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John Tran

Josh Parshall, Columbia, Mo., junior, will intern for the National Yiddish Book Center this summer in Amhurst, Mass. Parshall was one of 12 selected out of 60 applications for the internship. To hear a sample of Parshall's music, click here.

A University of Kansas student has been selected for an internship in Amherst, Mass., to study Yiddish, the language of most Jews in Eastern and Central Europe before World War II.

Josh Parshall, Columbia, Mo., junior, said it was his passion for music that led him to his interest in Yiddish. Parshall has played concerts throughout Missouri and Kansas, including the Jazzhaus, 926 1/2 Massachusetts St., but he hasn’t played the types of music the majority of college students listen to on an everyday basis. He played his trumpet as part of a Klezmer band called The People’s Republic of Klezmerica.

Klezmer is Jewish folk music that originated in Eastern Europe as dance music for weddings. It is usually played at Jewish celebratory events, such as weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs.

Traditional Klezmer music is instrumental, but more recently it has gone through a revival and is melting with other types of music such as rock, punk, ska, R&B; and pop, Parshall said.

Other instruments in Klezmer music, specifically Parshall’s old band, are the accordion, flute, violin, clarinet, bass and percussion.

Parshall is integrating his life-long passion for music with a desire to bring more Yiddish culture to the University of Kansas as he prepares for an eight-week internship at the University of Massachusetts.

The program will give him an opportunity to study Yiddish language, literature and culture in the morning and work at the book center in the afternoon.

Parshall said that he might play Yiddish music but that he didn’t know how to speak Yiddish. He said he hoped to learn Yiddish through his internship this summer.

Parshall was recently chosen as one of 12 people out of 60 applicants for an internship at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. The book center is a library and distribution center for Yiddish books.

The American Studies major said he wasn’t skilled with foreign languages but hoped to learn enough to recognize Yiddish words on records.

“I’ll probably be a huge failure,” he said. “I never wanted to learn a language before, but I think I’ll be more motivated to learn Yiddish in this atmosphere.”

He said it was useful to have a command of the language surrounding Klezmer music.

He will receive six hours of credit and a $2,800 living stipend for his time spent in Massachusetts.

Parshall’s interest in music and Yiddish culture began when he was young, said his father, Tim Parshall.

He said Parshall had been fascinated with lyrics since he was four years old.

“I can remember him asking me about the lyrics of songs on the radio,” Tim said.

Parshall’s interest grew as he got older. In middle school, he became fascinated with music and culture partly because of an English teacher who would use music to inspire his students to write.

The same teacher gave Parshall his first taste of Klezmer music as a gift for his bar mitzvah. He has continued his study of music and culture through learning about and playing Klezmer music.

He said that he would like the internship to open doors for him to meet new people and make connections for the future and that he wanted to research Klezmer and its relationship to Jewish-American culture.

The development of Klezmer during the past 30 years says a lot about Jewish-American culture, he said.

“There is a segment of the Jewish-American population that isn’t satisfied with the current level of assimilation,” he said. “They don’t want to look at Israel as the primary source of Jewish culture.”

Bringing back what he learns could help the University include Yiddish studies in the Jewish Studies minor, he said.

“It has to do with saving some of Yiddish language and culture, which has been overlooked since the 1950s,” he said.

Parshall said he wanted to have some sort of academic career that included studies in music and culture.

“I’m not good enough to be a professional musician,” he said. “But I’ve hopefully found a way that I can keep studying music.”