Kathryn Hellerstein is Professor of Yiddish and past Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a visiting professor in Comparative Literature at Harvard in Spring 2026. Her monograph, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 won the 2014 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies and the 2015 Modern Language Association Fenia and Yaacov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies. She edited the selected essays of Irene Eber, Jews in China: Cultural Conversations, Changing Perceptions (Pennsylvania State UP, 2020). Her co-edited volume, China and Ashkenazic Jewry:
Transcultural Encounters, was published by De Gruyter in 2022. Hellerstein’s current projects Include Women Yiddish Poets: Anthology; China through Yiddish Eyes: Cultural Translation in the
Twentieth Century; The Rosewaters and the Colmans: Jewish Identity in Two Cleveland Jewish Families (1840-1915); and Jewish Women Poets as Translators: Changing Liturgy and Canon.

Aaron Alexander is a drummer, who also plays violin and has been an active and committed klezmer musician since 1988, when he first joined The Mazeltones, Seattle's first klezmer band. Aaron has several recordings as a leader featuring his original compositions and arrangements, including Blues for Sparky, Midrash Mish Mosh and The Klez Messengers among others.

Moishele Alfonso was born in Memphis, TN – USA and received his B.A. in German and French from the University of Memphis. He attended the YIVO Summer Program in 2018 and also participated in the Yiddish Book Center’s Yiddish Pedagogy Program in 2018-2019, where he was trained to teach with the YBC’s textbook, “In Eynem”. This past summer, Moishele taught a Beginners class and Intermediate Conversation at the YBC’s Steiner Intensive Yiddish Summer Program.

Shane Baker, executive director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, is one of the most prominent proponents of Yiddish language, culture, and theater in New York today. As an actor, translator, and playwright, he teaches students to apply the skills of the Yiddish stage to their own interpretation of the literature.

Sasha Berenstein is a current participant of the Yiddish Book Center's Yiddish Pedagogy Practicum, a klezmer musician, and LGBTQ+ inclusivity activist. She has led workshops for queer and transgender inclusivity in Yiddish pedagogy, while also centering accessibility and identity in Yiddish language instruction.

Isaac Bleaman is a doctoral student in Linguistics at New York University. His research focuses on variation in how Yiddish is spoken in New York today, both by Hasidim and by Yiddishists. Isaac holds a Master’s degree in Yiddish Studies from Oxford and a Bachelor’s in Linguistics and Comparative Literature from Stanford. In addition to his studies, Isaac writes a biweekly column in the Yiddish Forverts and serves as director of Leyenzal – A Yiddish Literacy Project, an educational nonprofit that commissions Yiddish-language lectures by sought-after teachers and makes them available to view for free online. He has taught beginning and intermediate language students at the Yiddish Farm and has tutored and lectured in Yiddish at various venues.

Since graduating from Oberlin College in 2018, Sonia Bloom has worked as a museum educator, language tutor and teacher, and translator in New York City, Buenos Aires, and Western Massachusetts. 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 was a teaching assistant for the YIVO-Weinreich Program in 2021 and the Yiddish Book Center’s Steiner Summer Yiddish Program in 2022 and 2023 and has taught short courses for beginner Yiddish students at Yale University, Amherst College, and the Yiddish Book Center. She also teaches Yiddish to children ages 5-10 at the Kinderland and Workers Circle shules in New York City.

Baruch Blum is the Yiddish Coordinator at the Workers Circle. He has worked as a Yiddish translator, as the secretary for the League for Yiddish, Inc., and as Yiddish language instructor at the Yiddish Farm.

Ladino paved Mira Rivka Blum’s initial pathway to Yiddishkeit while studying abroad in Spain, but it took ten more years and a doctorate specializing in Turkic languages before she discovered the vibrant and enticing world of Yiddish and Yiddishists.

Yankl-Peretz Blum began teaching himself Yiddish while a college student in California. He’s been on the board of Yugntruf — Youth for Yiddish since 2006 (for several years serving as its chair), and was active in the Yiddish Farm since its founding in 2011. He began teaching Yiddish in 2007. He has taught classes at the Yiddish Farm, YIVO, Workers Circle, Yiddish Summer Weimar, Yidish Ort, Paris Yiddish Center, and Yugntruf. He has an MA in Linguistics from CUNY Graduate Center, and helps develop the website YiddishPOP.com. He speaks Yiddish at home with his wife and two children in Jerusalem, and spends his free time learning languages.

Hanan-Michael Bordin was born in Riga, Latvia in 1958. He repatriated to Israel at the age of twenty. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, graduating with a BA in Hebrew linguistics and MA in Yiddish. After graduation, he stayed at his Alma Mater, where he taught at the Yiddish Department of the Hebrew University for 34 years.

Dovid Braun has taught Yiddish at all levels and at many of the foremost academic Yiddish programs worldwide. He has been a faculty member teaching Yiddish language, Yiddish linguistics, or general linguistics at Harvard University; Hebrew University (Jerusalem); University of Pennsylvania; Hampshire College/Yiddish Book Center; Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw); YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in its summer programs at Columbia University, NYU, and now Bard College; Gratz College; Workmen’s Circle (Boston; NYC). In the general field of Yiddish he has worked as a translator, researcher, dialect/pronunciation coach for performers, presenter on Yiddish-language pedagogy and topics in folklore, and a decipherer of handwritten documents. 

Leyzer Burko is a professional Yiddishist who has taught Yiddish in the YIVO Summer Program and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He is at work on a Yiddish Dialect Dictionary (yiddishdialectdictionary.com) which grew out of the research for his dissertation Saving Yiddish: Yiddish Studies and the Language Sciences in America, 1940-1970 (Jewish Theological Seminary, 2019). He edited the volume Mame-loshn by Nahum Stutchkoff, lives in the “Yiddish House” in the Bronx, and performs occasionally on the Yiddish stage.

Cantor Jeff Warschauer, of Congregation Or Chadash in Flemington, NJ, is ahazzan, educator and highly accomplished musician with a sweet, soulful voice and a friendly, engaging presence. Ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary, Jeff is a faculty member of Columbia University and JTS and has served congregations in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maine and Vermont.

Jeff is also internationally renowned as a leading klezmer mandolinist, an innovator in the development of klezmer guitar style, a Yiddish and Hebrew singer, and a skillful and inspirational educator. One half of the Strauss/Warschauer Duo, he was a longtime 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 of KlezKanada.

Annabel (Annie) Gottfried Cohen is a third year PhD Student in Modern Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and a teacher and translator of Yiddish. Alongside her PhD research, which focuses on the interwar Jewish anti-fascist left, Annie also researches the forgotten religious practices of Ashkenazi Jewish women, publishing her translations of Yiddish texts relating to these practices on a website www.pullingatthreads.com.

Matthew “Motl” Didner is the Associate Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.