Additional faculty & performers are being confirmed each week!
Aaron Alexander (percussion) is a drummer and fidl player, has been playing klezmer music for 34 years and has been fortunate to be associated with many of the finest musicians in the klezmer and Jewish music field. He has been on Faculty at Yiddish New York, Trip to Yiddishland, Klez Kamp, Klez Kanada, Yiddish Summer Weimar, and in 2010 founded the NY Klezmer Series – a weekly concert, workshop, dance party and jam session series that featured many wonderful klezmorim from around the world, until the pandemic forced a temporary shutdown. Look for upcoming events by the NY Klezmer Series soon. Alexander has performed with Strauss/Warschauer Duo, The Klezmatics, Michael Winograd, Pete Rushefsky, Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars, and lead bands for his own CDs – The Klez Messengers, Midrash Mish Mosh, and more.
Corbin Allardice (literature) is a Yiddish translator, poet, and performer, pursuing a PhD in Yiddish literature at John’s Hopkins. They are proud to be a founding member of GLYK: a queer Yiddish theater collective.
Michael Alpert (musicology, vocals, dance) is a National Heritage Fellow of the United States and a pioneering figure of the international renaissance of East European Jewish music and Yiddish culture since its beginnings in the 1970s. He is known worldwide for his solo and ensemble work with Brave Old World, Itzhak Perlman, Theodore Bikel, Daniel Kahn, Frank London and many others. A native Yiddish speaker, multi-instrumentalist, scholar and educator, Alpert is a foremost traditional Yiddish singer and composer of new Yiddish songs and a leading researcher and teacher of Yiddish dance. An important link to Old World Jewish musicians, he has played a key role in the transmission of Yiddish culture to new generations. His ethnomusicological fieldwork archive resides at the US Library of Congress, and he is translator and co-editor (with Mark Slobin) of Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, the pioneering 1948 work on klezmer music by Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski. Alpert is affiliated with NYC’s Center for Traditional Music and Dance and has taught at Oxford, Columbia, and Indiana Universities. Hailing from California and New England, he lives on the folksong-rich coast of Scotland with literary scholar Emily Finer and two mist-shrouded cats.
Zoë Aqua (violin) is an American violinist currently based in Romania. She was awarded a Fulbright research grant for the 2021-’22 and 2022-’23 academic years to study Transylvanian folk music pedagogy in Cluj, Romania. In September 2022, she released a full-length album of original compositions recorded with Eastern European musicians entitled “In Vald Arayn” (Into the Forest). “In Vald Arayn” mixes influences from klezmer, Transylvanian music, Hasidic music, lautarească and more to meditate on the ways that Jewish and non-Jewish music from Eastern Europe are in conversation with each other. Zoë is a co-founder of klezmer bands Tsibele and Farnakht and served as the full-time understudy for the Klezmatics’ Lisa Gutkin in the Broadway production of “Indecent”. She has presented concerts in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Romania, as well as the US and Canada. Long passionate about teaching, Zoë holds two degrees in music education.
Zackary Sholem Berger (poetry) is a poet and translator working in and among multiple languages including English, Yiddish, and Hebrew. He is a regular contributor to the Yiddish Forward and the author of multiple books including, most recently, the Yiddish-English book of poetry Covid (testimonials and witnessing, in press); a bilingual edition of Avrom Sutzkever’s Ode to the Dove with illustrations by Liora Ostroff and his translations; and a translation of Sutzkever’s prose poetry. By day he is a primary care doctor and ethicist. http://linktr.ee/zackarysholemberger
Recipient of the prestigious Bundesverdienstorden in 2022, the Thuringia Order of Merit in 2017 and the Weimar Prize in 2016, Dr. Alan Bern (accordion/piano) is the founding artistic director of Yiddish Summer Weimar, the OMA Improvisation Project, and the Other Music Academy (OMA) in Weimar, Germany. Bern is a composer/arranger, pianist, accordionist, educator, cultural activist and philosopher. He is co-founder and director of Brave Old World, The Semer Ensemble, The Other Europeans and Diaspora Redux, and he also performs with the Kadya Trio, Noah Balgley-Bendix, Bern, Brody & Rodach, Guy Klucevsek and many others. His education included classical piano with Paul Badura-Skoda and Leonard Shure, jazz with Karl Berger, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton and others, contemporary music with John Cage, Frederic Rzewski, Joel Hoffman and others, and philosophy and cognitive science with Daniel Dennett. He received his M.A. in Philosophy and his D.M.A. in Music Composition. He has composed and directed music for theater and dance in New York, Montreal, Berlin, Luzern, Essen and Bremen, among others. He is the creator of Present-Time Composition (PTC©), an original method for collective real-time composition informed by insights from cognitive science.
Eléonore Biezunski (violin, voice) is an award-winning Parisian singer/violinist now living in NYC. An avid collector of Yiddish music, she co-founded and is a member of the Klezmographers, Yerushe, Shtetl Stompers, Ephemeral Birds, Lyubtshe, and Shpilkes and has collaborated with a large number of well-known Jewish performers here and abroad. Her recordings include Yerushe (IEMJ, 2016) and Zol zayn (2014). She won a Bubbe Awards in 2021 for her song “Tshemodan” in the category Best New Yiddish Song. As YIVO’s Sound Archivist, Eléonore has coordinated the Ruth Rubin Legacy website (ruthrubin.yivo.org). She is also a member of the Klezmer Institute‘s KMDMP and Klezmer Archive Project. She has a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and has published several academic articles about Yiddish music and Yiddish, including “The YIVO Sound Archive as a Living Space: Archiving and Revitalizing Klezmer” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies. She is a recipient of a NYSCA Folk Arts Apprenticeship. She appears in several documentary films about Yiddish culture and music. www.eleonorebiezunski.com
Philadelphia native Dan Blacksberg (trombone) has created a singular musical voice as a trombonist, composer, and educator. One of the foremost practitioners of klezmer trombone and a respected voice in jazz and experimental music, Dan is known for a formidable virtuosity and versatility. This has led to performances with artists such klezmer masters as Frank London, Elaine Hoffman Watts and Adrienne Cooper, and experimentalists like Anthony Braxton and extreme doom metal band The Body. Dan composes music from danceable klezmer melodies on Radiant Others, to genre-busting projects like his Hasidic doom metal band Deveykus and Name Of the Sea, Dan forges music that “aims to infuse the fearless avant-garde with timeless sounds and techniques, and vice versa.” (WXPN’s The Key) Dan currently teaches jazz and klezmer at Temple University, and coordinates the Instrumental and Dance programs at Yiddish New York with Deb Strauss. He also makes the Radiant Others Klezmer Podcast.
Sonia Bloom (she/her) (kids) grew up attending KlezKamp in the winters, Camp Kinderland in the summers, and kindershule during the school year. Sonia was the 2021-2022 Yiddish Education and Translation Initiatives fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, and continues to work there as a Yiddish Education Specialist, assisting in teacher training, program planning, and activity design. She has taught short courses for beginner Yiddish students at Yale University, Amherst College, the Yiddish Book Center, and the New York Workers Circle and currently teaches Yiddish to children ages 5-12 at the Kinderland kindershule in Brooklyn.
Raffi Boden (cello) is a NY-based cellist, composer and educator known for his groovy bass lines, lush tone and versatility. Raffi’s a member of the klezmer band Mamaliga, with whom he’s performed internationally and been a guest artist at Yiddish New York, Yiddish Summer Weimar and KlezKanada. Their debut album of original klezmer compositions, Dos Gildn Bletl, was released in 2021 and hailed as “virtuosic and vibrant” (In Geveb). Raffi was recently in the Juilliard production of “Indecent”, for which he worked with composer and music director Lisa Gutkin to compose a cello part for the band. In classical contexts, he has performed internationally in Europe and South America, locally in Carnegie Hall, and with members of the NY Philharmonic. He is also a member of six-piece chamber-jazz ensemble Simone Baron & Arco Belo. Raffi holds degrees from Juilliard and Oberlin.
Nicole and Edy Borger** (vocals, coordinators) – A São Paulo-based chanteuse, Nicole Borger creates fresh interpretations of Yiddish song classics, setting them to a kaleidoscope of Brazilian musical styles. Her most recent album, “Raízes/Roots – A Recording of Jewish Songs Reinvented With a Brazilian Sound,” was produced by Frank London. Along with her husband Edy, Nicole founded and directs the Kleztival, an international klezmer festival in São Paolo, as well as the Instituto da Música Judaica Brasil. The Klezitval is South America’s largest annual Yiddish cultural festival. Nicole’s family background includes Russian, German, American, and Portuguese Jewish roots, and she studied composition at São Paulo´s Santa Marcelina University. When not performing, Nicole works as a practicing attorney in São Paulo, and visits the US frequently.
Joanne Borts (voice, social justice) is a New York based Actor, Singer, Yiddish Diva and Labor Activist whose Broadway credits include the 2012 Tony Award Winning Best Musical ONCE, ROGERS & HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA with Eartha Kitt, and FIDDLER ON THE ROOF with Topol. She’s appeared off Broadway in HELLO MUDDAH, HELLO FADDUH, FIDLER AFN DAKHand many others. Joanne has performed in numerous concerts and international festivals, including the Montréal Jazz festival and New York’s Carnegie Hall. She is the writer and director of KIDS & YIDDISH: THE MISHEGAS CONTINUES, currently performing at the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre in NYC! Bring the whole mishpokhe!!
Judy Bressler (voice) is a third generation Yiddish performer whose family includes Lucy Gehrman and Menashe Skulnick. Since 1980, Judy’s been a leading voice in the revival and continuation of Yiddish music worldwide. A founding member of Boston’s Klezmer Conservatory Band, she’s the featured vocalist on all 10 KCB recordings. Judy is part of Itzhak Perlman’s 20 years+, ongoing “In The Fiddler’s House” live concerts including his two albums dedicated to klezmer and Yiddish music and 2015’s memorable concert at Carnegie Hall celebrating the Folksbiene’s 100th anniversary. Judy is heard with Yale Strom and Hot P’stromi on “City Of The Future-Yiddish Songs From The Former Soviet Union”(2015). She has taught voice and Yiddish song and dance at Klezkamp, Klezkanada and Boston Workers Circle. Judy Bressler is the current recipient of a two-year Mass Cultural Council Traditional Arts Apprenticeship Grant to mentor Adah Hetko.
Lauren Brody (accordion) is an accordionist, singer, researcher, professional piano tuner/technician and Fulbright scholar from New York City. She is a pioneer of the klezmer music revival in the United States and a founding member of the groundbreaking band “Kapelye”, formed in 1979. She has toured, recorded and appeared on TV and film with Kapelye, and with the seminal all-female ensemble “Mikveh”. Lauren has played the with The Klezmatics, Andy Statman, Michael Winograd, David Krakauer, Alicia Svigals, Frank London, Merlin and Polina Shepherd and many other klezmer luminaries. She was a trailblazer in the domestic Balkan music scene and was the first female gadulka player in the United States. Lauren was an original member of the first Bulgarian traditional folk orchestra “Pitu Guli”, formed in Los Angeles, California in 1970 and has taught and performed at EEFC’s Balkan Camp, Klezkamp, KlezCalifornia, KlezKanada, Ashkenaz, Yidstock, Yiddish New York. Lauren was the recipient of a Bulgarian Government stipend to study Bulgarian folk music during the Communist period, from 1971-73, at the Bulgarian Conservatory of Music in Sofia. As a Fulbright scholar to Bulgaria in 1990 she conducted research on the commercial recording industry and folk music, and released two acclaimed reissues of 78 rpm recordings. Lauren continues to perform, with a particular accent on composing new music for her own Balkan/Klezmer-inspired solo project “Lauren Brody’s Accordion Bytes”, as “Tsoyber” with Yiddish singer Susan Leviton, and with the Bulgaria-based accordion duo Brody-Stoikov.
Clara Byom (coordinator) is a versatile multi-instrumentalist, electronic musician, musicologist, arts administrator, and tunesmith who has been described as having “radiant energy” and “immense talent.” Clara has premiered over 40 new classical works as soloist, collaborator, or with the New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble, which she co-founded in 2016 with Dalton Harris. In 2020, Clara produced three solo albums of electronic/electroacoustic music and a collaborative album with lo-fi hip hop/experimental artist Dan Dan. Clara frequently plays for contra, English Country, and International Folk Dance with The Parson Sisters and performs with the indie folk rock band Dust City Opera. Clara serves as Development Director for the Klezmer Institute. She holds a Master of Music degree from the University of New Mexico in Clarinet Performance and Musicology (2017) and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Luther College (2012). clarabyom.com
Celeste Cantor-Stephens (trumpet) is a UK-based musician-composer, and a writer and educator, working at an intersection of arts and social justice. She plays the trumpet and other sound-making objects, with a focus on the creative and exploratory, incorporating sounds from klezmer to jazz, dub to free improvisation. Her projects include klezmer-dub ensemble Shabbos Ranks, experimental klezmer-tinged duo Cirenne, and free improv trio TORU. Celeste’s work also focuses, in particular, on borders, forced displacement, and human experiences of these. She currently lectures at BIMM Bristol, leading modules on music psychology, and music and social justice.
Chaia (kleztronica, accordion, voice) is a New York-based electronic music artist, DJ, and curator. Using samples from archival Yiddish recordings, Chaia creates electronic dance grooves that inspire new visions of Jewish diasporic identity. Chaia’s music has been heard at major Jewish music festivals across the globe including Shtetl Berlin, KlezKanada, and Yiddish New York. She’s also headlined major electronic music festivals such as NICE, a Fest and Nowadays Nonstop. Her work has been supported by Boston’s Festival For New Jewish Music, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, KlezCummington, and the Jewish Museum of Maryland. In 2023, she was awarded the Studio 170 Award from the Goethe Institut for her work with visual artist Dan Tombs. Her debut album, Yibaneh, created in collaboration with mixing pioneer Russell Elevado (Jay Z, Al Green, D’Angelo), will be released in Spring of 2024.
Debra Caplan (theater) is Associate Professor of Theatre at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She specializes in modern Jewish theater and performance, with a particular interest in Yiddish theater. Her first book, Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy (University of Michigan Press, 2018), won the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association for best new book in theater and performance studies and the Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies from the Modern Language Association. The Dybbuk Century: The Jewish Play That Possessed the World, an edited collection co-edited with Rachel Merrill Moss, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2023. Debra’s writing has appeared in Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Performance Research, New England Theater Journal, Comparative Drama, In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, American Jewish History, Aschkenas, and Studies in American Jewish Literature, among others. She is co-founder of the Digital Yiddish Theater Project, an international Yiddish theater research collective that applies digital tools to the study of Yiddish theater. She is also a playwright, director, dramaturg, and theater translator.
Sandra Chiritescu (language, culture, history) is a PhD Candidate in Yiddish Studies at Columbia University. She is writing her dissertation on Yiddish and second-wave feminism. She has translated Yiddish children’s stories for the volume In the Land of Happy Tears (Penguin Random House, 2018). She has processed several Yiddish archival collections at Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Formerly, she was a research assistant for YIVO’s Bruce and Francesca Cernia Slovin Online Museum and a recipient of the Posen Foundation’s Digital Humanities and Indexing Fellowship. She is teaching Yiddish at the Worker’s Circle this fall.
Christina Crowder (musicology, accordion) has been performing and researching Jewish music for over twenty years, beginning in Budapest, Hungary in 1993, continuing with a Fulbright grant to Romania to document Jewish music in 1999, and since 2002 with an active research, teaching, and performing career in the US. She is Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute, which has been awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for 2021-2022. Current projects include compilation of a folio of Jewish-adjacent Moldavian music, and publication of selected field recordings from the Fulbright grant period. Christina lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and performs with her klezmer quartet Bivolița. She also performs regularly with Michael Winograd and the Honorable Mentschen, the Goldenshtayn Kompaniye, and the Dave Levitt Klezmer Trio. She has been a guest instructor in klezmer accordion and ensemble performance in the US, Canada, and Europe, and was both musical director and performer in the 2019 Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the 2020 ART Portland productions of the Broadway play “Indecent.”
Derek David (vocals) is a composer, conductor, and music educator based in Boston, Massachusetts. His dramatic and vibrant music has been performed in both Europe and the United States and has received great recognition from audiences and critics alike. Since his first String Quartet (2011) – described as “a true musical jewel of the 21st Century – Derek has been the recipient of the EAMA Nadia Boulanger Institute Prize (2011), the Morton Gould ASCAP Award (2011), first place in the 2015 American Prize in Composition–Chamber Music, and the 2018 SFCM Hoefer Prize. He has been commissioned by the Juventas Ensemble, SAKURA Cello Quintet, Del Sol Quartet the Verona Quartet, the Sonica Quartet, The Sounding Board, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music New Music Ensemble, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Derek is currently the musical director and conductor of ‘A Besere Velt’ – אַ בעסערע װעלט, one of three choirs in the world dedicated to the performance and preservation of Yiddish repertoire. Derek studied composition at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music and received Masters and Doctoral degrees from The New England Conservatory. Previously a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and five-time recipient of its Distinction in Teaching Award, he is now Lecturer in Music at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His areas of interest extend to Medieval theory and musicology, the Beatles, and music of the Yiddish world.
Sam Day Harmet (mandolin) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, and music educator based in Brooklyn, NY. A musician of diverse tastes, Sam’s projects range from deconstructive klezmer and jazz, to free improvisation, to left field electronic music, to Soundpainting and beyond. He has also written extensively in theater settings often composing material that blurs the lines between far flung styles and disciplines. Around NYC, he can regularly be found performing with La Banda Chuska, Shabbos Ranks, Astroturf Noise, and the Walter Thompson Orchestra. As a producer, he has shaped sounds for Frank London, Eleonore Weill, and Shabbos Ranks among others. His work has been called “wildly fresh” by Jazziz Magazine and “chic and eccentric” by The New York Times. More at http://samdayharmet.com
Walter Zev Feldman (musicology) is a leading researcher in both Ottoman Turkish and Jewish music.
During the mid-1970s he and clarinetist Andy Statman studied with the legendary Dave
Tarras and were two of the creators of the klezmer revitalization. Under an NEH grant
(1984-86) he translated the seminal Ottoman-language Book of the Science of Music
(ca. 1700) by the Moldavian Prince Demetrius Cantemir, and studied with the leading
masters of Ottoman music in Istanbul. His subsequent book Music of the Ottoman Court
(Berlin 1996) is taught worldwide, and will be released in a revised edition by Brill Press.
His book Klezmer: Music, History and Memory was published by Oxford University Press
in 2016. His new book, From Rumi to the Whirling Dervishes: Music, Poetry and
Mysticism in the Ottoman Empire was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022.
Feldman had been a Professor of Music and then a Senior Research Fellow at NYU in
Abu Dhabi (2010-2019). He is currently the Artistic Director of the Klezmer Institute.
Raya Ferholt-Wirz (teens) is a student at Beacon High School and a multi-instrumentalist who mainly plays violin and trombone. Her trombone focus recently has been on the afro-latin FATCAT program taught by Zack O’Farrill along with some Balkan brass and Klezmer tunes. On violin she’s explored a variety of genres including Irish, American fiddle, Klezmer, Balkan, jazz & classical and she plays in a park slope orchestra called BYMP. Raya has been attending YNY since she was 5 and has been to Klezkanada in past years. This will be her fourth year leading the teen theater production with Jenny Romaine & Ozzy Gold-Shapiro. She has spent time working in the Brooklyn New School band program and at the Brooklyn Shule. Raya is passionate about social justice and understanding the issues of our time through art and activism. She believes that young people’s voices have power and importance in today’s world like never before.
Translator and poet David Forman was first a calligrapher, then a psychology researcher and professor before finally returning to his early love of writing. He began studying Yiddish in his fifties, in order to fulfill a lifelong vow of reading his grandfather’s work. He lives in Ithaca, New York where he has taught Elementary Yiddish both in adult education and at Cornell University. He has also translated and cataloged Yiddish materials at Cornell’s library. In the fall of 2021, Kinder-Loshn Publications released The Clever Little Tailor by Solomon Simon, Forman’s first book-length, Yiddish-to-English translation. In the past year, he contributed translations to the Yosl and Chana Mlotek Yiddish Song Collection at the Arbeter Ring.
Benjy Fox-Rosen (voice, bass) is a singer, bassist and composer largely working in Jewish music. He is conductor of the Vienna Stadttempel Choir and researches Yiddish and Jewish liturgical music.
Yoshie Fruchter (guitar, bass) is a guitar, bass and oud player who has made his mark with a style of playing and composing all his own. His latest project, Sandcatchers (oud and lap steel), explores the sounds of the Middle East combined with the American South. He also released two albums on John Zorn’s Tzadik records with his band Pitom and played on three others. He is notable for his work in composing, performing and interpreting Jewish song and has constantly forged new directions with his music, regardless of genre. In addition to his own projects, Yoshie is a sought after sideman and has worked and played in projects with John Zorn, Frank London, Marilyn Lerner, Zeb Bangash, David Krakauer, Joey Weisenberg, Basya Shechter, Eitan Katz and many more. He is also currently a guitarist on the Tony award winning Broadway show Hadestown. Outside of his performing career, Yoshie is an experienced teacher and has taught music workshops at schools, festivals and synagogues throughout the US, Canada and Europe.
Carol Freeman (song, culture) first heard traditional Yiddish singing from her grandmother. She became actively involved in its research and presentation in 1977 as Yiddish vocalist for the American Jewish Congress’ CETA Artists Project. She continued her work with Yiddish singers both on her own and as a field researcher for the UJA Federation’s and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance’s Soviet Jewish Community Cultural Initiatives. In 1984 she received a New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Folk Arts Apprenticeship with legendary traditional Yiddish singer Bronya Sakina, and is now herself a NYSCA Master Folk Artist in Traditional Yiddish Ballad Singing. She has performed extensively throughout North America since 1970, and has also been teaching Yiddish and other traditional singing for many decades. Ms. Freeman also works with Greek, Bulgarian, Sephardic Jewish, and other vocal traditions.
Tamara Gleason Freidberg (history) is a historian (MPhil by UNAM, Mexico) and a gerontologist (MSc by King’s College London). She is the author of Di Shvue, los bundistas en México y su participación en la comunidad judía (Mexico City: Palabra de Clío, 2016). Her work includes publications on Mexican Yiddish literature and the Jewish Left in Mexico. Tamara facilitates Yiddish sessions at the Holocaust Survivor’s Centre, is an active organizer of the Yiddish House London. As a PhD candidate at UCL London, she currently studies the Yiddish press in Mexico, its sources and its unique role in the communication of news about the Holocaust as it developed.
Isabel Frey (voice) is a Yiddish singer and PhD candidate at the structured doctoral program “Music Matters” at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. Both her research and her artistic practice are concerned with the political dimensions of Yiddish singing for Jewish identity.
Ozzy Gold-Shapiro (teens) is a curious historian, Yiddishist, cultural worker, and raconteur living on Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, and Nonotuck land in so-called western Massachusetts. They have been involved as a researcher, translator, and performer in a number of archival Yiddish-based performance projects that seek to destabilize traditional historical narratives. Recent projects include Jenny Romaine’s “The Revival of the Gravediggers of Uzda,” A.C. Weaver’s “Plague Wedding,” and “Vu bistu geven?/Where Have You Been?,” a film about the history of the land where Klezkanada takes place. They also appeared as Bum in the Folksbiene’s staged reading of Kadya Molodowsky’s “Ale fentster tsu der zun” (dir. Jenny Romaine). They play ukulele and sing in the klezmer band Burikes, and orchestrate multigenerational, community-led spectacle theater parades based on the Jewish calendar
Sonia Gollance, Ph.D. (literature) –– Born on Second Avenue and based in London, Gollance is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Yiddish at University College London. A scholar, translator, and dance leader, her work is concerned with Yiddish literature, German-Jewish Studies, dance, and theatre. Her first book, It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford UP, 2021) was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. She has presented her research at Jewish cultural festivals in the United States and internationally, including KlezNorth, KlezKanada, Yiddish Summer Weimar, the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival, and the Montreal International Yiddish Theatre Festival. She is the Managing Editor of Plotting Yiddish Drama, an initiative of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project that offers an online database of English-language synopses of the Yiddish dramatic repertoire. Gollance is currently translating Tea Arciszewska’s play Miryeml and developing a new project on women who wrote plays in Yiddish.
Avery Gosfield (music, culture) was born in Philadelphia. In 2004, a chance discovery of some Jewish-Italian sung poetry allowed her to conjugate her roots with her interest in early music. Since then, Avery has pursued this link with passion, with her early music group Lucidarium; with “fusion” projects with top Yiddish and Klezmer artists, and with articles, lectures and master classes. She has won several grants, including the 2022 ShUM Cities Artist in Residence program for a music video, “Ritual Echoes,” filmed in the Speyer Mikve. From 2020 – 2022 she worked as director of the Jüdische Woche Dresden.
Esther Gottesman (she/her) (kids) is an elementary and middle school librarian and teacher at a public school in Brooklyn. She also teaches at the Worker’s Circle Manhattan Shule, where she has been for several years. Esther is a native Yiddish speaker and occasionally sings in Yiddish, too.
Itzik Gottesman, Ph.D.** (folklore, literature) – Internationally recognized as a leading scholar and activist for Yiddish language and culture, Gottesman currently teaches at University of Texas-Austin. He was previously managing editor of the Yiddish Forverts and authored the book Defining the Yiddish Nation: the Jewish Folklorists of Poland. Gottesman edits and writes the Yiddish Song of the Week blog for the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. He is the son of the renowned late poet/songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. For the YIVO Institute he created the current on-line accredited course “The Folklore of Ashkenaz”.
Adrianne Greenbaum (flute) is the foremost purveyor and revivalist of the klezmer flute tradition today, returning the instrument to its rightful historical position in the history of klezmer. Quoted as being a “A National Treasure”, she is a highly regarded and acclaimed flutist performing on modern and historical instruments of the 18th and 19th centuries. She is Professor of Flute at Mount Holyoke College where she also directs the 5-College klezmer band. She is in demand as a clinician at colleges and universities where studios are interested in branching out beyond their classical walls. Greenbaum has been on festival faculties of Klezkamp, Klezkanada, Boxwood, as well as New England Adult Music Camp’s
unique klezmer program. Adrianne’s current projects include a continued exploration of early Jewish instrumental music, performed on Renaissance and baroque flutes, teaching ongoing virtual klezmer and baroque flute classes, as well as preparing for a recording of historical flute and less known klezmer tunes, performed on her collection of historical flutes.
Mariya Gyendina, (history) a native of Crimea, is an academic librarian and writing instructor. Since 2022 she has been actively volunteering as a translator, tutor, and project manager.
Adah Hetko (vocals) started writing songs at the age of three and hasn’t been able to stop since. One fateful winter night, she fell in love with Yiddish folk song, and began to dream of someday writing new songs in Yiddish. Adah’s dream has come true: today she is a Yiddish singer/songwriter, dance-leader and educator based in Boston, MA. Several of her compositions are featured on the album Levyosn’s Lullaby, recorded with her ensemble Levyosn (Ashkenazi Hebrew for “Leviathan”), and released by Borscht Beat in June 2023. Levyosn’s Lullaby has been described as “one of those special recordings that brings joy and a smile each time it is heard” (Ari Davidow) and “a warm Yiddish blanket [to] calm your frayed nerves” (Rokhl Kafrissen). Adah has developed her knowledge and skills in many ways, including writing an ethnographic study of contemporary Yiddish women singers (while completing an MA in Jewish Studies at Indiana University), co-founding Western Massachusetts-based klezmer band Burikes, studying Yiddish song and dance-leading with veteran artist Judy Bressler, and teaching Yiddish songs to students of truly all ages.
Jordan Hirsch (trumpet) learned Klezmer music the old fashioned way- On the bandstand, playing with some of the greatest masters of American Klezmer, like Ray Musiker, Howie Leess, Danny Rubinstein, and Pete Sokolow. He has performed on the Khasidic wedding scene for five decades, which has given him a deep appreciation for the wide variety of Ashkenazic musical styles. He has been a regular member of the National Yiddish Theater orchestra since 2010, most notably in the critically acclaimed 2018-2020 production of Fidler Afn Dakh, and the most recent show, Amid Falling Walls. Jordan is a busy freelance musician in NYC, performing in numerous Jazz, Classical, and Klezmer ensembles, and has recorded with Klezmerfest, The Kleztraphobix, Neshoma Orchestea, Funk Shui, Shulem Lemmer, Michoel Schnitzler, and Dudu Fisher, among others. He performed in Catskills resorts for over 30 years, and was musical director of the Homowack Lodge, the last of the Borscht Belt hotels, for six years. He has appeared in concert with Avraham Fried, Joel Grey, David Hyde Pierce, Fyvush Finkel, Theo Bikel, Lipa Schmeltzer, and Shlomo Carlebach, just to name a few.
Joshua Horowitz (chromatic button accordion, cimbalom, piano, theory) is the director of the ensemble Budowitz and co-founder of the trio, Veretski Pass. He has taught, performed and recorded with The San Francisco Symphony, The Vienna Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque, Itzhak Perlman, Theodore Bikel, and the late Stan Getz, and is currently the curator and orchestrator for the San Francisco Symphony’s Jewish Music Currents Series and was moderator of the The Sonoma State University Jewish Music Concert Series from 2015-2020. In 2001, Joshua’s ensemble, Budowitz was chosen by the Austrian government to represent the country in the International Celebration of World Culture’s held at the “House of the Cultures of The World” in Berlin. Josh’s orchestration and re-composition of the only surviving pre-war Yiddish opera, Bas-Sheve of Henekh Kon, received its North American premiere in Toronto in September, 2022 at the Ashkenaz Festival through the Milken Foundation.
Yael Horowitz (theater) is a performer (also known as Brenda Roses), dancer, and PhD student studying Theatre and Performance at CUNY. She is a founder of the queer Yiddish burlesque troupe the Shmutzik Shmates. Her performance work and research are both rooted in Queer Yiddish Performance practices across time.
Born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, Miriam Isaacs (language) is a native Yiddish speaker. She taught Yiddish for many years at the University of Maryland. Most recently she has been translating and lecturing. She has held fellowships from the State Department’s Fulbright Scholars program in Sweden and the Yiddish Book Center to translate Rachel Korn’s poems and Simon Dzigan’s memoir. She has also translated her father’s memoir of WWII in the USSR. A fellowship from the United States Holocaust Museum which enabled her to work with the Center for Traditional Music and Dance to make accessible to the public an important archive of recordings of Holocaust survivors made by Ben Stonehill in New York in 1948.
Lysander Jaffe (violin, voice) is a violinist, violist, and vocalist based in Boston, equally at home in chamber music, traditional music, and cross-genre collaborations. He has performed at venues such as the Kennedy Center and National Sawdust and on national television in Kosovo, Georgia, and Greece. He holds a Masters in Contemporary Improvisation from New England Conservatory, where he studied styles ranging from free improvisation to klezmer to Hindustani classical music. Lysander is a violist and Co-Artistic Director of the chamber orchestra Palaver Strings and a founding member of Levyosn and the vocal quintet Culomba. In 2017, he appeared as a soloist with Revels’ Venetian Christmas Celebration at the Sanders Theatre. He has studied with masters of traditional music in Bulgaria, Kosovo, Greece, Corsica, and Georgia, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council has supported his work on the music of Epirus. As a teacher, Lysander is passionate about broadening sonic and cultural horizons, teaching not only repertoire but listening skills and expressive vocabulary. He has taught for SongRoots and Village Harmony and directs two Boston-area choirs, SingPositive and Boston Harmony. For more information, visit lysanderjaffe.com
Rokhl Kafrissen (culture) is a journalist, cultural critic, teacher, and playwright and the winner of the prestigious 2022 Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish prize. She’s been writing about life in the capital of Yiddishland since 2005, when her “Rootless Cosmopolitan” column began appearing in Jewish Currents. Since 2017, her “Rokhl’s Golden City” column has appeared in Tablet magazine twice a month, covering the length and breadth of Yiddish culture. In the summer of 2021, her song “Kum tsu mir” (a Yiddish translation-adaptation of Jimmy Buffett’s Why Don’t We Get Drunk …) was recorded by an all-star klezmer trio and has been viewed over 12,000 times on YouTube. In 2023, she created and taught a brand new four-week class for the Yiddish Book Center called “Between Heaven and Earth: Yiddish Women’s Folklore, Rituals, & Magic.” She is currently teaching a new, semester-long course of her design: an overview of Yiddish history and literature offered to students across the California State University system.
Daniel Kahn (vocals) is a Detroit-born troubadour, translator, multi-instrumentalist, and theater artist, now harboring in Hamburg. His work crosses many borders, linguistic and otherwise.
Mattias Kaufman (accordion) is and accordionist and co-founder of the ensemble Mamaliga. Mattias studies Contemporary Improvisation at New England Conservatory in Boston, MA. Mattias has worked with Guy Klucevsek, Carla Kihlstedt, Hankus Netsky and Ted Reichman. Mattias has spent several summers studying folk music in Hungary, Romania, and Serbia with musicians such as Serbian chromatic accordionist Nenad Ivanović, Hungarian accordionist Bobár Zoltán, and Transylvanian musicians Marcel Ramba and Istvanka Varga. Mattias is a founding member of the duo Farnakht, a collaboration with Brooklyn based violinist Zoë Aqua. He won first prize for new klezmer composition in the 2021 Bubbe Awards presented by the Jewish Music Institute (IMJ) in Sao Paulo.
Tine Kindermann** (visual arts, theater) is a German-Jewish visual artist and singer who lives and works in New York City. Her artistic work and recordings of old German folk songs draw inspiration from the darker side of folklore and deal with the timeless themes of love and loss, longing and loneliness. Kindermann’s dioramas and paintings have been shown at Stephen Romano Gallery, NY Studio Gallery, Metaphor Contemporary Art, NYU Galleries, the Toy Theatre Museum, the Manhattan Borough President’s Office and other places. She has been teaching in the visual arts program at KlezKanada for many years.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ph.D. (folklore) is Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, Core Exhibition, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. She is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt), and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (with Jeffrey Shandler). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she received an award for lifetime achievement from the Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Yosl Mlotek Prize for Yiddish and Yiddish Culture, honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the University of Haifa, and the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland from the President of Poland. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She currently serves on Advisory Boards for the Council of American Jewish Museums, Vienna Jewish Museum, Berlin Jewish Museum, and Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, and consults on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania and Israel.
Jake (Yankl) Krakovsky (culture) is an Atlanta-based theater-maker, educator, and Yiddishist. He has worked professionally for nearly a decade as an actor, puppeteer, writer, director, dramaturg, teaching artist, and clown. Yankl is the director of the 2021 film Labzik: Tales of a Clever Pup, and a Field Fellow with the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project
Zeke Levine (literature, musicology) is a PhD candidate in historical musicology at New York University, where his research focuses on Yiddish-American folk music. His collection of translated short stories by Sam Liptzin is available through Farlag Press.
Jeyn Levison** (social justice) is the Deputy Director of 22nd Century Initiative, a national pro-democracy organization that facilitates widespread opposition to authoritarian movements and ideas, and resources organizations and networks to build an enduring, reparative, people-powered democracy. Jeyn has also worked in racial justice, immigrant rights and low-wage worker labor, LGBTQIA+, and Jewish social justice organizing—and is the current Chair of the Board of Political Research Associates and a long-time member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. A life-long artist and musician, and a long-time Yiddish culture worker and creative organizer, Jeyn loves to spend time outside hiking, kayaking, foraging, and gardening under the hashtag antifa/rmer.
David Licht (percussion) is a founding member of the Grammy award-winning Klezmatics, and of the rock bands Shockabilly and Bongwater. He is currently recording and touring with Michael Winograd’s Honorable Mentshn. In the early ’80s, he also performed with Ned Rothenberg, John Zorn, and Tom Cora. Other collaborations include composing for choreographer Karen Heifetz, and performing with Kapelye, Giora Feidman, David Krakauer’s Klezmer Madness, Shekhina Big Band, The Chadbournes and When People Were Shorter And Lived Near The Water. Licht has been a painter/plasterer since the 1970s, which has allowed him to raise a family and while continuing to be a drummer! Licht’s drumming is singular and expressive.
Jeremiah Lockwood (music, history) is a scholar, singer, guitarist and composer. His work engages with issues arising from peering into the archive and imagining the power of “lost” forms of expression to articulate keenly felt needs in the present. Both his music performance and scholarship gravitate towards the Jewish liturgical music and Yiddish expressive culture of the early 20th century and the reverberations of this cultural moment in present day artistic and religious communities. He holds a PhD from Stanford University in Education and Jewish Studies, where his dissertation fieldwork focused on young Hasidic cantors in Brooklyn, and is currently a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic
Research at the University of Pennsylvania. His musical career began with years of playing guitar with blues musician Carolina Slim, and in synagogue singing with his grandfather Cantor Jacob Konigsberg. Lockwood is founder and frontman of The Sway Machinery, a group whose music the New Yorker has described as “unclassifiable and uplifting.” Lockwood has recorded 14 albums, toured internationally, and been the recipient of numerous academic honors including the Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies Award and the YIVO Kremen Memorial Fellowship in East European Arts, Music and Theater. His first book, Golden Ages: Hasidic singers and cantorial revival in the digital era, will be published by University of California Press in 2024.
Frank London** (trumpet) is a Grammy-award winning trumpeter-composer and co-founder of the Klezmatics. He has published two music books: Klezmer Trumpet Duets & Patterns for Klez. He composed and performed Freylekhs – Klezmer Fantasy for Trumpet & Orchestra at Central Park SummerStage. His Yiddish-Cuban opera Hatuey Memory of Fire (with Elise Thoron) premiered in Havana and at Montclair’s Peak Performances. His latest recordings include: Salomé: Woman of Valor (with poet Adeena Karasick); the song cycle Ghetto Songs – Venice and Beyond; the Klezmatics’ Letters to Afar; and e*f*g trio’s Transliminal Rites. He co-created and music directed Carnegie Hall’s From Shtetl to Stage; presented Weill in New York at Dessau’s Kurt Weill Festival; created the spectacle In Dreams Begin Responsibilities for the New York Public Library; and Ich Bin eine Hexe (I Am A Witch) for the Dresden Jewish Theater Week. He leads Glass House Orchestra, Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars, Shekhina Big Band, Sharabi, Ahava Raba with Yanky Lemmer & Michael Winograd, and Vilde mekhaye with Eleanor Reissa. He has worked with John Zorn, Karen O, Itzhak Perlman, Pink Floyd, LL Cool J, Mel Tormé, Lester Bowie, LaMonte Young, They Might Be Giants, David Byrne, Jane Siberry, Ben Folds 5, and is on over 600 CDs. Sir London was Artistic Director of KlezKanada; knighted by Hungary for his work advancing Jewish and multicultural Hungarian music and culture; and was featured on Sex And The City.
Sara Lukinson (film) is a three time Emmy award winning writer and film producer of documentaries and television specials, whose work focuses on biography, the arts and the groundbreakers of our times. She made 150 short biographical films for the Kennedy Center Honors, and 15 full-length documentaries seen on American Masters and HBO, including “Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler’s House,” and full length films about Irving Berlin, I.M. Pei, Jascha Heifetz, Herblock, Garrison Keillor and the artist exiles from Hitler who settled in Los Angeles. She wrote many national cultural events including the 9/11 Ceremonies for New York, the opening of the African-American museum, in Washington the Obama Inaugural concert “We Are One,” the Opening Ceremonies for the Atlanta Olympics, as well as programs for Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. She recently co-wrote a book with her former television producer called, “10 Seconds to Air:My Life in the Director’s Chair.” She currently teaches at NYU, the Smithsonian, and the 92nd Street Y.
Rebecca Mac (violin) is a founding member of Mamaliga, a contemporary Klezmer ensemble. Mamaliga enjoyed international acclaim for their debut album of original klezmer music “Dos Gildn Bletl”, winning first and third place in the 2021 Bubbe Awards category for “Best Original Klezmer Composition”. Mac has performed at KlezKanada, Yiddish Summer Weimar and Yiddish New York. Mac is a 2022-24 grant recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Traditional Arts Apprenticeship program, through which she is exploring the connections between Greek, Turkish and Jewish music with Beth Bahia Cohen. In addition to performing regularly in the Jewish music scene, Mac runs a regular, and inclusive Klezmer jam in downtown Boston. Mac has a degree in violin performance from Berklee College of Music.
Mamaliga (Rebecca Mac, Mattias Kaufmann, Rachel Leader, Raffi Boden) The Mamaliga duo, consisting of Rebecca Mac on violin and Mattias Kaufmann on accordion, started making music in 2018, drawing influences from Klezmer music and the folk masters they studied with in Eastern Europe, including Marcel Ramba, Adam Romer, and Istvanka Varga. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they were joined by Rachel Leader on violin and Raffi Boden on cello to create a four-piece ensemble. In November 2021 they released their debut album, Dos Gildn Bletl (The Golden Leaf), consisting of original compositions by all four band members. Mamaliga compositions won both 1st and 3rd place at the IMJ Brazil Kleztival Bubbe awards 2021 in the “Best New Klezmer Tune” category. Rebecca Mac has studied with Mimi Rabson and Beth Bahia Cohen. Mattias has studied with Guy Klucevsek, Carla Kihlstedt, Hankus Netsky, Ted Reichman, Serbian chromatic accordionist Nenad Ivanović, and Hungarian accordionist Bobár Zoltán. Rachel is the founding member of Northampton-based klezmer band Burikes and participated as a Klezmer New Leaders Fellow through the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and was mentored by violinist Zoë Aqua. Rachel is a co-founder of KlezCummington, a weekend-long klezmer music festival in Cummington, MA. Raffi is currently based in NY, where he performs with chamber-jazz ensemble Simone Baron and Arco Belo, teaches cello with the Harmony Program, and studies with Joel Krosnick as a graduate student at Juilliard.
M Miller (voice) is a native Yiddish speaker who was born into a family of a long line of Chasidic cantors, which fostered a great love for, and understanding of, liturgical, klezmer, and Yiddish music. M is part of a group of singers that is reviving a Yiddish song book from the early 1900’s, as part of Naomi Seidman’s Bais Yaakov Project. M teaches Yiddish at the Manhattan Workers Circle School. M is an interfaith-ordained wedding officiant who specializes in creating custom ceremonies for people of all faiths.
An internationally-acclaimed teacher of Yiddish dance, Avia Moore (dance) leads Yiddish dance workshops for festivals and events around the world, coaches emerging dance leaders, and works as a consultant for choreographers, directors, and teachers seeking to engage with Yiddish movement. In 2022, Avia led Yiddish circle dances at the Venice Biennale as part of the Yiddishland Pavilion. Avia Moore is the Artistic Director of KlezKanada and has worked extensively as a creative producer with festivals and cultural organizations across North America as well as on individual artistic projects in North America and Europe.
Cantor Sarah Myerson (voice, dance) proudly serves the community of Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn, New York. She was commissioned by the Cantors Assembly in 2018, and invested by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 2015, conferred with Diploma of Hazzan and Master of Sacred Music. Previously, she served Bay Ridge Jewish Center in Brooklyn, NY; Temple Sinai, Congregation Beth Ohr, and Beth Shalom Oceanside Jewish Center on Long Island, NY; Congregation Mishkan Tefila in Chestnut Hill, MA; and Kehillat Netzach Israel in Ashkelon, Israel. She received her Bachelor of Music (Composition) degree, honors first class, from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia. Cantor Sarah Myerson continues to write and perform new compositions, especially in Yiddish and Hebrew, and has developed a profile as a musician, speaker, educator and Yiddish dance teacher and leader.
Clair Padgett (language) is an MA student at Indiana University currently researching profanity and drug-related terminology in contemporary Hasidic Yiddish. My interests also include pre-war Jewish politics and language ideology, dialectology, Yiddish film, theater, and radical press as well as Yucatec Maya language and cosmology. I received my undergraduate degree in Linguistics and Latin American studies at UT Austin. Weirder flexes include various swine showmanship awards and a mastery of Texas two-step, country waltz, and western polka.
Alexander Parke (clarinet) is a clarinetist, ethnomusicologist, and composer working in NYC; being mainly known for Klezmer and Brazilian music. Having performed with big names such as Pete Rushefsky, Frank London, Michael Winograd, Jake Shulman-Ment, Ilya Shneyveys, Christina Crowder, and other great names of the klezmer world. He mainly works as a freelancer in NYC and has been part of various musical projects and has gained renown for his musicality and musical intention.
Eddy Portnoy (culture) is a specialist on Jewish popular culture. He currently serves as Academic Advisor for the Max Weinreich Center and Exhibition Curator at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The exhibitions he has created for YIVO have won plaudits from The New York Times, VICE, The Forward, and others. He is also the author of the acclaimed book Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Izzy Posen (film) grew up in the Chassidic community of London. He has since graduated with a masters degree in Physics and Philosophy and he teaches physics and educates about his native community.
Ethel Raim** (voice) – widely recognized for her expertise in both Yiddish and Balkan vocal traditions, is a master singer of unaccompanied Yiddish ballads and lyrical love songs. Raim first gained recognition with American audiences during the folk revival of the 1960s as the co-founder and director of the influential all-women’s a cappella group, The Pennywhistlers. She has had a distinguished career as a performer, workshop leader, master singing teacher, and recording artist for the Elektra and Nonesuch labels. Raim has taught unaccompanied Yiddish singing at Yiddish Summer Weimar, KlezKamp, KlezKanada, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and at Yiddish New York. She conducts singing workshops and master classes at universities and community centers here and abroad. A renowned folk arts specialist and cultural activist, Raim served as co-director of the Balkan Arts Center (subsequently the Ethnic Folk Arts Center and today the Center for Traditional Music and Dance) for over 25 years, and as artistic director until her retirement in 2018 . For her profound career impact on preserving immigrant performing arts traditions in the US, in 2018 Raim was named the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts (a lifetime honor), and was previously the 2013 recipient of the prestigious Benjamin Botkin Award from the American Folklore Society.
With over 15 years of experience playing klezmer music, Abigale Reisman (violin) has established herself as an expressive and thoughtful fidl player with a lot to say. She is particularly interested in mimicking the human voice through the violin and connecting her playing to the rhythms and accents of the Yiddish language. Abigale is a performer, composer, and arranger with the International Jewish Music Festival award winning band, Ezekiel’s Wheels Klezmer Band. She regularly performs in a duo with renowned klezmer scholar and performer Hankus Netsky. Abigale is also a co-founder of Thread Ensemble, an experimental trio that creates music out of interactions with their audiences. She recently received The Iguana Grant from Club Passim to create a series of videos showcasing the klezmer violin. Abigale earned her Bachelor’s degree at The Manhattan School of Music in Classical Violin Performance and went on to receive her Master’s degree at The New England Conservatory in Contemporary Improvisation. Abigale lives by the sea with her two Hemingway cats and her husband Charles.
Dobe (Dena) Ressler (clarinet) has taught at Yiddish New York, KlezKamp, the New England Conservatory of Music’s Summer Klezmer Institute and the Conference of Judaism in Rural New England. She produced and played on di bostoner klezmer’s CD, nakhes fun klezmer and has played with klezmer & Jewish music luminaries, including David and Psachya! She has reviewed Yiddish music in English and Yiddish.
Seth Rogovoy (history) is the author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet” (Scribner, 2009), “The Essential Klezmer” (Algonquin Books, 2000), and the forthcoming “Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison” (OUP, 2024). Seth is the artistic director of Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., and a contributing editor at The Forward. Seth also writes the Substack column “Everything Is Broken.” Seth lives in Hudson, N.Y.
Jenny Romaine (teens) is a director, designer, puppeteer and co-artistic director of Great Small Works visual theater collective. She is music director of Jennifer Miller’s CIRCUS AMOK. Romaine/ Great Small Works performs, teaches, and directs in theaters, schools, parks, libraries, museums, prisons, street corners, and other public spaces, producing work on many scales, from gigantic outdoor spectacles with scores of participants, to miniature shows in living rooms. Jenny was a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 13 years and for several decades has drawn on Yiddish/Pan Jewish primary source materials to create art that has contemporary meaning. Her /Great Small Works projects include Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls about Yiddish puppeteers Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler, The Sukkos Mob (featured in the film Punk Jews), community Purim Shpiln with the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee in cahoots with JFREJ, a maximalist staged reading in the NYT’s Yiddish Women Playwrights Series of Ale Fenster Tsu Der Zun, by Kadya Molodowsky, and Vu bistu geven? / Where Have You Been? a Quebec-based adventure parable that asks questions about diasporic Jewish relationships to land.
Dvoyre Rosenstein (social justice) is an activist and artist (photography, dance, writing) who’s been a popular educator in labor and climate spaces for decades. The disability justice and Palestinian solidarity movements ground her work and understandings of collective liberation. She’s learning to speak yiddish and play fidl, and loves intergenerational community and hanging out with goats and fireflies.
David G. Roskies (film) is Emeritus Professor of Yiddish Literature and Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 1981 (with the late Alan Mintz), he cofounded Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, and served for eighteen years as editor-in-chief of the New Yiddish Library. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. This past year he launched the online open-access archive “All Things Yiddish” https://archive.yiddish.nu/ and an expanded edition of Yiddishlands: A Memoir was published by Wayne State University Press.
Max Rothman (cultural preservation, technology) is a Boston-based fiddler and software engineer. He started out gigging klezmer around Cleveland as a teenager, and after years of building software professionally, he’s now working with the rest of the Klezmer Archive Project team to make their dreams a reality by creating a comprehensive resource for all things klezmer.
Anna Rozenfeld (history) is a Yiddish speaker, a scholar of Jewish history and Yiddish culture, and an interdisciplinary artist. A professional Yiddish performer on Polish Radio and at the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw. She has studied the history of art, graphic arts and painting, philosophy, literature and Jewish studies at universities in Marburg, Salzburg, Vienna and Warsaw. Graduated with honours of Interdisciplinary Individual Studies in the Humanities and PhD Studies in Yiddish at Warsaw University. Co-founder of theִ „ייִדיש לעבט” project, and a member of the “Yiddish Berlin” group, she is deeply committed to preserving and promoting Yiddish culture in Poland, Germany and internationally today. She hosted “Naye Khvalyes,” a Yiddish radio program broadcast by the Polish Radio, worked in the Education Department of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and taught as a lecturer for Yiddish at the Center for Yiddish Culture in Warsaw. Currently, she is associated with the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg and the LMU Munich. She carries out her own artistic, research and educational projects, and collaborates with numerous institutions and festivals of Jewish and Yiddish culture internationally. Together with her children, Lea and Dawid, she has been a constant part of YNY since its first edition.
Pete Rushefsky*** (tsimbl, banjo) is a leading performer, composer and researcher of the Jewish tsimbl (cimbalom or hammered dulcimer), Rushefsky tours and records internationally with violinist Itzhak Perlman as part of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and collaborates with a number of leading figures in the contemporary klezmer scene including Andy Statman, Adrianne Greenbaum, Steven Greenman, Joel Rubin, Eleonore Biezunski, Michael Alpert, Madeline Solomon, Zhenya Lopatnik, Zoe Aqua, Alex Parke, Jake Shulman-Ment, Keryn Kleiman, Eleonore Weill, Joanna Sternberg and Michael Winograd. Since 2006 he has served as Executive Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, the nation’s leading organization dedicated to the preservation and presentation of diverse immigrant music traditions from around the world. Rushefsky curated the Yiddish program at the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival and has authored a number of articles and books on traditional music and culture. He won the Jewish Music Institute (IMJ Sao Paulo’s) 2022 Bubbe Award for best new klezmer composition.
Stuart Schear (history, culture) is writing Pastry and Politics, a memoir with recipes, about his New York family, with its generations of bakers, leftwing activists, and Yiddish roots. Schear worked early in his career on documentaries for PBS, including Heritage: Civilization and the Jews and the Struggles for Poland and as a reporter for the PBS NewsHour. After serving in the press office of the Clinton White House, Schear advanced human rights as a leader in strategic communications, guiding social justice campaigns for some of the most highly regarded foundations, charities, and advocacy organizations, including Planned Parenthood Federation of America and American Jewish World Service. Schear earned a B.A. from Oberlin College, studied in YIVO’s Yiddish Summer Program at Columbia, and received an M.A. from the Columbia Journalism School. In 2022, the Journalism School honored Schear with its annual Alumni Award.
Sebastian Schulman (literature) is a writer, editor, and literary translator from Yiddish and other languages. His translations and original work have appeared in more than a dozen literary journals, including Two Lines, Words Without Borders, and ANMLY. His translation of Spomenka Stimec’s Esperanto-language novel Croatian War Nocturnal was published by Phoneme Media/Deep Vellum in 2017. After several years as the executive director of the leading Yiddish arts and culture organization KlezKanada, Sebastian now serves as the director of special projects and partnerships at the Yiddish Book Center. He lives in Montréal, Québec.
Amanda (Miryem-Khaye) Seigel (she/her) (theater) is a Yiddish singer, songwriter, actor, recording artist, and scholar in Yiddish music and culture who “exemplifies the attempt to bring a centuries-old language and culture into the contemporary world” (New York Times). She has performed internationally, including with many luminaries of the Yiddish and klezmer world, and released a CD called “Toyznt tamen=A thousand flavors”. Miryem-Khaye is co-editor (with Alyssa Quint) of Women on the Yiddish Stage and a member of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project. She received YIVO’s Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellowship for her research project The Broder Singers: Forerunners of the Yiddish Theater. Please visit memkhes.com.
Psachya Septimus (accordion/piano/keys, melodica, voice) received a classical piano education majoring in performance at Brooklyn College’s School of Music. He has been an integral part of the New York City Hasidic music scene for over 37 years including having accompanied most of the well-known Chassidic singers at weddings and in concert. Psachya has performed with acts as diverse as Avrohom Fried, Eitan Katz, the Diaspora Yeshiva Band, Yehuda Green, and Soulfarm. He has performed a wide variety of styles–bluegrass, klezmer, Chasidic, pop, marching band, and musical theater (including duties as a musical director) in a wide variety of settings–wedding halls, hotels, vineyards, stadiums, mansions, and tiki bars, senior residences, and hospitals–in 24 states, and in Canada, Panama, Venezuela, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Israel. He’s also played more than two thousand weddings! Psachya has appeared on recordings with Soulfarm, Yaakov Shwekey, the Kleztraphobix,. His solo credits include three albums: “Shattered Glass,” (2012), “Relax,” and to date, four “Relax” albums: 25 Jewish solo piano selections (2022), “Relax Israeli” (2022) ,“Relax Pesach” (2023), “Relax Chabad” (2023) and “Relax Chanukah” (2023).
Ilya Shneyveys** (accordion/piano) is an international performer, accordionist and multi-instrumentalist, teacher, composer, arranger and producer of contemporary Jewish music, from klezmer and Yiddish folk song to fusion and experimental projects. A founding member of Berlin’s famous Neukölln Klezmer Sessions and Shtetl Neukölln festival, as well as a long-time faculty member at Yiddish Summer Weimar, Ilya has performed and taught at major Jewish festivals around the world, including Yiddish Fest Moscow, Yiddish New York, Klezfest St.Petersburg, Klezfest London, KlezKanada, Montreal Jewish Festival, Toronto Ashkenaz Festival, Krakow Jewish Festival and more. He is the artistic director and a founding member of the Yiddish psychedelic rock band Forshpil (LV-RU-DE), and a founding member of the Yiddish-Bavarian fusion project Alpen Klezmer (DE), winner of 2014 RUTH World Music Award at TFF Rudolstadt. He is an artistic director of the German-Israeli student exchange project The Caravan Orchestra, for which he was awarded the 2017 Shimon-Peres-Prize. As a touring member of the klezmer-balkan band Dobranotch (RU) he has received the Eiserne Eversteiner Preis in 2017. He has performed and collaborated with such projects like Opa! (RU), The Klezmatics (US), Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird (DE) and many others. Originally from Riga, Latvia, Ilya has been traveling the world for the last 15 years promoting Yiddish music and culture. He is currently based in Brooklyn, NY, where he’s been organising socially distanced klezmer jam sessions and picnics during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eve Sicular (film) is producing new Isle of Klezbos album Yiddish Silver Screen in celebration of the band’s 25th anniversary, featuring her myriad adaptations of music heard on Yiddish archival soundtracks. Shehas published and lectured widely on Yiddish and early Russian filmmaking, including The Yiddish Celluloid Closet; Edgar Ulmer’s Canon of Cinema Contagion; her Harvard thesis on pioneering Soviet compilation director Esther Shub, Ideology & Montage; and her ingeveb exegesis Samy Szlingerbaum’s Heymish Avant-Garde Kino der Mamen: Mysteries, Music, & Immigrant Life in “Brussels Transit.” Other ongoing cultural research projects include the Yinglish Mikado of Danny Kaye, Jerome Robbins and Judy Garland. In her musician life as drummer and bandleader for Isle of Klezbos and Metropolitan Klezmer, Eve has toured from Vienna to Vancouver as well as collaborating with artists from Jill Sobule to Scissor Sisters.
Deborah Strauss** (violin) is an internationally acclaimed klezmer violinist and educator who has been active in the klezmer and Yiddish music scene for over 30 years. She is a member of the Strauss/Warschauer Duo, was a long-time member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and has performed with the Klezmatics. She has appeared on numerous recordings and was featured in the Emmy Award-winning film, Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler’s House. Deborah performs and teaches annually at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, Yiddish Summer Weimar and KlezKanada. She is also an award-winning children’s educator and a highly regarded Yiddish dance leader. With Dan Blacksberg, Deborah is co-director of the instrumental music program and the dance program at Yiddish New York and, with Alan Bern, is the author of Klezmer Duets for Violin and Accordion, published in 2017 by Universal Edition, Vienna.
Judy Sweet** (educator, dance, piano/accordion) grew up cartwheeling around the hotel lobby at Klezkamp, one of the most formative experiences of her Jewish and musical life. She went on to study a unique approach to music education at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and received her MA in Interdisciplinary Arts Infusion from Towson University. She currently serves as Early Childhood Education Manager with an El-Sistema inspired program at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and organizes community klezmer events at Hinenu: The Baltimore Justice Shtiebl. An active band-leader, dancer, educator, and arts administrator, Judy is thrilled to have the opportunity to share her deep love for Klezmer music and Yiddish dance with the Yiddish NY Kids program.
Paula/Perl Teitelbaum (language, vocals) is a New York City language teacher and Yiddish singer. Born in post-WWII Poland, she was multilingual even before having immigrated to the US as a teenager. A teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY and Yiddish language at the YIVO Institute and the Workers Circle for many years, she has also taught professional and non-professional singers, through courses such as, Yiddish for Singers at Klezkamp and Klezkanada, Yiddish Lullabies at the YIVO Institute, as well as other themed song workshops. As a Yiddish language coach she has consulted with singers and choral conductors. With Lorin Sklamberg she co-produced and sang on Di Grine Katshke / The Green Duck. Other recordings include Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman’s projects, Zumerteg/ Summer Days and Fli, Fli, Mayn Flishlang/ Fly My Kite, and the 1978 LP Vaserl released by Yugntruf-Youth for Yiddish. http://learnyiddishlive.com
Suzanne Toren (theater) has appeared on and off Broadway, and in regional theatres , in works by well-known playwrights (from Shakespeare and Moliere to Arthur Miller and Neil Simon), as well as new ones. Broadway: Goodbye, Fidel (starring Jane Alexander). Regional: Paper Mill Playhouse (Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities), Philadelphia Drama Guild (A View from the Bridge), Pennsylvania Stage Company (Brighton Beach Memoirs), Syracuse Stage (The Seagull). Off-Broadway: Westside Arts (A Shayna Maidel, From Door to Door); Stock: Fiddler on the Roof (Yenta); TV: Law and Order. Suzanne also often performs in Yiddish—-in both readings and full productions, most recently as Linda Loman in the critically acclaimed Yiddish “Death of a Salesman”. In addition, she is a multi-award-winning narrator of around 1000 audio books, for all the major publishers. She received a “Golden Voice” award from Audiofile Magazine, for “career achievements and invaluable contributions to the world of audiobooks.”
For over 35 years, Deborah Ugoretz** (art) has developed workshops and classes wherein students of all ages learn about Jewish papercutting and Hebrew Illuminated manuscripts. For two years she mentored a student in the art of Jewish papercutting through a grant from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. She has created workshops that teach Jewish texts through hands-on visual arts. She has taught classes and workshops at the Yeshiva University Museum and at the Museum at Eldridge Street, New York, where a retrospective of her cut paper work was exhibited. This will be her second year teaching at YNY. In addition to papercutting, Ugoretz creates Jewish marriage contracts (ketubah) and paints in her studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Asya Vaisman Schulman, Ph.D. (language) is the director of the Yiddish Language Institute and the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA. Asya received her PhD in Yiddish Language and Culture from Harvard University, where she wrote her dissertation on the Yiddish songs and singing practices of contemporary Hasidic women. Her Yiddish textbook for beginning students, In eynem was published by White Goat Press in 2020. Asya is also a Yiddish dance teacher, singer, and songwriter and has participated in and taught at Klezmer festivals around the world. She currently resides in Montreal.
For over 35 years, Deborah Ugoretz** (art) has developed workshops and classes wherein students of all ages learn about Jewish papercutting and Hebrew Illuminated manuscripts. She has been recognized by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as a Master Paper-Cutter. Her classes and workshops were held at the Yeshiva University Museum and at the Museum at Eldridge Street, New York, where a retrospective of her cut paper work was exhibited in 2018-19. For two years she mentored a student in the art of Jewish papercutting through a grant from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. Ugoretz teaches Jewish paper cutting in the Eastern European tradition. This will be her third year teaching at YNY. In addition to papercutting, Ugoretz creates Jewish marriage contracts (ketubah), paints and builds mobiles, boxes and screens in her studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Erin Viola (she/they) (kids) is an organizer, educator, and rabbinical student based in Philadelphia, PA, Lenapehoking. Erin is an organizer with the Jewish Youth Climate Movement and is a former core teacher at the Manhattan Worker’s Circle Shule.
Josh Waletzky**(vocals, film) is a leading contemporary Yiddish songwriter and an award-winning documentary filmmaker.He co-produced the Grammy-nominated album of Jewish songs of resistance, Partisans of Vilna (1989), and his groundbreaking CD of original Yiddish songs, Crossing the Shadows (2001), was greeted as “a classic of the American-Jewish folk revival;” his 2017 collection PASAZHIRN / Passengers and his 2019 song cycle PLEYTEM TSUZAMEN / Refugees Together—hailed at its theatrical world premiere earlier this year at the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene—have established him as “the poet-laureate of new Yiddish songwriting.” Waletzky has been involved as a director and editor of a number of acclaimed films, including Image Before My Eyes (1981), Partisans of Vilna (1986), and the Academy Award-nominated Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (1992). He recently completed a series of four films on Yiddish writers for the League for Yiddish. Waletzky’s editing credits include the Emmy Award-winning documentary Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler’s House (1995). He was additionally a consultant to Barbra Streisand on her production of Yentl. He has served as a master teacher to a number of Yiddish singers and songwriters through the Center for Traditional Music and Dance and New York State Council on the Arts’ Folk Arts Apprenticeship program. He now leads a weekly Yiddish Singing Society. Waletzky was for a number of years the music director at Camp Boiberik. His father, Sholom, was a noted Yiddish singer and his mother, Tsirl, was a master visual artist.
Cantor Jeff Warschauer (guitar, mandolin, voice), of Congregation Brothers of Israel in Newtown, PA, is a hazzan, educator and highly accomplished musician with a sweet, soulful voice and a friendly, engaging presence. Ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary, and on the faculty of Columbia
University and JTS, Jeff has served congregations in NJ, NY, CT, OH, PA, ME and VT. Jeff is also internationally renowned as a leading klezmer mandolinist, as an innovator in the development of a klezmer guitar style, as a Yiddish and Hebrew singer and as a skillful and inspirational educator. One half of the Strauss/Warschauer Duo, he was a long-time member of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and has been featured in concert and on recordings with Itzhak Perlman, Joel Grey and the late Theodore Bikel. Jeff is also a Founding Artistic Director and Senior Artistic Advisor of KlezKanada.
Weaver (performance art) is a Yiddish translator, playwright, actor, director and cultural organizer living in Northampton, MA. They co-organize the People’s Puppet Parade (a Yiddish processional theatre collective) and are currently translating and adapting Sholem Asch’s drama “Shabbtai Tsvi” for immersive outdoor performance.
Born on Governor’s Island and Bar Mitzvahed in the Bronx, Steven Lee Weintraub (dance) received his dance training in Manhattan with Alvin Ailey and Erick Hawkins, among others. He is currently in international demand as a teacher and leader of traditional Yiddish dance at festivals and workshops including Klezkamp, Klezkanada, Yidstock, and festivals in Krakow, Furth, Paris, Weimar, Munich, Bratislava, and London. He delights in introducing people to the figures, steps and stylings of the dances that belong to klezmer music. Steven now lives in Philadelphia and in 2016 choreographed and performed in an evening length new Yiddish dance theater piece GILGUL-Transformations, for festival week at Yiddish Summer Weimar. He also choreographed a Jewish Wedding suite ( A Freylekhn Khasene- A Joyous Wedding) for the Brigham Young University folk dancers and recently taught Yiddish dances at Stockton Folkdance Camp.
Cantor Rachel Weston (voice) trained at New York’s Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music, where she was the recipient of the Koret Foundation Scholarship and the Atara Scholarship for Merit. In the UK she has coordinated and taught Yiddish song and niggunim workshop programmes for the Jewish Music Institute, SOAS, Kleznorth, Klezfest London, WOMAD festival, and the London Yiddish choir. Rachel has performed Yiddish song and cantorial music internationally, in London, Montreal, Toronto, New York, Weimar, Berlin and Krakow. Rachel is also a community workshop facilitator and leads music workshops for people with dementia and their caregivers. Rachel served as student cantor at Garden City Jewish Center in Long Island for four years, as well as at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue and Manchester Reform Synagogue. She is currently the cantor of Sinai Synagogue in Leeds, and is the first cantor in the UK to serve as sole spiritual leader of a progressive community.
Clarinetist Michael Winograd lives in Brooklyn. His band, the Honorable Mentshn, brings klezmer music to ears, turntables and hearts around the world. Their newest album “Early Bird Special,” is pretty good! Michael collaborates with Pakistani vocalist Zeb Bangash in Sandaraa, and recently debuted ‘Yiddishe Pirat’ along with Socalled and Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton. He’s currently working with vocalist Lorin Sklamberg on a program and recording of Yiddish Cabaret from Helsinki, debuting in Finland in November 2022. He has played and recorded with many of your favorite performers of Jewish music, and is a guest soloist with Vulfpeck, having joined them for a sold out show at NYC’s Madison Square Garden in 2019. His music is featured in films and TV, including HBOs reboot of “Sex and the City” (“And Just Like That,”) and was recently used by (current) US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Shumer’s new campaign ad, featured on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He is available for weddings and other celebrations, providing competitive and market-appropriate rates.
Mikhl Yashinsky (theater) was born in Detroit and works as an actor, writer, and teacher in Manhattan. He teaches Yiddish at Columbia and is a co-author of the award-winning Yiddish language textbook In eynem. He has performed with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in the Yiddish-language Fiddler on the Roof, The Sorceress (title role), and Amid Falling Walls. In January, he made his solo singing début at Carnegie Hall, performing the anthem of the Vilna partisans at the Holocaust Remembrance Day concert “We Are Here.” As a LABA fellow, he is writing a new Yiddish-language musical with Mamaliga, Feast of the Seven Sinners. His Yiddish-language erotic drama Blessing of the New Moon premièred at the Lower East Side Play Festival. This December and January, another Yiddish play of his, The Gospel According to Chaim, is being produced by New Yiddish Rep (tickets at www.newyiddishrep.org). www.instagram.com/mikhldarling
Jennifer Young (history) currently serves as Education Program Manager at the Yiddish Book Center, and formerly served as the Director of Education at the YIVO Institute. She has worked as a writer, editor, and walking tour guide, and as a museum educator at the Tenement Museum and the New-York Historical Society. Jennifer has a passion for public history and for bringing stories of the Jewish past to life.
Dr. Sheva Zucker (language, literature) is the author of the textbooks Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature & Culture, Vols. I & II and the editor and producer of the CDs The Golden Peacock: Voice of the Yiddish Writer and The Golden Peacock: Bilingual. She has taught Yiddish for many years in the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture, currently under the auspices of Bard College and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. She currently teaches for the YIVO and the Workers Circle. From 2005 until 2020 she served as the executive director of the League for Yiddish as well as the editor-in-chief of its magazine Afn Shvel. She has taught and lectured on Yiddish language, literature and culture on five continents. Her research and translation work focus mostly on women in Yiddish literature.