at 8th Street, the 6 at Astor Place, and the A C E B D F M at West 4th Street.