Markets go up, markets go down.  But Madoff’s returns went up, more or less.  In a straight line.  For forty years.  Who wouldn’t want that kind of security – no downturns, just growth?  No failure, no loss, no death.  It’s beautiful.

But it’s impossible. 

Alicia Jo Rabins:
A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff

Written and performed by Alicia Jo Rabins 

Directed by Jessi D. Hill
Musical direction by Colette Alexander
Lighting design by Jon Harper
Co-produced with Mud/Bone Collective

A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff is a new one-woman show by Brooklyn-based poet, composer, performer, and Torah scholar Alicia Jo Rabins about the spiritual implications of the financial collapse.   Performed by Rabins on violin and voice through a range of looping pedals and processors -  along with a live band -  this musical essay traces a year of obsession with Bernie Madoff to investigate the intersection of mysticism and finance, the inevitability of cycles, and the true meaning of wealth.

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Alicia Jo Rabins is the creator, songwriter and bandleader of Girls in Trouble, an art-pop song cycle in the voices of obscure women from the Torah.  Rabins tours internationally with Girls in Trouble and has released two critically acclaimed albums on Jdub Records;  for eight years was the fiddler of pioneering klezmer-punk band Golem;  and has toured Central America and Kuwait as a cultural ambassador for the US State Department.  Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, 6×6, and anthologies from NYU Press and Knopf. aliciajo.com

A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff is supported by a grant from the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, a partnership of Avoda Arts, JDub Records, and the Foundation for Jewish Culture, and made possible with major funding from UJA-Federation of New York, as well as support from LABA: The National Laboratory for New Jewish Culture at the 14th Street Y, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council through a real estate donation from Savanna. Mud/Bone Collective and this co-production are made possible in part by public funds from New York State Council on the Arts and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

“Melodic, spare gorgeousness” -NBC

“Gorgeous vocals” -NY Times Magazine

“Hauntingly lovely” -LA Weekly 

“Her retelling of…often scandalous, murderous tales distills them to a universal essence, so that they work as reflections of contemporary life, not just as fables.” -Chicago Reader