Isabel Frey
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Isabel Frey | |
|---|---|
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| Background information | |
| Born | Isabel Frey |
| Origin | Vienna, Austria |
| Genres | Yiddish |
| Occupations | Singer, researcher, activist |
| Website | |
Isabel Frey is an Austrian singer, ethnomusicologist and peace activist. She sings in Yiddish. In 2023, she co-founded the Jewish-Arab peace initiative "Standing Together Vienna".[1] In 2020, she ran for district council in the historically Jewish Leopoldstadt district for the party LINKS Wien in Vienna municipal elections. Her first album, Millennial Bundist, was released in September, 2020,[2] and her second album "Di fliendike pave" in October 2024.[3] Her third album “Lider mit Palestine”, described as a “compilation of 17 new Yiddish songs responding to the ongoing genocide in Gaza” was released in July 2025.[4]
Born in Vienna to a "bourgeois" secular Ashkenazi Jewish family, Frey was active in the Socialist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair youth movement as a child. She is the daughter of liberal newspaper journalist Eric Frey and TV journalist Katinka Nowotny. Her paternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors.[5] Describing her family as a "bit assimilated, but not completely", she attended Sunday school and went to shul on holidays. She did not learn Yiddish as a child, due to her family's "Austro-Hungarian assimilated roots". Her grandparents spoke Hungarian and German, associating Yiddish with Hasidic culture only. As a young woman, after living on a kibbutz in southern Israel, Frey returned to Austria and developed a diasporic, Yiddishist, non-Zionist worldview.[6][7] Frey became a bat mitzvah at Or Chadasch, the Reform synagogue in Vienna that was founded by her grandparents and where her father serves as president.[8]
Frey studied social sciences at Amsterdam University College, as well as medical anthropology and sociology at the University of Amsterdam. In 2024, she completed her Phd in the "Music matters" structured doctoral program at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna with a dissertation on contemporary transmission and performance of Yiddish folksong and the politics of the Yiddish voice.[9] She works as a postdoctoral researcher in ethnomusicology and an artist at the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.[10]