Brooklyn-born Josh Waletzky has been performing, teaching, and composing Yiddish song since childhood. His early musical career in the 1960s and 1970s at Camp Boiberik, Workers Circle shules, the Yugntruf Ensemble, the YIVO Yiddish Summer Program, and Kapelye prepared him for (the past) thirty years of Yiddish songwriting. He is the only representative of his generation represented in the canonic Mlotek Yiddish songbooks. In view of the more than 40 original songs he has written over the past three decades, ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin has called him “the poet-laureate of new Yiddish song.” Most importantly, Josh has had the honor of collaborating with many of the leading Yiddish musicians of our day and mentoring some of the talented singer-songwriters on our current scene.

Rose Waldman is a native Yiddish speaker, born and raised in the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor of Writing at NYU and has taught Translation Theory at Columbia University. Her translated works include Married by I. L. Peretz (2013), Pioneers: The First Breach by S. An-sky (2017), and the forthcoming Sons and Daughters by Chaim Grade (2022-2023). She has been awarded fellowships for translation by the National Endowment for the Arts and twice by the Yiddish Book Center.

Jeff Warschauer, of the Jewish Center of Princeton, is a cantor, educator and highly accomplished musician with a sweet, soulful voice and a friendly, engaging presence.

Ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary, Jeff has served congregations in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maine and Vermont.

In the Yiddish scene, Jeff is internationally renowned as a leading klezmer mandolinist, as an innovator in the development of a klezmer guitar style, as a Yiddish 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 Theodore Bikel z”l. Jeff teaches at Columbia University, and is a Founding Artistic Director of KlezKanada.

Michael Wex is a Canadian novelist, columnist, playwright, translator, lecturer and performer. His is also the author of numerous books, including the 2005 bestseller “Born to Kvetch.” A native of Lethbridge, Alberta, Michael has worked in virtually every area of contemporary Yiddish. Some of his songs have been recorded by such klezmer bands as Sukke, The Flying Bulgars, and the 2007 Grammy winners, The Klezmatics. Michael’s teaching and lecture activities—a unique combination of learning, stand-up comedy and probing investigation into the nature of Yiddish and Yiddishkayt—have taken him from Toronto to Budapest, and to many points in between.

Kalman Weiser is an Associate Professor of History and the Humanities, the Silber Family Chair in Jewish Studies at York University, and director of York's Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies.

Born in Detroit and educated at Harvard, Mikhl Yashinsky is an actor-director, writer, and Yiddish teacher and translator. He recently appeared with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in the Drama Desk-winning Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof, directed by Joel Grey, and in The Sorceress (a New York Times Critic’s Pick), for which performance he was hailed by the Times for giving a “keen, if malevolent, psychology” to the title role. Forthcoming publications include his translation of the memoirs of theatrical pioneer Ester-Rokhl Kaminska (Syracuse University Press), and In eynem (Yiddish Book Center), a new Yiddish textbook he co-authored. He has also taught the language at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the University of Michigan. In 2019, he was named to the Forward 50, the historic newspaper’s annual list of “influential, intriguing, and inspiring” American Jews. www.yashinsky.com

Moshe Yassur, born in Iasi, Romania was a child actor in the Pomul Verde [The Green Apple], the original Yiddish theatre founded by Avram Goldfadn in Iasi in 1876 and revived after WWII. At the same time he trained at the Conservatory and acted in the Romanian National Theatre in Iasi. In 1950, after immigration to Israel and learning Hebrew, he became part of the Hebrew theatre in Israel as actor, director, and teacher. Moshe has directed traditional and modern works in Yiddish at the Jewish State Theatre in Bucharest, premiered Howard Barker’s Judith, Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, and The Belle of Amherst along with directing several plays by Ionesco at major Romanian theatres, acted at Castillo Theatre in Fred Newman’s Mr. Hirsch Died Yesterday, and directed Dan Friedman’s The Learning Play of Rabbi Levi Yitzhok, Son of Sara, of Berdichev. Having directed Waiting for Godot for New Yiddish Rep, originally in cooperation with Castillo in 2013, he is honored to have performed it at Portora Royal as part of the Beckett Festival in Enniskillen, NI and reprised as part of Origin’s 2014 First Irish Theatre Festival. Most recently he directed 2 By Wolf, for New Yiddish Rep.

Sheva Zucker is the author of the textbooks Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature & Culture, Vols. I & II, published by the Workmen’s Circle, and the editor and producer of the CDs The Golden Peacock: Voice of the Yiddish Writer. She has taught and lectured on Yiddish language, literature and culture on five continents and has taught Yiddish for over two decades 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 served for 15 years, from 2005-2020, as the director of the League for Yiddish and the editor of its all-Yiddish magazine Afn Shvel.