In early November of 2016, The Forward posted a video of Berlin-based klezmer musician Daniel Kahn accompanying himself on acoustic guitar singing Leonard Cohen’s anthem “Hallelujah.” It’s a song that’s been covered to the point of banality, but Kahn’s rendition was strikingly different, rendering the familiar lines in Yiddish.
The video’s timing was sadly felicitous. What would have likely remained within a small coterie of devotees of the language of Eastern European Jewry became a viral sensation when Cohen’s death on 2026, Nov. 7 was announced. The stark, compelling rendition has received some 2.7 million views to date.
“People thought I’d released it as a tribute to him but it was recorded a few weeks before and when it posted I hadn’t heard that he died,” said Kahn, who plays a central role in the San Francisco Leonard Cohen Festival, which marks the 10th anniversary of the artist’s death Nov. 5-8 with programs at the JCCSF’s Kanbar Hall, the Swedish American Hall, and The Freight in Berkeley.
Produced by Conspiracy of Beards, the 30-member San Francisco choir founded in 2003 to perform Cohen’s songs, the festival explores his poetry, music, and spirituality. Last year the festival took place at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Scaling back to smaller venues is part of the event’s recalibration, said longtime Beard Clay Eugene Smith, the festival’s lead organizer.
“The real evolution is that last year I wrote the show,” he said. “Before that the choir would come out and blaze though songs and not say anything. We’re telling a story now of Leonard’s music, letting him tell some of the story too through audio clips. And Daniel is an amazing storyteller himself.”
Opening festival opens Thursday at Kanbar Hall with “Umru/Unrest” featuring Kahn, the Detroit-born vocalist and multi-instrumentalist now living in Hamburg, and New York fiddle expert Jake Shulman-Ment. Longtime musical collaborators in various bands and projects, they’ve honed a repertoire that weaves Kahn’s Yiddish translations of songs by Cohen, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Woody Guthrie with originals and English-language Cohen covers.
Kahn hasn’t performed in the region since 2018 and the Kanbar concert marks the Bay Area debut of the “Umru/Unrest” material, “including several very new Yiddish translations that have never been heard anywhere,” he said.
Cohen was born into a prominent Jewish family in Montreal—his maternal grandfather was an esteemed Talmudic scholar–and spent many of his later years as an ascetic disciple of Zen master Joshu Sasaki Roshi. Interpreting his songs in Yiddish, which largely disappeared as a primary language with the Holocaust’s destruction of centuries-old Ashkenazi communities across Central and Eastern Europe, might seem like a Quixotic campaign.
For Kahn, adapting Cohen’s songs (“I don’t like the term ‘translate,’” he said) brings out deep poetic resonances that lurk in his lyrics. “There’s the obvious baked-in Jewish sensibility in his work, including the liturgical imagistic landscape,” he said. “He’s a deeply Jewish artist, even as a Buddhist. It’s a way of reading the original in a certain light that brings out ghosts and sensibilities that would otherwise be more dormant.”
The seed was planted in 2016 when Klezmatics trumpeter Frank London asked Kahn translate “Hallalujah” into Yiddish for a choir. The assignment called for the first few verses, but he plunged in and adapted all seven, and started including it on his own sets. “People think it’s some kind of an ecumenical prayer, but it’s about doubt and sex,” Kahn said. “It shouldn’t work. Every verse has the word ‘but,’ which is key.”
Kahn and Shulman-Ment are also featured Friday when the festival moves to the Swedish American Hall for a night of Bay Area poets and singer/songwriters exploring Cohen’s words and music. Curated by Bobby Coleman, choir president of Conspiracy of Beards, the program includes poets Devorah Major, Alejandro Murguia, and Josiah Luis Alderete.
“We start out with introduction and kind of dance through words and story and music, giving the night some texture,” Smith said. “Last year when we did the poetry it was so emotionally potent. You invite these talented people and tell them to do whatever you want. They really put their heart into it.”
The festival continues at the Swedish American Hall Saturday with
Conspiracy of Beards premiering their new show “The Song & Spirit of Leonard Cohen” joined by Kahn and Shulman-Ment. Smith and Kahn have known each other for decades, a friendship that brought Conspiracy of Beards to Europe to collaborate with the Painted Bird, Kahn’s klezmer band.
The event closes Sunday afternoon at the Freight with a screening of Nick Broomfield’s 2019 documentary “Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love.” It’s a fascinating portrait of Cohen’s lifelong friendship with Marianne Ihlen, a lover and muse he met on Greek island of Hydra in 1960. Their relationship happened to be captured by legendary documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, and Broomfield makes brilliant use of the never-before-seen footage.
Years before he wrote his first song, Cohen is a quietly riveting presence, and there’s a satisfying narrative loop in ending the festival with an origin story. As the only ongoing tribute to Cohen, the festival itself has become a force that has rippled out from the Bay Area. Smith is in touch with several music producers in Europe who have put on their own tributes, and he’s consulted with artists Jessica DeStefano, who’s producing the first NYC Leonard Cohen Festival in April. Conspiracy of Beards is on the Big Apple bill.
“It’s an honor and responsibility to do this,” Smith said. “We talk about that in rehearsal when we sing these songs, the meaning of the words and the intention, how to sing certain phrases with the emotion he may have intended. Mostly we have to interpret. His music lends itself to interpretation and seems open for taking it to new places.”
With Conspiracy of Beards, Cohen’s music has found a voluminous home in San Francisco.