For Hebrew/Yiddish/Ladino songs, virtually the entire catalogue of Tara Publications is relevant. Velvel Pasternak is the head of this company, and they publish dozens (well, a couple of dozen at least) of songbooks of Jewish music. Many of them have accompanying tapes.

Another worthwhile source to obtain is the Harvard Hillel Songbook, published by David Godine, with musical transcriptions by Jerry Epstein.

In dealing with all of this material, the question of transliteration rears its ugly head. I've got a copy of the Beregovski book mentioned above, for example, which transliterates Hebrew and Yiddish into Roman characters, sometimes through the intermediary of Cyrillic. (It also transliterates into Russian.) The transliteration isn't even consistent throughout the book. I'm quite happy reading untransliterated source material in Yiddish or Hebrew or Russian, but I hesitate to transliterate it to post here. Is the sound at the beginning of Channukah to be ch or kh or x? If I use one system, and you prefer another, will you complain vociferously?

Somewhere, I've got singable translation of zemirot that I'll have to post here eventually. (A project begun several years ago with some roommates after going to a folk festival and realizing that the Jewish stuff wasn't going to have the same widespread following as gospel music as long as most of it remained in a language that the folk festival crowd couldn't understand.) One of these days I try to post it, probably after the Jewish holidays. [Sorry for the teaser without actually posting the stuff, but I've been too busy singing the last few weekends to talk about singing in this discussion group; and Jewish Holidays are about to hit with a vengeance]

Tzion go bragh!

Charlie Baum