“I think that there’s something really special about rave, and something that’s made it such a center for queer and black people throughout the last fifty years or so,” said Kaia Berman Peters ’23-24, who goes by Chaia.
“It’s the fact that it’s like a space of pure joy. …It’s only positive, only vibing with the music, only going into this kind of trans-otherworldly thing,” she explained. “I think that Jews, especially diaspora Jews, really need that right now—this kind of space to be purely joyous, away from all these pressures of Jewish identity and statehood and anti-Semitic attacks.”
In December of 2022, Berman Peters founded a new genre of music called “kleztronica,” combining the Jewish dance music known as klezmer with “electronica,” or electronic dance music. Kleztronica is the first form of collective Jewish electronic music.
“I thought it was going to be this kind of fringe thing—this weirdo Jewish techno, whatever. And then I threw the first rave in December, and like 300 people showed up. I was like, ‘holy shit, who are these people?’ I had never seen any of these people before, but they were all Jews who were interested in techno,” Berman Peters recalled.
She is a multi-dimensional Jewish techno artist: a producer, DJ, singer, and songwriter.
As an Ashkenazi Jew, Berman Peters grew up singing klezmer. She played the accordion and was involved with Jewish bands. Her father is a Jewish Studies professor, so Jewish musicians took classes at her house, and she learned songs from visiting rabbis and cantors.
Berman Peters is now a dual degree student at Harvard and the New England Conservatory, where she gravitated towards electronic music production. Like the klezmer she grew up with, she found that techno was designed for dancing. Techno was also created as a black resistance language, similar to how Jewish music often acted as a form of resistance or a secret cultural boundary that could keep Jews safe. She was inspired to create techno and house music “oriented towards the Jewish diaspora.”
“So towards solidifying Jewish homeland apart from any idea of a nation-state, or any colonial forces. For instance, the British Mandate shaped the Israeli state as we know it. But maybe these ideas of Jewish homeland … are more about culture, and they’re more about community,” Berman Peters said.
She explored anti-Zionist thought in Yiddish and klezmer music, but “thought that techno was a really good way to express that kind of resistance,” because its rhythmic nature was historically used to make sense of injustices like racism, acting as “this kind of support system” for oppressed groups.
Through kleztronica, she wants “to assuage this kind of fear… there’s a lot of fear in the Jewish community about persecution and genocide. People have often found shelter from that fear in ideas of a military-protected nation-state. That fear is valid. But I think spaces of culture and community are often more sustainable tools.”
“It’s very important to me in making the space that it’s an anti-colonial space. That it doesn’t align itself with colonial forces, and instead it serves as a space of solidarity,” Berman Peters explained. “There’s the rave so you don’t have to be afraid. So you can fight for other people’s rights. So you can stand in solidarity with these groups, and so you can find your power from solidarity instead of from assimilation.”
Before Berman Peters created kleztronica, a few artists had experimented with Jewish techno. “But no one’s thrown raves. No one’s developed this kind of infrastructure for this genre,” she emphasized, adding, “I’m the compiler and the publicizer of it.”
Using an SP-404 sampler, Berman Peters uploads sounds such as drum loops, cords, house and techno rhythms, and Jewish samples to each button. She plays the buttons and sings on top of them to produce her music.
Among her samples are recordings from the Ruth Rubin archive of old Yiddish songs and historical Jewish field recordings from the Belf Orkestra. She also includes interviews from anti-Zionist groups like IfNotNow and historical Jewish radicals like the anarchist activist Emma Goldman.
To complement her kleztronica tracks, Berman Peters said, “I’ve been doing video projects where I take a lot of archival footage of life in Eastern Europe, and I have visual designers make it into rave-type footage. Marleigh Belsley ’24, who goes to Harvard, made an amazing rave footage out of footage of an old Jewish town for me.”
Berman Peters had always used traditional klezmer for Jewish storytelling, but she became frustrated that the music was not popular among youth. “It’s because of internalized anti-Semitism. No one wants to play Jewish folk music, so there’s only a few people who do it,” she noted.
She then discovered a high-energy storytelling medium in techno tracks due to their “intentional richness,” and the rave environment attracted young people.
In December 2022, Berman Peters contacted Pete Rushefsky, the head of Yiddish New York, which is the largest Jewish music festival in the United States. She convinced him to sponsor a kleztronica afterparty. Berman Peters is also in a traditional klezmer band signed with Jewish record label Borscht Beat, which is producing their album. Aaron Bendich, the head of Borscht Beat, agreed to promote her kleztronica afterparty.
The Yiddish New York afterparty rave that Berman Peters organized was wildly popular, so she threw another rave. As founder of the kleztronica movement, she will lead a Berlin rave in May, then a New York rave in July.
By founding this novel genre, Berman Peters has followed in the footsteps of Hankus Netsky, her mentor at the New England Conservatory, who initiated the international klezmer revival post-Holocaust. “He thinks it’s crazy. He thinks I’m out of my mind,” Berman Peters laughed, referring to kleztronica.
“It has taken off since December. I’m leaving school because of it. I’m taking indefinite leave to pursue this genre,” Berman Peters declared.
Her tracks often incorporate oral histories from her mother or the lectures her father gives on Jewish Studies, many of which involve questioning Zionism. “I really want to collaborate, where he’ll give a talk about all these ways in which Zionism leans on these colonial systems, and then I’ll do a track that will be about that, and it will be a combined rave/lecture. That’s my dream,” Berman Peters said.
Berman Peters’ father is also an expert on Jewish mysticism. He taught her about Jewish mythical imagery as a child, and her songwriting lyrics incorporate Jewish mythology. “That’s where the whole songwriting comes into everything. I sing a song that’s Jewish mythology, and then I have Jewish samples, and then it’s techno, and it’s all in one thing,” she noted.
For Berman Peters, Judaism is more about practice than faith. “It’s almost not relevant if I believe in God or if I don’t,” she said.
Berman Peters believes that universal Jewish homeland is realized through the continuance of Jewish culture and community worldwide, not through any Jewish nation-state. This is her motivation for both lighting the synagogue candles and founding kleztronica. “It’s beautiful. I’m tied to my ancestors. And it’s a community. I’m tied to my ancestors is the biggest thing, and tied to all Jews all around the world,” Berman Peters said.
Kya Brooks ’25 (kyabrooks@college.harvard.edu) is excited to attend a kleztronica rave in the near future.
Poster by Martha Schnee
Poster by NahirArts
Posters by Janet M. Fearth