Review: Earshot Jazz Magazine
By Devon Léger, July 2025
On the new album, Khaveyrim Zayt Greyt, from Seattle duo Brivele (Maia Brown and Stefanie Brendler), the breathy wheeze of the accordion marches alongside the rising and falling cadences of Yiddish song. Formed originally as a trio and now a duo, Brivele makes music for marching, for protest, for coming together in resistance. They make Jewish music, as well, mostly in or inspired by the Yiddish language, but really their music relates to a long streak of resistance in Yiddish and Jewish culture that stretches all the way back to the Spanish Civil War and World War II. While much of this music is specifically anti-fascist, written either to support the International Brigades fighting Franco, many of whom were Jewish, or the rising stide of Nazism in Europe, it’s also closely tied to the history of international labor movements. For Brivele, the ties between anti-fascist and labor histories are a long-held lineage.
Brown points out the popular Italian partisan song, “Bella Ciao,” now an anthem of climate change activists, started out as a labor anthem before it became anti-fascist. On the album, Brown and Brendler sing “Bella Ciao” in Yiddish.
For Maia Brown, this is all a personal history, as she grew up raised as she says, “by both the red diaper baby leftists Jewish spaces in town, but also the really serious queer Yiddishists of the old left." …One of Brown’s Yiddish mentors, Frank Krasnowski, moved to Seattle to be part of the labor movement here and brought Yiddish labor and anti-fascist songs with him.
For both Brown and Brendler, the histories that they research and present in their songs have a real echo in today’s politics. The duo played at the Northwest Folklife Festival just on day after protestors were attacked by police on Capital Hill for trying to block an anti-LGBTQ hate group gathering. Brendler pointed out the parallels to the British song “Cable Street” on their album, written about the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, in which a neighborhood fought the police to keep British fascists out. “It’s so important to tel these stories,” says Brendler, “because this is history that happened and this is history still happening.”