Petra Gelbart is a member of the Romani community in the United States. She has a PhD in ethnomusicology from Harvard and is a professor at NYU, or New York University. This is certainly very different from the standard image presented on TV shows like American Gypsies and My Great Fat Gypsy Wedding. Petra Gelbart thinks that these programmes present a false picture and that they encourage prejudice against her community:
Petra Gelbart (Standard American accent): I think any information that these programmes give about actual Romani history is just an alibi because they’re absolutely, shamelessly exploiting small numbers of Romani people, and also people that are not Romani at all, and that they are calling gypsies, which on the American Gypsy, Wedding shows, most of them are not actual Roma. I mean, these are Irish ‘Travellers’ which are called ‘gypsies’. I mean, anybody can call themselves a gypsy, they don’t have to have an Indian background, or a Romani background. So they’re conflating two completely different groups of people together, and when they are approached by actual Romani people who say, “OK, I’ll be on your show, I’m a Romani person,” but, if that Romani person doesn’t fit the stereotype that they are trying to promote, they will ignore that Romani person. And we have many stories of people contacting them and saying, “I’m a Romani person, I’m happy to be on your show.” They do not allow normal Romani people on their shows. They will not allow it! They only allow the kind of people that perpetuate the message they’re trying to send, which is that we are all very strange, very unusual, very exotic, very wild, very crazy and not able to adapt to the rest of society.
PROBLEM
And Petra Gelbart, who is the daughter of a Czech father and a Romani mother, constantly has to fight against such stereotypes:
Petra Gelbart: The idea that gypsies or Roma are nomadic is largely a myth because the vast majority of our people is (sic) no longer nomadic and has been settled for hundreds of years. So being nomadic really has nothing to do with being Romani, it’s something that some Roma do and it’s something that some Roma romanticise, but the rest of us have no interest in it whatsoever. In terms of traditions being lost or changed, you know, my husband is Jewish, and he does not live in a shtetl, he does not wear prayer shawls, he does not wear kippah, he doesn’t really do any of the things that people would say are quintessentially or traditionally Jewish, and yet he is still a Jewish person. So the idea that Roma have to stick to some kind of tradition that somebody has made up as what it means to be a gypsy is utterly ridiculous because we’re people who evolved just like everybody else!
PROBLEM
Petra Gelbart is herself a musician. She sings, plays the accordion, and dances with the band Via Romen.Yet she says that Romani work in a variety of professions:
Petra Gelbart: When people think about Roma or gypsies, the most important thing to keep in mind is that we are individuals, we have many different sub-groups, many different occupations, many different ambitions, and we are just as different from each other as any other large group of people and so it makes no sense to lump us together into one category, whatever that category may be.
Para saber más: American Gypsies: New York
