The Yellow Ticket with Alicia Svigals 

The Yellow Ticket with Alicia Svigals | Closing Night
Monday, May 21 | 7:30 pm
Washington DCJCC
Tickets: $15; $12 Discounted Member, Senior, Student
Black and White, Silent, 52 minutes

Alicia Svigals premieres an original score to the silent Pola Negri film The Yellow Ticket. Svigals is the world's leading klezmer fiddler and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics. She has played with and composed for violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, the late poet Allen Ginsburg, and many others. The score, commissioned by the Washington Jewish Music Festival, will feature piano by Marilyn Lerner, an exhilarating jazz pianist/improviser, whose work spans the worlds of jazz, creative improvisation, klezmer and 20th century classical music.

The Yellow Ticket (1918) is the first film to explore Jewish discrimination in Imperial Russia. Lea hides her Jewish heritage to study medicine in St. Petersburg. Coerced into prostitution to pay the rent, Lea is saved by a beloved professor with a secret of his own. Starring Pola Negri, Hollywood’s first European silent film star and originator of the cinematic femme fatale.

Followed by a closing night reception.

“[Alicia Svigals] is without question the greatest living exponent of the klezmer fiddle.”
-Seth Rogovoy, author of The Essential Klezmer

This performance is funded by the Arthur Tracy “The Street Singer” Endowment Fund. Honoring the memory and musical legacy of Arthur Tracy—the renowned radio, stage and screen singer and entertainer whose talents delighted millions around the world—the arts programs supported by this fund continue Tracy’s ability to entertain for years to come.

Partner: DCJCC’s WJFF Year-Round

Co-sponsors: Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, Goethe-Institut, The Program in Judaic Studies of the George Washington University, Women in Film & Video

See the entire Festival line-up at wjmf.org!