Sam Reider is a Latin GRAMMY-nominated pianist, accordionist, composer, and educator from San Francisco, California. His work brings together various streams of American music, from jazz and folk tunes to popular song and contemporary composition. He has appeared as a bandleader and soloist at major festivals and venues around the world and his performances and original compositions have been featured on NPR, PBS and the BBC. Reider has performed, recorded and collaborated with a range of artists including Jon Batiste, Jorge Glem, Sierra Hull, Laurie Lewis, and Paquito d’Rivera. From his genre-bending acoustic ensemble The Human Hands to his duo collaboration with Grammy-nominated Venezuelan artist Jorge Glem, Reider’s unique compositional voice and melodicism runs throughout his eclectic projects. His 2022 solo piano record of original music Petrichor received four stars and made the Best of 2022 in Downbeat Magazine. Reider and Glem’s album Brooklyn-Cumaná was featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk and was nominated for Best Instrumental Album in the 2023 Latin GRAMMY Awards. In addition to his work as a performer, Reider is a prolific composer and arranger and has written for a variety of ensembles and soloists including the San Francisco Girl’s Chorus, Time for Three, Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival, Del Sol Quartet, and Tessa Lark.

Jonah Platt, a true entertainment multi-hyphenate, is an actor, writer, producer, singer and host of the new hit podcast Being Jewish with Jonah. Join Platt for a wide-open conversation about growing up Jewish and the influence it has had on his career, including his upcoming project producing and co-staring alongside Ginnifer Goodwin in the feature film The Mensch and co-writing the musical adaptation of Lois Lowry’s best-selling novel, The Giver. In conversation with Joe Alterman, executive director of Neranenah,

This program is part of The Pulse: Moments That Matter, a series of frank conversations on culturally relevant topics with musicians, comedians and other entertainment industry professionals to illuminate how being Jewish has shaped their experiences, both personally and professionally.

Jews have been a major presence in America's jazz, as musicians and as jazz facilitators, and in Kosher Jammers, Gerber tells that story with a rigour worthy of academia but with a feature writer's creative flair. Besides drawing on a plethora of second-hand sources, Kosher Jammers is absolutely packed with first-hand material, from interviews, phone calls and emails with jazz figures, Jewish and otherwise -- including possibly the last ever interview with swing era icon Artie Shaw.

Among the many other interviewees are black jazz figures such as saxophonist Buddy Collette and the critic Stanley Crouch, as a key theme running through the book is the relationship between Jews and African Americans in jazz. The impact on jazz of tunes written by Jewish "Great American Songbook" composers such as George Gershwin, Harold Arlen and Johnny Green is also covered, And the book features an extensive study of the Jewish-jazz phenomenon, whereby musicians from Ziggy Ellman in the 1930s to contemporary artists, notably John Zorn, have sought to create jazz that draws on Jewish music influences and themes.

Gerber drives home the point that, even had there never been a single Jewish jazz musician, Jews will still have contributed massively to the development of jazz in the United States, as managers, impresarios, venue owners, label founders and writers.