Chaia: Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move

Chaia’s Yiddishland on the Move is an immersive sound collage composed from newly digitized recordings from the 1950s–1980s in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s Jewish Labor and Political Archives. Drawn from the archives of the Jewish Labor Bund—a radical political party and social movement founded in Vilna, Russian Empire (now Lithuania) in 1897, and reaching the height of its influence between the World Wars—the recordings reflect a movement committed to solidarity between Jews and other marginalized groups, the vitality of Yiddish culture, and collective liberation in the diaspora. Premiering at the Tang Museum, Yiddishland on the Move foregrounds the sounds of everyday life within the Bund: the quiet textures of revolutionary practice, the intimacy of organizing, and the beauty of a revolution in which music and personal relationships are inseparable from collective action.

Chaia is a New York-based composer whose work fuses archival Yiddish audio recordings with contemporary techno and ambient sound. Raised in the klezmer tradition, Chaia creates hybrid folk-electronic compositions that situate ancestral sound within global and liberatory rave culture. Her debut album, “Yiddish Electronic,” was released in 2025, and her next EP, “Romanian Fantasies,” will be released this fall.

Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move is organized by Adam Tinkle, Associate Professor and Director of MDOCS, and Izzy DeSantis, former Kiki Pohlad ’13 Curatorial Assistant, and is supported by the Friends of the Tang.