ESTHER SINGER (they/them)

Complete Beginners Yiddish: Let’s Get Started

Esther Singer started learning Yiddish in 2015 through immersion on a Yiddish speaking farm. Discovering the pleasures of speaking mame loshn later in life inspired them to start a series of adult beginner classes in Melbourne in order to provide the same opportunity to others. They caught the teaching bug and have not looked back since.

As well as teaching, Esther has a passion for learning, continuing their Yiddish studies everywhere from New York to Warsaw as well as receiving a Masters in Applied Linguistics focused on Second Language Acquisition. They are passionate about making language learning enjoyable and welcoming, so that everyone can experience the joy of connecting or reconnecting to Yiddish.

ETHEL RAIM (she/her)

Workshop: The Art of Unaccompanied Yiddish Singing

Ethel Raim – 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 over the last 12 years at Yiddish Summer Weimar, KlezKamp, KlezKanada, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and at Yiddish New York. A renowned folk arts specialist, Raim served for over four decades as artistic director of the Balkan Arts Center, today the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. 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).

HINDE BURSTIN (she/her)

Advanced Yiddish: Kvirshnit

Hinde Ena Burstin is a dykele, a shtoltse, shtarke lezbianke, a shande from down-under and a Yiddishist with a twist. She grew up in a veltlekher/secular Yiddish-speaking home and community on the unceded lands of the Kulin nation in so-called Melbourne, Australia. Yiddish is her mame-loshn, and the first language she learnt to speak, read and write. She is a passionate and playful Yiddish teacher. She loves the transnational connections that online Yiddish teaching fosters, and the ways that this contributes to the hemshekh/continuation of Yiddish internationalism. Hinde currently teaches online courses in Yiddish (beginners, intermediate and advanced levels), Yiddish literature and Yiddish literature in translation. She is a Yiddish literature researcher and translator. Her current research focuses on feminist and queer themes in pre-war Yiddish poems by women. Hinde Ena Burstin is a Yiddish writer and performer whose work includes lesboerotic Yiddish poetry. She is a lifelong social justice activist.

JENNY ROMAINE (she/her)

Workshop: Legacies of Queer Yiddish Spectacle Performance 1987-2011

Jenny Romaine is a performer, director, puppeteer and designer who has been making works of new Yiddish theater for 3 decades. She was a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for 13 years, and has made archive rooted work with communities all over the world. She is a founding member of the Great Small Works collective, a member (emeritus) of The Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee, music director of Circus Amok, founded the Youth Theater Workshop of the Yiddish Folk Arts program Klezkamp, and is recently working on the film Vu Bistu Geven?/Where Have You Been? an adventure parable co-created with Simone Lucas, Sadie Gold Shapiro, Geoff Berner, Ira Temple, Trina Stacey and Rachel Lemish that asks questions about diasporic Jewish Montrealers’ relationships to land and colonialism. Vu Bistu Geven? weaves together original music and songs in Yiddish, English, French, and Kanien’kehá:ka; characters penned by Yiddish Montreal writers; colourful, original narrative film sequences; and a collage of documentary and pop-culture material.

MAI LI PITTARD (she/her, they/them)

Workshop: Intro to 500 Years of Yiddish Bangers

Mai Li Pittard has been rabblerousing around the Yiddishist and Klezmer world for a decade, since the start of their genre-busting neo-vaudevillian cabaret punk klezmer band, The Debaucherauntes. An active working musician and private music instructor, Miles has achieved notoriety in the Yiddish culture world through the scholarship programs at KlezKanada, Yiddish New York, and Yiddish Summer Weimar; sweeping KlezKanada’s 2017 KrechtsFactor; sharing stages with A-listers Jinta-La-Mvta, Michael Winograd, Geoff Berner, Daniel Kahn; and making trouble in the wee hours. Miles’ focus on Yiddish culture has been around finding a place in the burgeoning new revival movement through their composition, songwriting, & performance work, seeking buried queer cultural narratives and connecting hidden gems of old traditions to new modern evolutions; but also extends more broadly to community building, production, events, and teaching.

Mai Li holds a BM in Music Composition from Florida State University, gigs on 6 instruments, teaches privately, leads bands, writes, arranges, and performs across the US and abroad. They have 52 houseplants, and an edible garden they share with their community house and a partner in unceded Duwamish & Coastal Salish land (Seattle), where they surreptitiously make soups and hide from COVID.

STEVE WEINTRAUB (he/him)

Workshop: Yiddish Folk Dances from the Zoom Dimension

Steven Lee Weintraub received his dance training in Manhattan with Alvin Ailey and Erick Hawkins, among others. He worked closely with Polish Jewish modern dancer and choreographer Felix Fibich and absorbed a lot of Yiddish styling from him. Steve was a principal dancer and choreographer with the Israeli folkdance group Parparim and is assistant director of the annual Israeli Folk Dance Festival in NYC.

He is in international demand as a teacher and leader of traditional Yiddish dance at festivals and workshops including Klezkamp, Klezkanada, and festivals in Krakow, Furth, Paris, and London. He delights in introducing people to the figures, steps and stylings of the dances that belong to klezmer music. He has often been called the “Pied Piper of Yiddish Dance”, with years of experience leading and researching Yiddish dance. Responding to the restrictions imposed by Covid, he has developed and perfected ways of leading people in Yiddish dance online on Zoom in ways that still feels personal and communal.

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.

NAOMI SEIDMAN (she/her, they/them)

Workshop: Dos Polish Yingl, or Why Yiddish Literature is so Queer

Naomi Seidman was raised in a Yiddish-speaking Hasidic home in Boro Park, Brooklyn, is presently the Chancellor Jackman Professor of the Arts at the University of Toronto, and has written books on “the sexual politics of Hebrew and Yiddish,” “how Jews fell in love with love,” and the Orthodox girls’ school system Bais Yaakov.

MIRIAM SCHULZ (she/her)

Lower Intermediate Yiddish: Utopia

Miriam Schulz holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and currently works as the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the co-founder of the EU-funded project “We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present“.

RIVKE MARGOLIS (she/her)

Advanced Yiddish: Exploring a Queer Yiddish Usable Past

Rivke Margolis learned Yiddish at a secular Jewish day school in Montreal and received her PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia. She is a Yiddishist who has been teaching Yiddish at all age levels, from preschool to university, as well as in immersive programs (YIVO, University of Ottawa, Steiner Program, Tel Aviv) for the last twenty-five years. She is also the author of Basic Yiddish: A Grammar and Workbook. She is a professor of Jewish Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, and her research deals with Yiddish culture and its continuity. Her forthcoming book, Yiddish Lebt: Strategies of Language Transmission is coming out this year. Her current project is on 21st century Yiddish cinema and she is working on a book called The Supernatural in New Yiddish Cinema. You can learn about her and her ideas on Queer Yiddishkeit in a recent episode of Vaybertaytsh (#61)

ROSZA DANIEL LANG/LEVITSKY (they/them, she/her)

Workshop: Yiddish Culture as a Wellspring for Justice Movement Work

rosza daniel lang/levitsky is a cultural worker and organizer living on the northern estuary of lenapehoking. Third-generation radical; second-generation queer – never figured out how to make art for art’s sake; rarely wants to work alone. Just another gendertreyf diasporist mischling fem who identifies with, not as. Some current projects: abolition feminist organizing with Survived & Punished NY; making NYC’s radical purimshpil with the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee; singing with Koyt Far Dayn Fardakht and solo; co-editing a collection of contemporary Yiddish song (with Zoë Aqua & Adah Hetko); helping revitalize the Tsentrale Yidishe Kultur-Organizatsye. Always writing, performing, teaching, learning, and more.

SASHA BERENSTEIN (she/her, they/them)

Upper Beginner Yiddish: Let’s Get Familiar

A Yiddish teacher for 3 years, Klezmer accordion player, and a reformed ex-DSA organizer, Sasha Berenstein has focused their activism spoons in recent years on fighting for trans and nonbinary inclusivity in the Yiddish speaking world, and popularizing gender-inclusive language in common Yiddish use. You can find the Trans/Nonbinary Yiddish vocab list she put together.

SASHA HOFFMAN (they/them)

Upper Intermediate Yiddish: Grammar

Sasha Hoffman received their PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan in 2012, with a dissertation focused on humorous representations of oppression within the writing of four classical Yiddish and Harlem Renaissance writers: Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Sholem Aleykhem, and Modkhe Spector. Sasha has been a student and a teacher of Yiddish language and culture for the past dozen or so years and is currently focused on apprenticing to become a carpenter.

YANKL SALANT (he/him)

Upper Intermediate Yiddish: Conversation and Reading Skills

Having started to study Yiddish in 1984, Yankl Salant was sucked into the irresistible whirlpool of Yiddish soon after, teaching Yiddish to children and adults, directing the YIVO summer program, acting on the Yiddish stage and becoming a Yiddish graphic designer and translator. Never enough!

ZOHAR WEIMAN-KELMAN (they/them)

Workshop: Yiddish Sado-Masochism (Dirty Poetry)

Zohar Weiman-Kelman is a senior lecturer in the department of foreign literatures and linguistics at Ben-Gurion University. They received a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California Berkeley and were a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Jewish Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Zohar was a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and an associate scholar at the Humanities Forum on Sex, both at the University of Pennsylvania. Their first book, Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry, was published by SUNY Press in 2018.