Past Event Highlights:

Degenerate Music featuring Panorama Jazz Band
May 16, 2017

Judah Cohen, PhD, along with Ben Schenck and the Panorama Jazz Band explored degenerate music in Germany during the Third Reich. Throughout his research, Dr. Cohen has focused on the idea of Jewish cultural expression as a dynamic and ever-changing process, created and re-created over time by artists, religious leaders, philosophers, and activists. He has aimed to understand this idea largely through the prism of sound, and its relationship to ideas of Jewish identity. The audience then heard a performance of “degenerate music” by Ben Schenck and the Panorama Jazz Band, made up of a clarinet, a saxophone, an accordion, a banjo, a tuba, and a drum set. The group’s repertoire draws on the most exciting music from around the world—funky New Orleans jazz, tropical rhythms of the Caribbean, and exotic melodies of Eastern Europe. 

Brundibár
May 14, 2016

During World War II, a children's opera, Brundibár, was performed 55 times at Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Brundibár, which premiered in 1942, was a story of hope used by the Nazis as a propaganda tool. Ela Weissberger, an original cast member and Holocaust survivor, was a guest of honor at the performances. The musical fable, performed by local children in partnership with the New Orleans Opera Association, put on three shows here in New Orleans.