When we sing, we are writing back to ancestors.

When we perform, we are forwarding their invitation into the archives of our wild lineages.

I founded Brivele, an anti-fascist Yiddish esemble, as an informal study group, wanting to dig into the archives of Yiddish anti-fascist politics found in the balladry and street tunes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Brivele means a little letter. We think of our songs that way: like receiving letters from ancestors, singing them into our present, and in that way writing back to them. The way we build a song together is the way we are restoring this correspondence; the way we are finding that the archive is alive.