WALETZKY, JOSH

WALETZKY, JOSH , U.S. filmmaker and musician. Waletzky was born in New York City. Early on his father, Sholom Waletzky, introduced him to Yiddish melodies. Waletzky studied piano and composition at the Juilliard School from 1959 to 1965 and spent a semester studying under Peter Schickele. He graduated from Harvard College in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in linguistics and mathematics. Waletzky sang with the Yugntruf Ensemble, and in 1970 he wrote and directed the Yiddish operetta Chelm, Undzer Shtetl with Zalman Mlotek, which was staged at New York's 92^nd Street Y. He performed with the Yiddish Youth Ensemble on Yiddish Songs of Work and Struggle (1972), a recorded collection of hymns and ballads from the Jewish workers' movements. At nyu Film School, he composed the music for and directed the Yiddish-language film Dos Mazl (1974). Waletzky worked as a sound editor on the documentary Ibeorgun (1975), followed by work on the Oscar-winning Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976), directed by Barbara *Kopple. He composed music for the film Circle in the Square (1976), as well as for two shorts, Car Wash (1977) and Body Shop (1977), for the pbs children's show Sesame Street. He served as musical director for a production of The Jewish Woman (1977) at the American Jewish Theatre, and scored The Good Omen (1978). Waletzky returned to sound editing for two Oscar-nominated documentaries, With Babies and Banners: The Women's Emergency Brigade (1978), which recounted the 1937 sit-down strike against General Motors, and The War at Home (1979), which followed the antiwar movement in Madison, Wisconsin. After working on the album Past and Present (1980) with Kapelye, a klezmer band he helped found, Waletzky starred with the band in the film and on the soundtrack for The Chosen (1981). In 1981, he was producer-director of Image Before My Eyes, a documentary about Jewish life in prewar Poland, and he served as script and musical consultant for the Barbra *Streisand film Yentl (1983). In 1986, Waletzky directed, scored, and cowrote the Jewish resistance documentary Partisans of Vilna (1986) with Aviva Kempner. Later Waletzky focused his attention on directing musical documentaries, including Pavarotti and the Italian Tenor (1991), Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (1992), Music for the Movies: The Hollywood Sound (1995), and Sacred Stage: The Mariinsky Theater (2005). Other documentaries have included Dashiell Hammett: Detective, Writer (1999) and The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2000). In 2001, he released a cd of Yiddish songs, Crossing the Shadows.

[Adam Wills (2^nd ed.)]