Rose Shoshana Kahan – A Yiddish Story of Shanghai

Musical theatre by Alan Bern (composer) and Diana Matut (libretto)

A zest for life, boundless energy, and a celebrated career on Yiddish stages around the world. A loving husband, three children, and a life lived to the fullest. All of this was shattered when war forced Rose Shoshana Kahan and her family to flee. In the end, only she and her husband reached the last refuge still open to Jewish refugees: Shanghai.

Inspired by these extraordinary writings, Alan Bern’s sensitive and evocative music leads us into Rose Shoshana’s inner world: her hopes, fears, memories, resilience, and humanity. 

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Yiddish Wo:men’s Song Cultures

Eight leading artists from the world of Yiddish music come together to give voice to the poetry of Yiddish-speaking women. Commissioned by Yiddish Summer Weimar, this ambitious project sets these remarkable texts to newly created, 21st century Yiddish music that embraces a rich spectrum of sounds, textures, and styles—from lyrical song to techno, from klezmer-inspired traditions to contemporary pop.

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Online Exhibition

From the medieval period through the 21st century, women have been a driving force of the Yiddish book market – as customers and readers whose taste shaped literary production, as patronesses who supported the printing of books, as women for whom manuscripts were copied, as printers with their own publishing houses, as typesetters, proofreaders, and typists, and finally, as writers.

This exhibition follows the traces left by  women with their names on title pages and in dedications, in their own words or those of others. Yiddish-reading women had access to the literature of the world in Yiddish translation and adaptation. The exhibition shows how women were, and remain,connected through the centuries as readers.

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