Museum exhibition, conversation with bestselling author Molly Crabapple, and the Capital Region’s first-ever Kleztronica rave will connect Yiddish cultural history, radical politics, and contemporary electronic dance music.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SARATOGA SPRINGS / TROY, NY — Electronic music composer and performer Chaia brings her distinctive fusion of Yiddish musical traditions, archival recordings, and contemporary electronic club music to a series of engagements in New York’s Capital Region this December. The events culminate an ongoing sound installation at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, with a public conversation with acclaimed artist and bestselling author Molly Crabapple, and the debut of Kleztronica in the Capital Region with a headlining performance at Kleztronica Hannukah in Troy.

Chaia’s work connects the cultural memory of Eastern European Jewish life with contemporary electronic music and global dance-floor culture. Working with archival recordings of Yiddish speech, song, and political life, she transforms historical voices into the raw material of contemporary techno and ambient compositions. The project extends beyond the museum: Chaia has been incorporating these archival voices into recent concert tours, bringing them to audiences at leading electronic music venues, including Brooklyn’s Public Records.

The engagements offer audiences several ways to encounter Chaia’s evolving exploration of Yiddishland: as an immersive sound installation, as a conversation about historical memory and radical politics, and as a communal celebration on the dance floor.

Kleztronica Hannukah: Ritual + Rave feat. Chaia (NYC) and DJ Mercy!!!

Saturday, December 5, 2026 | 3–8 pm

Congregation Berith Sholom

Troy, NY

Kleztronica makes its first landfall in the Capital Region, with a dancefloor celebration of ancestral belonging and electronic beats, plus a dose of performance and ritual. Headlined by Chaia, who coined the term Kleztronica to describe her fusion of klezmer and electronic dance music, the inaugural Kleztronica Hannukah brings the sounds of Yiddishland to the beautiful historic sanctuary of Congregation Berith Sholom, the oldest continuously operating synagogue building in New York State.

The afternoon will feature an opening DJ set by Troy’s own DJ Mercy!!! (also the proprietor of Paper Moon bookstore), a participatory Hanukkah line dance with instruction by Lo Ryder, a dance performance by Liv McKee (local choreographer and member of the Ellen Sinopoli Company), and a communal candlelighting ritual.

By combining klezmer, Yiddish song, archival recordings, and electronic rhythms, Kleztronica creates space for cultural memory, aesthetic experimentation, and collective celebration. More than just highlighting a musical hybrid, Kleztronica Hannukah announces the Capital Region emergence of an evolving cultural movement to bring Jewish diasporic traditions into conversation with contemporary art, nightlife culture and a liberationist ethos.

Yiddishland on the Move: exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum

July 25, 2026 – January 3, 2027

Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College

Saratoga Springs, NY

Visitors in the Tang Teaching Museum elevator, home of the Elevator Music series. Tang Museum, 2026, photo by Mindy McDaniel.

Chaia’s Yiddishland on the Move is the 55th installment of the Tang Museum’s Elevator Music series, which transforms the museum’s elevator into a site for sonic art. The immersive audio collage, Yiddishland on the Move: In a Strange Town, Who Will Bless Us?, foregrounds the sounds of everyday life within the Jewish Labor Bund, drawing on newly digitized archival recordings from the Jewish Labor and Political Archives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project.

Founded in 1897, the Jewish Labor Bund was a major Jewish socialist movement that advocated for workers’ rights, secular Yiddish culture, and solidarity across national and ethnic boundaries. Its vision of doikayt—Yiddish for “hereness,” or the principle of building a meaningful Jewish life wherever one lives—offered an alternative to nationalism rooted in territorial belonging.

Bundist meeting in a Warsaw courtyard, c. 1920s. Image courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Through the juxtaposition of archival voices and contemporary electronic sound, Chaia brings these historical voices into a new sonic environment, exploring the intimate relationships between cultural memory, political organizing, and collective liberation.

Exhibition information: https://tang.skidmore.edu/exhibitions/798-elevator-music-55-chaia-yiddishland-on-the-move

Tour and discuss the exhibition with co-curator/professor Adam Tinkle on Dec 4, 12 noon.