Jacob Schaefer (composer)

Jacob Schaefer (, 1888–1936) was a Russian-born Jewish American composer, political activist and choir director whose career ran from the 1910s to the 1930s. A committed Communist for the last two decades of his life, he founded and operated a number of workers’ orchestras and choirs in Chicago and New York, including most famously the Freiheit Gezang Farein. He composed a number of cantatas, oratorios and song arrangements which were performed by the ensembles he directed, as well as by their affiliated performing groups around the United States. Biography Early life Schaefer was born in Kremenets, Volhynian Governorate, Russian Empire (now located in Ternopil Oblast, Ukraine) on October 13, 1888. Jacob was born into a Jewish family of carpenters; his father, Moishe-Dovid, was a follower of Hasidic Judaism who knew many traditional songs and nigunim, and his mother was named Hania-Chava. (His father spelled the family name Soifer (), which Jacob occasionally did as well even after emigrating. It was through his new higher-paying music jobs that in 1911 he was able to purchase his own piano for the first time in his life. During the summer of 1914 there were extensive discussions a