David E. Fishman is Professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (2017), which has appeared in six foreign languages, and The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture. He is also the proud father of Yiddish-speaking children.

Raphael Finkel (Refoyl) comes from a family of Yiddishists in Chicago.

His grandparents used to host "Yiddish Thursdays". But that was years before Refoyl was born. In order to preserve his Yiddish inheritance, Refoyl started studying Yiddish at the Hillel House at the University of Chicago under Rabbi Max Ticktin of blessed memory. Later as a graduate student at Stanford University he continued his Yiddish studies on the side of his "regular job": Computer Science. He speaks only Yiddish with his two children (now adults) and is a regular attendee at Yugntruf's Yiddish-Vokh. Refoyl has developed various useful computer facilities, such as his Shraybmashinke and his online dictionary. He was the technical editor of the web journal "Der Bavebter Yid". He is currently occupied with correcting an online version of the entire opus of Sholem Aleichem.

Frieda Forman has been a teacher, writer and scholar in the fields of Jewish Studies and Women’s Studies for over four decades. She was the founder and coordinator of the Women’s Educational Resources Centre at OISE/ University of Toronto, where she is currently an associate scholar.

Eve Jochnowitz is a Yiddish scholar, culinary ethnographer, chef, and baker.  Eve has lectured both in the United States and abroad on food in Jewish tradition, religion, and ritual as well as food in Yiddish performance and popular culture.  Eve received her PhD on the subject of Jewish culinary ethnography from New York University’s Performance Studies Department. She translated and edited “The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook” by restaurateur Fania Lewando, which is based on a 1938 Yiddish cookbook. She also runs the video program “Est Gezunterheyt” with author Rukhl Schaechter for The Yiddish Daily Forward.

Dovid Katz is a native of New York City who went on to found and lead Yiddish studies at Oxford for 18 years (1978-1997), and, after a stint as visiting professor at Yale (1998-1999), relocated to Vilnius, Lithuania in 1999. He is the author of Grammar of the Yiddish Language; Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish; Lithuanian Jewish Culture; and Yiddish and Power (in English); Issues in Yiddish Stylistics (in Yiddish), numerous works on Yiddish linguistics, and four volumes of Yiddish fiction, most recently Einstein of Svir and Other Short Stories (Leyvik House, 2020). He is currently at work on his Yiddish Cultural Dictionary: English-Yiddish Dictionary for the 21st Century (available free online). He edits DefendingHistory.com, a web journal at the forefront of efforts to counter the new East European incarnations of Holocaust denial. Many of his writings (including his translation-in-progress of the Bible into Lithuanian Yiddish) are posted on his website: http://www.dovidkatz.net.

Dov-Ber Kerler is the Cohn Chair in Yiddish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He taught Yiddish as well as courses on Yiddish literature, culture and scholarship in Jerusalem, Oxford, Moscow, and Vilnius. A son of the noted Yiddish poet, Yosef Kerler, Dov-Ber has been publishing his own original Yiddish poetry since 1993, in addition to scholarly and general articles (mostly in Yiddish). To date, since 1996, six collections of his poetry have been published in Britain and Israel, including a joint volume of his and his father’s poems, entitled “Shpigl–ksav” (Words in a Mirror).

Irena Klepfisz is a lesbian poet, activist, teacher and practicing secular Jew and a vocal proponent of translating the writings of Yiddish women artists and intellectuals. Her most recent poetry collection Her Birth and Later Years: Poems Collected and New 1971-2021 was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry from the Publishing Triangle.

Miri Koral has shared her passion for Yiddish by teaching the language and culture to hundreds of students of all ages at UCLA, at the American Jewish University, and privately for over 20 years. She is also the Founding Director of the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language which produces Yiddish programming since 1999 (www.yiddisi.org), and is an accomplished Yiddish poet and translator.

Natalia Krynicka is a teacher, researcher and translator of Yiddish literature. Since 1995 she has worked at the Medem Library in Paris, where she is the chief librarian. She teaches Yiddish language and literature at the Sorbonne, at the Paris Yiddish Center (Maison de la culture yiddish) and on international seminars in Paris, Strasbourg, Warsaw, Berlin. Her doctorate covers the Polish-Jewish cultural relations in the light of translations from Polish to Yiddish and from Yiddish to Polish in the years 1885-1939.

Ber Kotlerman is Professor at Bar Ilan University, Israel and Head of the Rena Costa Center for Yiddish Studies. He also holds the Sznajderman Chair in Yiddish Culture and Hasidism. In the late 1990s to the early 2000s he served as director for the Tel Aviv-based Association of Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Israel (Leyvik House) and as the Israeli representative of The Yiddish Daily Forward (Forverts). He has also taught Yiddish language and culture at Kiev, Tokyo, Berlin, Vilnius, and Birobidzhan, where he founded an International Yiddish Summer Program. Ber’s academic activities include numerous publications on Yiddish history and culture, among them monographs about Sholem Aleichem’s and Der Nister’s writings, as well as translations from the Old Yiddish into Russian and Hebrew.

Avraham Lichtenbaum has been the Executive Director of the IWO Foundation (Institute of Jewish Research) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, since 1994. He has taught Yiddish in New York, Warsaw, Buenos Aires and Vilnius. Avraham is also the lecturer and the author of texts about Jewish history and culture. Avraham was one of the first instructors to lead the Workmen’s Circle online Yiddish program, teaching students from around the world from his office in Buenos Aires.

Zhenya Lopatnik is a singer, composer, author of songs in Yiddish, published writer, and a teacher of everything that is connected to the word “Jewish”. She is a master of informal Jewish education, teaching Jewish culture and traditions to people of all ages.

Elena Luchina, born in Moscow, is a PhD candidate in linguistics at the Hebrew University. Her research objectively answers questions with agenda, like how is Yiddish similar to German or certain Slavic languages, how different are texts from different places or how special or “good” is the language of particular author. She also translates songs into Yiddish. Elena has been teaching Yiddish since 2012 in various places, including National Research University HSE (Mosocw) and Beit Leyvik (Tel Aviv). She is passionate about developing new formats for teaching fluency and creativity.

David Mandelbaum has been producing and acting in experimental theater in New York for over 35 years. He has worked at La Mama, etc., Theater For The New City, The Common Basis Theater and numerous others. In 2007, he and Amy Coleman founded the New Yiddish Rep and premiered its first show, an adaptation of the Holocaust classic, Yosl Rakover Speaks To G-d, which has since been showcased in Montreal, Rome, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Under David’s leadership, the New Yiddish Rep has presented original films, concerts, performance art, and art exhibitions, and has workshopped and developed The Essence: A Yiddish Theater Dim Sum and The Big Bupkis: The Complete Gentile’s Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville.

Alyssa Masor received her PhD in Yiddish studies from Columbia University. Her dissertation was entitled “The Evolution of Literary Neo-Hasidism.” She has taught Yiddish language and literature at Columbia, YIVO, Yeshiva University, and Yiddish Farm. She has published poetry and prose in Yiddish in Forverts Penshaft and Afn Shvel, as well as scholarly articles on Yiddish literature. She gives tours of Hasidic Boro Park and lectures on contemporary Hasidic culture.