Daniella Rabbani Brings Yiddish Music Into 2026 With Klezmerette, Out October 16

Music video for first single, “Ketzele Broygez (Lover’s Tiff),” out today HERE

Photo Credit: Ashley Romines

New York, NY - Singer, actress and filmmaker Daniella Rabbani will release Klezmerette, a vibrant new album that brings the humor, sensuality, sorrow and sonic bravado of Yiddish music into the present, on October 16.

Produced by GRAMMY winner Joanie Leeds and Klezmer virtuoso and clarinetist Michael Winograd, Klezmerette’s ten Yiddish standards travel through boisterous dance music, smoky cabaret, folk ballads and devastating tango, revealing the threads connecting Klezmer to Broadway, jazz and Roma traditions. Both a celebration of Jewish music in all its diversity and a deeply personal reckoning with heritage and grief, Klezmerette treats tradition not as something frozen in time, but as a living art form that continues to move, transform and make room for joy. After two decades immersed in Yiddish performance, Daniella began the project to challenge the idea that the language and its music belong to the past – and, amid rising antisemitism, to create something rooted not only in remembrance, but in Jewish pride and joy.

Klezmerette’s boisterous first single, “Ketzele Broygez (Lover’s Tiff),” is out today alongside a video celebrating “the music of New York.” The playful song centers on yikhes – where someone comes from and what makes them who they are – as a woman recounts her imperfect, colorful family history to a persistent suitor. Filmed on location, the video follows Daniella from a Bushwick bodega to dancing on the subway, playing with her band and staging a jubilant mini-concert in Washington Square Park. Like the woman in the original song, Daniella’s New York is fun, silly, raw and unmistakably itself.

Lyrically, Klezmerette moves between flirtation, family, longing, survival and celebration. “Der Nayer Sher (New Dance Tune)” calls listeners onto the dance floor, while “A Yiddishe Mama (A Jewish Mom)” pairs Yiddish and English with sensual horns that evoke a Vaudeville nightclub. Across all ten songs, Daniella invites listeners into a musical tradition that needs no translation to be felt: music made to help people remember, mourn, laugh, dance and keep moving.

At the album’s emotional center is “Friling (Springtime),” written by Shmerke Kaczerginski in 1943 in the Vilna ghetto following the death of his wife. It’s a tension – a world bursting back into life while grief stands still – that took on new meaning for Daniella when her older sister Ariana died suddenly during the making of Klezmerette. Of recording the album’s vocals, Daniella said: “I really felt her in the booth with me. I sang the way she heard me. Not the way I heard myself.”

That experience with loss deepened Daniella’s lifelong fascination with how songs and stories carry people forward. Born in NYC’s West side and raised Modern Orthodox between the City and Great Neck, Long Island, she grew up with a combination of her father’s Persian Jewish heritage and her mother’s Ashkenazi history. Both of her maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust, and her grandfather spoke primarily Yiddish. When Daniella later learned the language herself, it felt like learning “something my soul had remembered.”

After studying at NYU’s Stella Adler Studio of Acting, Daniella was encouraged by Adler’s grandson Tom Oppenheim to carry forward the legacy of Yiddish theater after he told her that she “reminded him of his family.” She has since performed in Yiddish for more than 20 years on stages including Jazz at Lincoln Center, Town Hall and the State Jewish Theaters in Warsaw, Łódź and Bucharest. Her screen work includes Ocean’s 8 – whose opening scene opposite Sandra Bullock she filmed while eight months pregnant – Scenes from a Marriage, and The Americans. A Brooklyn-based mom of two, she also hosts the podcast Mom Curious and directed the award-winning short film OMA, inspired by her maternal grandmother.

To debut her renditions of the songs on Klezmerette, Daniella will perform at New York Sings Yiddish at Central Park SummerStage on September 17, followed by an album-release concert at The Cutting Room on October 15.

Klezmerette tracklist:

1. Ketzele Broygez (Lover’s Tiff)
2. Nor a Stral Fun Glick (Just a Strand of Luck)
3. Dona Dona (The Calf)
4. Friling (Springtime)
5. Ot Azoy Neyt a Shnayder
6. Oyfn Pripitchek (At the Hearth)
7. Papir iz Dokh Vays (Paper is White)
8. Shpil Gitar (Play Guitar)
9. Der Nayer Sher (New Dance Tune)
10. A Yiddishe Mama (A Jewish Mom)

About Daniella Rabbani:

Daniella Rabbani is an actress, filmmaker, and Yiddish songstress hailed by The New York Times as “the sassy raspy voice Daniella (who) will leave you twirling in the streets”. You may twirl from such appearances on HBO’s Scenes from a Marriage, Amazon’s The Better Sister, WB’s Oceans 8, as Madame Nazar in Red Dead Redemption 2, in the Drama Desk Award-winning Off Broadway productions and/ or her worldwide Klezmer concerts. A graduate of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting at NYU, Daniella is the director of the award-winning film OMA (available on Prime Video), host of Mom Curious (produced by Hoff Studios), and the force behind Klezmerette, a film and album exploring lineage and legacy. More @daniellarabbani on Instagram and DaniellaRabbani.com