Joseph Roth's The Wandering Jews (a recent translation of the original Weimar-era German-language edition, by Granta Books) offers some edifying reflections on music in pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish life. Musicians, says Roth, "are very poor, because they live off the joys of strangers". Some things haven't changed.

Others have. Consider the new Klezmatics album, Rise Up!. Coming precisely a year after the New York and Washington attacks, its release is no ordinary event. In the album notes, Public Radio International host Ellen Kushner writes of a year of struggle and loss: "We lost 3,000 fellow-citizens, we lost hope and we lost heart, and for a while we even lost the music". But in these uneasy times, phoenix-like, Rise Up! offers spirited testimony to human resilience, against what is shaping up as an enduring humanitarian struggle with ignorance, fear and ethnocentric hatred.

I had the opportunity to see the Klezmatics perform most of the material on Rise Up! this past summer, at the Nürnberg Bardentreffen Fest, a multikulti (as Germans say) weekend of live outdoor music. Artists converge from all over the planet to perform at a half-dozen free street venues throughout the extensive pedestrian zone. In this medieval city (which has taken major measures to shake off its own sinister National Socialist history, without forgetting it), the band captivated listeners from a stage perhaps 100 meters from the memorial where the former Nürnberg synagogue stood, destroyed as a prelude to Kristallnacht in 1938. Sixty-odd years later, before a rapt crowd, in a country that cannot get enough of klezmer, the paradox and pathos of this historical juxtaposition was manifest.

It seems doubtful that a band of this spirit, complexity and integrity will perform next year in Jerusalem. But as debates over the past are always arguments about political struggle in the present, one can hope and beseech the divine -- as these artists do, with great passion -- for a world in which nation-state is not synonymous with cultural identity, in which the denial of political autonomy is not synonymous with cultural extinction.

The release of Rise Up! confirms the status of the Klezmatics, since their 1986 founding, as an innovative, challenging and eclectic voice in klezmer and avant-garde Jewish music. Four tracks on Rise Up! come from the score of the Pilobolus Dance Theatre's Davenen. "Klezmorimlekh Mayne Libinke" ("Beloved Klezmorim, My Dear Ones"), a traditional tune, opens the album in prayer-like fashion, borne aloft on singer Lorin Sklamberg's exquisite tenor. "Kats un Moyz" ("Cat and Mouse") has a distinctive Latin-jazz pulse, especially in David Licht's percussion, and the straight-ahead piano montuno of guest Steve Sandberg.

The "Davenen" ("Prayers") theme itself, an instrumental, blends violin and kaval in the upper register against a simple piano and tsimbl (a struck trapezoidal zither of Greek origin) underpinning, giving way to London's rueful, evocative trumpet.

Another piece from Davenen, "Hevl Iz Havolim" ("Vanity Is Vanities") achieves a tantalizing balance between Sklamberg's plaintive vocals, Lisa Gutkin's adroit violin, and Matt Darriau's wailing clarinet and airy kaval (Bulgarian-Macedonian end-blown flute), over an insistent piano and percussion foundation. The traditional Yiddish text can be read as a pointed commentary on the latest crisis of corporate criminality:

One's whole life is misery,
Another one lives large....
Oy, vanity is vanities
Oy, vanity is vanities
A dream is the world
And the world runs on money.

The instrumental "Di Gayster" ("The Ghosts"), composed by Darriau, sets up a gorgeous interplay between piano, Paul Morrissett's ringing tsimbl , and Darriau's ethereal kaval, invoking great lamentations, a haunted Kaddish for the hovering spirits of disappeared humanity.

"Bulgars #2", an essay in musical evolution, with its opening accordion-violin-tsimbl interplay, harkens back to nineteenth-century Eastern European dance, moving through Klezmer history from Joseph Moskowitz-Abe Schwartz territory to the more contemporary North American sound of the clarinet, trumpet and percussion.

"Loshn-koydesh" ("Holy Tongues", in reference to sacred Hebrew and Aramaic texts), is a prayerful invocation of the Song of Songs. It also is the anthem of a Hebrew teacher's adoration of his student favorite and beloved, a verse by the pseudonymous Yiddish poet A. Alm (1892-1963) set to a traditional tune. Its frank sexual theme will leave homophobes Lynne Cheney, John Ashcroft and the religious right spluttering and fulminating:

Moyshele and I begin
To chant The Song of Songs.
And our two hearts then start to
Thump rapidly along.
I interpret every word --
I don't get paid to skip;
When I get to "yishokeyni",
I kiss him on the lips...
And handsome, fair Moyshele
Now knows the Holy Tongue.

And if that is not enough to spark authoritarian ire, the album centerpiece should arouse the unreflective "patriotism" of all those who would shoot first and (maybe) ask questions later. Holly Near's eerily prophetic "I Ain't Afraid" (from her latest album, Edge, released a month before the US Supreme Court appointed the current Pennsylvania Avenue potentate) assumes form as a powerful gospel choir. Sung in Yiddish and English (and reprised to close the album), it stakes out an unequivocal spiritual and political position.

I ain't afraid of your Yahweh
I ain't afraid of your Allah
I ain't afraid of your Jesus...

Rise up to your higher power
Free up from fear, it will devour you
Watch out for the ego of the hour
The ones who say they know it
Are the ones who will impose it on you.

Rise up and find a higher story
Free up from the gods of war and glory...
I ain't afraid of your Bible
I ain't afraid of your Torah
I ain't afraid of your Koran
Don't let the letter of the law obscure
The spirit of your love, it's killing us.

I ain't afraid of your money
I ain't afraid of your culture
I ain't afraid of your choices
I'm afraid of what you do
In the name of your god.

Against extremist sentiment of every conviction, "Yo Riboyn Olam" ("Creator, Master of This World") is a song of fervent devotion, a pacifist vision of an enduring ecumenical peace in Jerusalem, as the international cultural capital it has been for most of its history. Lorin Sklamberg gives loving voice to divine yearning, coming as close as a secular artist can aspire to the cantorial sublime. An evocative Middle Eastern feel comes from a jagged blend of choral voices, plus guests Myra Melford (a sublimely evocative harmonium) and (on percussion) Aaron Alexander, Samard Walker-Butler and Jacob Heifetz-Licht.

Sklamberg opens up another sphere of devotional ecstasy on his own (ironically titled?) composition, "St. John's Nign" (a wordless song of ecstasy). Its accelerating chorus ("Dai, dai, dai", like "Daiyenu", the Passover song) and keening clarinet cry out, "Enough! It is enough!"

And so it is, in this treacherous era, that the music of Rise Up! renounces all manner of high unholy madness: messianic politics, the self-righteous fire-and-brimstone moralizing of fascist faith, a demagogic language of enemies and evildoers, covert secular crusades, clandestine detention and inquisition sans habeas corpus, deception and hypocrisy, the dismissive pre-meditated assurance of sanitized mass murder, all on a mission from god.

Two recent Rounder reissues of earlier Klezmatics titles also deserve mention. The wryly titled Jews with Horns (originally on the German label Piranha, 1994), presents an earlier Klezmatics incarnation, before David Krakauer (clarinet, bass clarinet, vocals) and Alicia Svigals (violin, vocals) took solo careers. Produced by Hijaz Mustapha, its guests include guitarist Mark Ribot, Moxy Früvous, BETTY, singer Adrienne Cooper and, a premonition of things to come, woodwind whiz Matt Darriau. More frank, unapologetic homosexual sentiment ("Man in a Hat", "Bulgars / The Kiss"), a host of kick-ass Eastern swing dance pieces, and "In Kamf" ("Struggle"), a militant Yiddish labor song from New York circa 1889, backed by an elderly community chorus of seven veteran organizers. The latter anticipates the theme of "Barikadn" ("Barricades"), heard on Rise Up!

When Possessed first appeared in 1997, Darriau had by then replaced David Krakauer; Adrienne Cooper, Moxy Früvous and John Medeski (piano, organ) turned in stylish guest turns. "An Undoing World", penned for an eponymous musical theatre piece by Tony Kushner, sets out a recurrent theme of exile and wandering, rejection and ideological deceit, laid at the feet of a sphinx-like yet familiar, ever-paradoxical cultural and political beacon:

Copper-plated, nailed together, buffeted by ocean weather
Stands the Queen of Exiles, and our mother she may be.
Hollow-breasted, broken-hearted, watching for her dear departed
For her children cast upon the sea.
At her back the great idyllic land of justice
For exilic peoples ponders making justice private property...
A refugee, who's running from the wars,
Hiding from the firebombs they've hurled;
Eternally a stranger out-of-doors,
Desperate in this undoing world.

Writing of the North American Diaspora, Joseph Roth records the experience of Jewish quarantine on Ellis Island: "Through the bars of his prison he sees the Statue of Liberty, and he doesn't know whether it's himself or Liberty that has been incarcerated".

Another number sure to enrage the cultural constabulary is "Mizmor Shir Lehanef (Reefer Song)", which hails clarinetist and saxophonist Mezz Mezzrow, known for his appetite for the spliff life (he was Louis Armstrong's main supplier). The lyrics attribute to Mezzrow the following spiritual reflection on his preferred controlled substance, "It's God's best medium of consolation". Listeners can judge for themselves. The album's second half presents an extended suite from the Klezmatics score for Kushner's play, A Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds, based on a classic Yiddish tale of love and possession, hence the album title. This album's frenetic turbulence, stunning vocals and terrifying instrumental precision comprise a compelling mixture of spiritual suffering and joy that is the very essence of Jewish song.

A devoted Klezmatics fan and collaborator, Kushner has this to say in his impressionistic, confessional album notes: "I want to be a God-believing Jew and a historical-materialist socialist humanist agnostic. I want the State of Israel to exist... and at the same time (and I'm afraid this won't help sales of your CD) I think the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity... I wish Jerusalem was an international city under a UN protectorate".

Lest anyone think that Kushner suffers from a merely modern cultural ambivalence (the unholy affliction of the "self-hating Jew"), consider the remarks of a dedicated chronicler of Jewish life, Joseph Roth. On the spirit of Jewish nationalism that animated debates in the East during the 1920s: "Some look to a future in Palestine, and some, rightly believing that the earth belongs to everyone who treats it with respect, have no national aspirations". Deeply suspicious of the heralded benefits of "the deadly, antiseptic boredom of [Western] civilization", and the errors of nationalism and individualism that for him marked Jewish cultural assimilation, Roth suggests that "Zionism and nationhood are by their nature Western European ideals", and thus contrary to the pacifist tenets and historical legacy of traditional Jewish faith.

Indeed, Roth's interests are spiritual, not political, and he writes prophetically: "If there can ever be such a thing as a just history, surely the Jews will be given great credit for holding on to their common sense in not having had a fatherland in a time when the whole world launched itself into patriotic madness".

Against all that, Roth reminds us of Jewish music's manifestly spiritual character, especially as expressed through the unadorned human voice, a medium of divine praise. Eastern European Jewish singers, Roth notes, enjoyed a more elevated status than their accompanists did:

"Artistic fame also attaches to the singers -- the precentors, or cantors as they are known in the West -- know professionally as hazanim These singers tend to fare better than musicians, because their appointed task is a religious one and their art is sacred and liturgical... the synagogues like to invite one of the celebrated singers and cantors from the East every year for the High Holy Days. Then the Jews attend prayers in the same spirit as one might attend a concert, and have their spiritual and artistic needs satisfied at once... I have never been able to verify whether those Jews were right who insisted to me that such and such a hazan was better than Caruso".

Comparisons with Caruso we can leave to students of the opera, but singer Lorin Sklamberg has the markings of a magnificent hazan. The songs of The Zmiros Project -- a Klezmatics spin-off collaboration between Sklamberg, London and Rob Schwimmer -- postulate no division between the spiritual and the aesthetic.

Zmiros (the singular is zemer) are Shabbat (Sabbath) songs of praise and celebration. A tradition traceable to the Ashkenazi communities of eleventh-century Germany and northern France, zmiros are sung around the table in connection with the three ritual Shabbat meals. The trio does not so much perform these songs as inhabit them, in the chanted, metrical, cyclical expression of spiritual longing, ecstasy and surrender to the mercy and wisdom of the divine.

The extensive liner notes, by ethnomusicologist and Jewish scholar Jim Loeffler, call zmiros "both loftily spiritual and concretely earthy... full of melodies and literary figures borrowed from medieval German taverns and Turkish coffee houses... found in virtually all Jewish communities... a baffling Jewish creation: religious drinking songs for the holy, communal postprandial sing-along". Drawing on diverse secular and sacred sources over the centuries, these songs express a mixture of piety and delight, projecting a passionate creative spirit dedicated not to Mammon, but to feeding, celebrating and sharing the sacred joys of strangers, lovers, family and friends.

The opening text, "Sholoym Aleykhem" ("Peace Be Upon You") is sung to two quite distinct melodies, the first a sedate Galician (western Ukraine) tune, the second a loping Hungarian setting with a distinctly Middle Eastern coloration. Recited before the Shabbat meal prior to the Kiddush (a ritual blessing chanted over wine), it welcomes the good and bad angels alike to come, be blessed, and go in peace, to which they must reply, "So be it". If only humans had such integrity of conduct.

From Exodus, "Veshomnu" is technically not a zemer but a component of the Shabbat liturgy, a call to the faithful to keep the Shabbat, sung at the Friday evening meal and again with the Saturday morning Kiddush. The trio does it in waltz tempo, a reflection of the tune's German Jewish roots.

"Azameyr Bishvokhin" ("The Bride's Song", the metaphor of the Shabbat as bride), sung before the Friday night meal, is here rendered in a theremin-trumpet duet whose quavering bowed-saw vibrations invoke the song's mystical Kabalistic origins, traced to sixteenth-century Venice, and thence east to Palestine.

Sung during the Saturday Shabbat meals, "Mizmoyr Ledovid" is set to a tune apparently originating in Galicia, with the sprightly, driving tempo of a folk dance. It may strike nominally Christian listeners as unusual that the text comes from Psalms 23, the Lord's Prayer.

"Omar Hashem Leyakoyv" dates at least to the sixteenth century, a mystical Yiddish-language post-Shabbat song of faith, built on the recurrent phrase, "Fear not, my servant Jacob". Against an endless loop of muted trumpet and dissonant keyboard arpeggios, Sklamberg sings with a sweetness and desire that lifts the simple, evocative melody into another dimension.

One of the most widespread zmiros in the Jewish world, "Tsur Misheloy", as arranged here assumes a distinctly Macedonian sound (Salonika was, after all, a center of Jewish mysticism). The melody, which listeners may recognize without knowing its name, comes from a sixteenth-century German annotation, a song of thanksgiving for material and spiritual nourishment extended by the divine.

Rob Schwimmer interprets "Eyliyohu Hanovi" ("Elijah the Prophet"), the beloved zemer sung at the Shabbat's close, as a brooding solo piano instrumental, a beautifully impressionistic largo improvisation upon a lingering Eastern European waltz.

True to the spirit of the continual renewal of zmiros by assimilating other cultural influences, "Az Nisht Keyn Emune" sets a late nineteenth-century Yiddish text from Latvia to a ska-like figure, a suggestively muted trumpet, and some pulsing R&B organ riffs. It poses an age-old question with especially contemporary resonance: "Without faith, understanding, loving deeds, patience, virtues, charity, mercy... what value is all your money and toil in the world?"

In the spirit of Tikkun (the process of refining, restituting and rehabilitating the materiality of this world), the closing zemer, "A Gute Volk", offers a simple blessing and egalitarian vision of universal peace and plenty, worthy counsel for discordant times:

Oy, God should give to everyone
What they need, what they wish for,
Oy, bread to eat, clothes to wear,
And wine for the Kiddush of havdole.

Joseph Roth could have been describing the Klezmatics and company when he wrote of the "Jewish melodies from the East... I can best describe [them] as a mixture of Russia and Jerusalem, of popular song and psalm. It is music that blends the pathos of the synagogue with the naïveté of folk song. The words, when you read them, would seem to demand a light and jaunty melody. But when you hear the song, it's a sad tune, 'smiling through tears'. Once having heard it, you remember it weeks later... [These poets have] the wrath of the old prophets and the sweetness of the crowing child". To the sacred joys of strangers may they ever sing.