Merryl Goldberg, Ed.D.

Merryl Goldberg, Ed.D. Profile Photo

Professor / Musician / Author

Dr. Merryl Goldberg is currently a professor at the School of Arts at California State University, San Marcos, and the executive director of Center Arte, a university center dedicated to restoring arts to education. She toured internationally for 13 years with the Klezmer Conservatory Band and has recorded over a dozen CDs with major labels. She received her undergraduate degree from New England Conservatory of Music and her doctorate in teaching curriculum and learning environments from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

She was the saxophonist and cipher creator for the KCB, that's the Klezmer Conservatory Band quartet that entered the Soviet Union in 1985. She's also an author, and she's gonna be speaking at the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival where she's gonna have a conversation with Josiah Schmidt, the literary arts director of the St. Louis J, Thursday, December 17th at 7:00 PM at the St. Louis County Library, Clark Family Branch.

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Nov. 10, 2026

Outwitting the KGB: A Klezmer Quartet's Cold War Odyssey

Dr. Merryl Goldberg tells the uncanny story of how a klezmer quartet used a musical cipher to smuggle information out of the Soviet Union and help refuseniks and dissidents — literally encoding names, addresses and escape directions into sheet music to outwit the KGB. We discuss her new book Notes of Deception: How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB and her upcoming St. Louis Jewish Book Festival appearance.