Henry Sapoznik

Who is Henry Sapoznik?

Henry "Hank" Sapoznik העניק סאַפאַזשניק is an award winning author, record and radio producer and performer of traditional Yiddish and American music. With MacArthur Fellow David Isay, he produced the 10-week radio series the "Yiddish Radio Project" on the history of Jewish broadcasting for NPR’s All Things Considered in the spring of 2002. The series won the prestigious Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism for 2002.

A pioneering scholar and performer of klezmer music, Sapoznik founded the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and was its first director from 1982 to 1994. As an outgrowth of that work, in 1985 Sapoznik started "KlezKamp: The Yiddish Folk Arts Program", the world's most important training venue for practitioners of this nearly lost art and, in 1994, founded Living Traditions to administer it. His "Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World", the first book on the history of klezmer music, was the winner of the 2000 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Scholarship.