Ruth Rubin (September 1, 1906 – June 11, 2000) was a Canadian-American folklorist, singer, poet, and scholar of Yiddish culture and music.
[3] In 1924, she moved to New York where she studied music and attended night school at Hunter College while working as a secretary and stenographer.
[1][4] From about 1947 on, Rubin began to conduct serious fieldwork within the Jewish community of immigrants in New York City, Montreal and Toronto, focusing on the displaced persons who had arrived from Europe following the Holocaust.
She gathered thousands of songs over the next twenty years from a generation of survivors who had nearly been annihilated by Nazism and later Stalinist repression.
[1] In addition to her work as a collector, Rubin also organized and performed in recitals of Yiddish folksongs and hosted salons in her Grammercy Park Avenue apartment.