Janie Respitz is a Montreal based Yiddish scholar and entertainer. For the past thirty years she has performed in concerts throughout the world and taught courses relating to Yiddish language, folklore, literature and Eastern European Jewish history, at Queen’s University, McGill University, Cummings Jewish Centre for Seniors and a variety of other learning environments.

Boris Sandler (born in Beltz, Moldova) is a Yiddish language author, journalist, playwright and lyricist and the former editor of the Yiddish edition of the Forward.

Rukhl Schaechter is the Yiddish editor of the online Forward newspaper and host of the YouTube series Yiddish Word of the Day. She also produces Yiddish cooking shows together with Yiddish food scholar and chef Eve Jochnowitz. Working as a Forverts writer and editor since 1998, she has garnered years of experience in writing news articles and personal essays in Yiddish and English, and won a number of Rockower Awards by the American Jewish Press Association.

Robert Moses Shapiro is a professor of East European Jewish History, Holocaust Studies, and Yiddish Language and Literature at Brooklyn College. Although a native Yiddish speaker born in Germany to Polish Jews from Chrzanow and Sosnowiec, Poland, he undertook advanced Yiddish study at YIVO, Columbia University, and Oxford University, as well as numerous Arbeter-Ring intensive online courses. Since Polish Jewry was multi-lingual, Shapiro supplemented his Yiddish with Hebrew, Loshn Koydesh, Polish and German to access the wealth of primary sources in those languages.

D. Zisl Slepovitch is a native of Minsk, Belarus, who has resided in the United States since 2008. He is a musicologist and ethnomusicologist (Ph.D., Belarusian State Academy of Music), with primary interest in the Eastern European Jewish music culture; a multi-instrumentalist klezmer, classical, and improvised music performer (woodwinds, keyboards, vocals); composer, conductor, music and Yiddish educator. He is a founding member of the critically acclaimed bands Litvakus, Zisl Slepovitch Trio, and Zisl Slepovitch Ensemble. Slepovitch has served in multiple roles in numerous productions by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (New York), State Jewish Theatre (Bucharest), and is now Musician-in-Residence at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. Slepovitch has taught Yiddish language and culture at The New School, worked as an educator and Artist-in-Residence at BIMA at Brandeis University, and a guest artist and lecturer at many US and international academic and cultural institutions and festivals. Slepovitch’s theater, film, and TV contributions include Defiance movie, Eternal Echoes album (Sony Classical), Rejoice with Itzhak Perlman and Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot (PBS), and Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish (off-Broadway). @zislepovitch

Daniel Soyer is professor of History at Fordham University. Most recently, he is the editor of The Jewish Metropolis: New York City from the 17th to the 21st Century (Academic Studies Press, 2021), and author of Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy (Cornell, 2021). His other books include, with Annie Polland, The Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840-1920 (NYU, 2012), winner of a National Jewish Book Award; Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880-1939 (Harvard, 1997), winner of the Saul Viener Award of the American Jewish Historical Society; and, with Jocelyn Cohen, My Future Is in America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants (NYU, 2006), an anthology of selections from YIVO’s 1942 autobiography contest, translated from Yiddish.

Esther Ides Szwarc was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She graduated from the Teachers Seminar and from the (High School For Jewish Studies) in Buenos Aires. She graduated from the {National Professors Institute’s} branch of French Language, Literature and Culture. Academic Director of Fundación IWO (Argentina YIVO). Organized the rescue efforts of materials from the IWO Library after the July 18, 1994 bombing. Honored as an Outstanding Cultural Personality (Personalidad destacada de la Cultura) by the Buenos Aires legislature.

Marianne Tatom teaches Yiddish for a number of community organizations online. She recently received the Certificate of Yiddish Pedagogy from the Yiddish Book Center, the culmination of an intensive period of Yiddish pedagogical study. Marianne has a PhD in music theory and is also a freelance editor and klezmer musician. She lives in Seattle with her beloved dachshund Mendel, who frequently makes an appearance in her classes.

Paula Teitelbaum is a native Yiddish speaker and an experienced teacher of Yiddish, Spanish, and English to speakers of other languages. Her courses integrate listening, speaking, reading, and writing to help students understand basic conversational Yiddish, its vocabulary and its grammatical structures. Teitelbaum holds a Master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University and is an accomplished singer. Her singing can be heard on the recordings Vaserl, Zumerteg, Fli,Fli, My Flishlang and on the soundtrack of the documentary film Image Before My Eyes. In addition to teaching at the Workmen’s Circle, she has taught Yiddish at the YIVO Summer Intensive Program, New York University, Stern College for Women, the Shevach High School for Girls, the 92nd Street Y, the Central Queens Y, Yugntruf, and Klezkamp.

Miriam Trinh was born in Poland, grew up in Germany and immigrated to Israel after finishing High School. She completed her undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Yiddish at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, obtained her Master’s degree in Yiddish literature at the Universities of Paris-Sorbonne and Strasbourg (France), her Ph.D. at the Hebrew University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She has taught Yiddish language and literature since 1999, in Paris, Oxford, Strassbourg, Vilna, New York, Baltimore, Tel Aviv and is currently teaching Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Miriam Trinh has published works in the field of Modern Yiddish Literature and especially on Holocaust literature. She is also engaged in translation from and into Yiddish.

Yuri Vedenyapin is a Yiddish scholar, teacher, and performer. He is Preceptor in Yiddish at Harvard University and has also taught Yiddish language and culture at Cambridge University, Columbia University, Moscow State University, the Naomi Prawer Kadar Yiddish Summer Program at Tel Aviv University, the Yiddish Book Center, the Yiddish Summer Program in Warsaw, and elsewhere. Interested in Yiddish dialects and oral history, he has interviewed Yiddish writers, actors, and members of Hasidic communities. He studied acting at the Shchepkin Theater School in Moscow and performs songs in Yiddish and other languages.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.