"Let My People Eat!" CBST's Annual Benefit Concert

“Let My People Eat!” celebrates the enduring relationship between food and the Jewish people. Featuring music in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, and Ladino, this rich and spicy program explores the centrality of music and food as markers of identity and culture.

Join us on Sunday, June 12, at 4 p.m. ET (in-person and streaming online) for CBST’s 27th Annual Benefit Concert, as we revel in this timeless music and celebrate the enduring relationship between food and the Jewish people—and, importantly, support Music at CBST. Get your in-person or online tickets »

CANTOR SAM ROSEN
I’m so excited for the Concert on Sunday. What we’re presenting is just so wildly diverse in content—the places where the music comes from, the different languages. It covers such a wide swath of the Jewish experience from around the world and through time.

MUSIC DIRECTOR JOYCE ROSENZWEIG
I love this topic we’re doing this year. It’s really fun. After the past two years we’ve had, we all need some levity and something beautiful in our lives, and something to smile at and be happy about. And this concert is just the right recipe for that.

CANTOR ROSEN
Yes! It’s joyful. It’s very celebratory. In Jewish life, there’s a whole category of what we call “table songs.” Other cultures, for example, have drinking songs. But we have these songs meant to be sung around a table, eating and drinking. Suddenly we’re back in time, in Eastern Europe, singing a song about potatoes. It’s a world we can’t go back to, except in song. Suddenly, you’re there.

JOYCE
Absolutely. And as a people, we’ve been forced to move from place to place. What we are able to bring with us are not the tangible objects of our lives, but rather often they are the recipes, and the music of our lives. Those things can travel with us, with no baggage, yet bring us the most continuity. We celebrate those things today—that music, culture, those foods, which have stayed with us for generations, and that no one can take away from us.

CANTOR ROSEN
It’s a very rare experience, getting a chance to hear these songs all in one place. You can’t find anything else like this. It will be a singular experience on Sunday.

Get your in-person or online tickets here.