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Rut RubinAmerican ethnomusicologist
Date of Birth: 01.09.1906
Country:  USA |
Content:
Biography of Ruth Rubin
Early Life and EducationRuth Rubin, an American ethnomusicologist, folklorist, poetess, and performer of Yiddish songs, was born on September 1, 1906, in the county town of Hotin in northern Bessarabia. Her birth name was Rivke Royzenblat. When she was about two years old, her family immigrated across the Atlantic Ocean and settled in Montreal. Sadly, her father passed away when she was five years old. In Montreal, Rivke Royzenblat attended the Protestant school, The Aberdeen School. In 1915, after seeing the writer Sholem Aleichem, she developed a serious interest in Jewish literature and began composing poems in Yiddish. Her collection of poems, titled "Lider" (Poems), was published under her maiden name Rivke Royzenblat in New York in 1929.
Career and Contributions
From 1924, Rivke Royzenblat lived in New York, where she got married in 1932 and changed her name to Ruth Rubin. Around the same time, she became involved in Jewish folklore studies and, influenced by one of the main theorists of Yiddishism, Chaim Zhitlovsky, and later by the linguist Max Weinreich, she started collecting Yiddish songs and the associated ethnographic material. As a result, she earned a Ph.D. in Female Song Folklore among Jews from the Union Graduate School in Cleveland and collected over 2,000 folk and working-class Yiddish songs, as well as urban romances. Rubin's ethnographic material became the basis for the largest collection of Jewish folk songs ever compiled.
Starting in 1945, Rubin released a series of 78 rpm records (under the Oriole label), and from 1954 onwards, she also released long-playing records, mainly under the Folkways Records label (founded in 1948 by the son of the Jewish writer Sholem Ash, Moses Asch, and now owned by the Smithsonian Institution), featuring her own renditions of the collected songs.
The outcome of her years of research were the widely reprinted monographs "A Treasury of Jewish Folksong" (1950) and "Voice of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong" (1963). Posthumously, an extensive monograph titled "Yiddish Folksongs From the Ruth Rubin Archive" was published. A documentary film, "A Life of a Song: A Portrait of Ruth Rubin," directed by Cindy Marshall, depicts the life and work of Ruth Rubin.
Awards and Honors
Ruth Rubin was awarded an honorary doctorate from The New England Conservatory of Music and received the YIVO Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to Jewish studies. Her dedication to preserving and promoting Yiddish songs and folklore has left an indelible mark on the field of ethnomusicology.
