Review: “The songs are the tools. Brivele shows us how to use them.”

By Daniel Kahn, Hamburg, April 2025

These fierce and loving gardeners of revolutionary yidishkayt have opened their shed of rusty tools, tilled the hard yard and harvested a bountiful crop of fully-organic radical songs. These are just the ingredients we need to weather the winter, feed one another, and pass on the seeds to be replanted. I don’t know how far I can take this gardening metaphor but I love these songs. I love these friends and comrades.

I love how their singing is an act of gathering in. I’ve felt that watching Brivele play and I hear it here. They gather songs from fields of labor and battle long ago, then re-purpose, re-compose, and re-translate them into our own time, our own stories and struggles. These tracks prove the durability and necessity of such work.

So many of these songs seem to have been just waiting for us to really need them. And gevald do we need them now. Maybe the songs aren’t fruits and vegetables after all.

Yeah. Scratch that.

The songs are the tools. Brivele shows us how to use them.

Be great, khaveyrim, get ready.