About: Jacob Schaefer (composer)

Jacob Schaefer (Yiddish: יעקב שײפער, 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.