Dust Bowl meets matzo ball

Culture shocks don’t come much more shocking than the Klezmatics’ juxtaposition of “Ilse Koch,” a searing dirge detailing concentration camp horrors, and a frisky holiday ditty called “Hanuka Tree” at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Monday.

It’s also jarring to realize that both songs’ lyrics were written by Woody Guthrie, a musician generally associated with “This Land Is Your Land” and Dust Bowl ballads. That segue was just one of the startling moments of poignant contrast in “Holy Ground: The Jewish and Spiritual Songs of Woody Guthrie,” a richly rewarding program that teamed the New York-based Klezmatics with Guthrie’s folksinger son Arlo.

The elder Guthrie wrote a wealth of Jewish material in the ‘40s and ‘50s, largely inspired by wife Marjorie Mazia Guthrie’s Jewish heritage. Arlo told the audience that some of the songs, which his sister Nora recently discovered in the vast Guthrie archive, stemmed from Woody’s playing with his and Marjorie’s first child, Kathy Ann, who died at age 4. Others were collaborations with Marjorie’s mother, Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt.

The Klezmatics, swinging from Odessa to Manhattan and all points in between, combined scholarly, European-based klezmer roots and freewheeling flair to bring color and depth to the music its members composed for the Guthrie lyrics.

Arlo, accompanied by his son Abe and pedal steel player Gordon Titcomb, with the Klezmatics joining in later, neatly balanced his and his father’s sensibilities. That balance was no better demonstrated than when he interrupted the climactic “This Land Is Your Land” to summarize the Old Testament story of Joseph in a hilarious, stream-of-consciousness manner familiar to anyone who knows “Alice’s Restaurant.”