This week in class we we learned about two infamously musical peoples, the Roma and the Jews, so how can we not dance? In this video I do some informal Romani-style dancing — ’tis true, I do it terribly — and teach “the grapevine,” the most basic of basic steps one may use to dance to klezmer. Remember, our mission when we dance in class is not perfection! Technically we’re terrible; we traffic in joy.

We can surely all get along, at least if we’re making music. In this exuberant clip from “Zug des Lebens” (“Train of Life,”) Jewish and non-Jewish, presumably Roma, musicians find common ground in song. (The party really kicks in at about 1:30.) The 1998 film, a French-language collaboration between French, Belgian, Dutch, Israeli and Romanian filmmakers and musicians, tells the tale of Jewish village’s attempt to escape the Holocaust by masquerading as a Nazi transport train while really heading away from the concentration camps, toward Palestine.

This week in our online class we depart from our usual country-by-country routine to go off the beaten track with the Roma/Romani people and with Ashkenazic (Central and Eastern European-descended) Jews. Both groups have lived at one point or another in almost ever corner of Eastern Europe, and have been evicted from the same. Both groups have long histories full of unfathomable struggle, yet have somehow managed to survive. Both make music that bursts with joy and at the very same time can be so, so sad.