I am beyond grateful to announce that I was named the third place winner of the Best In-Depth Reporting on Religion award from the American Academy of Religion.

I love writing on religion, and going in depth on stories of relevance and import. To be recognized by the world’s largest association of academics who research or teach topics related to religion and to place behind wonderful religion writers like Peter Manseau and Dawn Araujo-Hawkins is an immense honor.

The judges had this to say about my work:

[Ken’s] reporting includes a delightful and eye-opening history of a Muslim acrobat in Liverpool, an insightful and timely article on how sports play a role in combatting ignorance and Islamophobia, and interesting reports on Jewish music and spiritual seeking in modern-day Germany.

Here below are the three stories I submitted, just in case you missed them last year.

Thanks in advance, for taking a (second) look.

The Liverpool Effect

A hidden grave, Moroccan acrobats, and combatting Islamophobia in Liverpool through sport.

Berlin: The not-so-secular city

Is Berlin the atheist capital of Europe? Maybe so…but maybe not.

Klezmer’s modern European revival

Yiddish Music Is Resurging In The Weimar Square Hitler Frequented

In a clear homage to the Beatles’ 1967 “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album cover and its wonderful whirl of colorful visuals, the poster for this year’s Yiddish Summer Weimar (YSW) festival features a menagerie of cut-out visages: from Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to wandering cattle and a bedecked bass drum reading, “Makonovetsky’s Wandering Stars Club Band.”

Together, the collage symbolizes the transcultural and time-spanning story of Yiddish culture and music — its progenitors and critics, its historical influences and contemporary performative interpreters.

At the center of it all stands Alan Bern.

Bern playing the accordion. PHOTO: Yulia Kabakova, courtesy of Alan Bern

The Bloomington, Indiana-born composer, musician, educator and cultural activist made his way to Berlin, Germany in 1987. There, he helped found Brave Old World, a band described by The Washington Post as the first “supergroup” of klezmer music’s contemporary revival movement.

Klezmer music is an instrumental tradition of Ashkenazi Jews of Europe. Simply meaning “musician,” the word “klezmer” reflects, and conveys, its broader Yiddish roots.

A spoken language of a considerable portion of Ashkenazi Jews for centuries, Yiddish emerged in 9th-century Europe as a mix of German vernacular, written Hebrew, and Aramaic, Slavic, and Romantic linguistic influences and vocabulary. Meaning “Jewish” in the language itself, Yiddish is also the vehicle for a rich culture heritage of everyday Jewish life and celebration: proverbs, humor, idioms and music.

Over the last 30-odd years, klezmer – and Yiddish language and culture in general – has been enjoying quite the comeback.

Knoblauch Klezmer Band · Moustache

In the midst of this rejuvenation, Bern and Brave Old World were invited to conduct a workshop on Yiddish music in the central German city of Weimar as part of the European Summer Academy in 1999. The workshop was a wild success and Bern became the founding artistic director of what is now known as YSW — a five-week summer institute and festival for the study, creation and performance of Yiddish culture and music in the heart of Germany.

Today, it is one of the most widely recognized programs for the renewal of Yiddish culture in the world, receiving awards from the European Union and the German Music Council, among others. In 2016 Bern was awarded the Weimar Prize in recognition of his significant cultural contributions to the city.

For Bern, YSW is about more than showcasing Yiddish music; it’s about exploring Yiddish culture as a complex, and continually evolving, convergence of European and non-European customs. It’s also about empowering people for creativity and connection on a continent evermore marked by diversity and difference.

Read the full story at religion unplugged