“Wild Burning Rage & Song: Replies to Scottsboro” Concert/Lecture

Wednesday, November 6  |  6 – 8 PM, Doors at 5:30 PM | The Ark (316 S Main St, Ann Arbor, MI)

Admission: FREE

Performers: Amelia Glaser, Heather Klein, Anthony Russell, and Uri Schreter

This concert/lecture brings to life a twentieth-century world of Jewish responses to the pervasive climate of race prejudice that gave birth to the Scottsboro trials—and injustices to come—through a performance of Yiddish and English poems from the era newly set to music.

The Scottsboro Trials stand among the most renowned miscarriages of justice in the history of American jurisprudence. Beginning in 1931 with a false accusation of rape against nine Black teenagers, the case went on to invigorate a nascent Civil Rights movement, earn the international support of the Communist Party, and establish itself as a watchword among various strands of the American Left. It also inspired reaction from the contemporary world of arts and letters, most famously by poets Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and novelist Harper Lee, who adapted its events in To Kill a Mockingbird.

The international, politically oriented Yiddish intelligentsia of the 1930s was no less galvanized, producing a body of creative responses that passionately took up the themes of the trial, juxtaposing its American injustices with diverse images, tropes and language imbued with their own distinct histories of oppression. These writings are the basis of Wild Burning Rage and Song: Replies to Scottsboro.

This world premiere performance features Professor Amelia Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP), composer/vocalists Heather Klein and Anthony Russell, and composer/pianist Uri Schreter.