If you want to listen to and learn klezmer, I think you are still better off getting early recordings- both from America and Europe. There aren't so many recordings available of European stuff, but it often has a quite different flavour from the (particularly later) US scene. This is presumably because of the different social surroundings- the Americans more centred on music hall and the ethnic recordings market, Europeans more on the traditional celebrations, with the recordings being often parlour style performances by scholarly collectors.

It's notable that Irish music developed in radically new directions under similar American influences- notably the pipes as we know them today are actually largely a transatlantic variant.

But klez has come a long way since the 70s, and is really exciting because it is still developing, and because there are so many unexplored ways of interpreting it.