Founded by musicians and scholars Jeremiah Lockwood and Judith Berkson, Khazones Underground is an initiative to celebrate and reanimate Yiddish spiritual heritage music through record releases, concerts, multimedia presentations, workshops and lectures that promote and amplify the work of cantorial revivalists--artists who draw on the heritage of khazones for new projects of aesthetic and social significance.
Khazones is the Yiddish term for the work of a special kind of artist that once played an integral role in the Jewish community—the spiritual music virtuoso who represented the community through a style of vocal music that was legible to listeners as a mirror to the soul of the collective
Driven by the pursuit of formal achievement, radical recontextualization that addresses the needs of the current moment, and spiritual commitment, cantorial revivalists are drawn from a variety of identities at the fringes of American Jewish life, including Hasidic intellectuals, avant garde composers, leftist political activists, and secular Yiddishists.