May 16-18, 2025: Seattle's Festival of Yiddish Music, Art & Culture!
FACULTY
Seattle Yiddish Fest is proud to feature the world's leading performers, purveyors and educators in Yiddish culture. Our faculty teach at workshops across Europe, North and South America and beyond and bring their expertise and joy for sharing this world to the small and intimate workshops that can only be found at a festival like this.
Throughout the weekend there are various opportunities to see and hear the faculty perform, and the informal conversations that happen between sessions, and chance to get to know both other participants and faculty who may not work in the sam discipline as you are often some of the most exciting experiences at a festival like this.
guest faculty
Frank London
Trumpet
Sir Frank London is a Grammy Award–winning trumpeter and composer, a member of the Klezmatics, and leader of the Klezmer Brass Allstars, Conspiracy Brass, the Elders, the Loisaida Fife & Drum Corps., and Polka Loca. He has performed and recorded with John Zorn, Pink Floyd, Mel Tormé, Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, LaMonte Young, Gal Costa, They Might Be Giants, David Byrne, Itzhak Perlman, and is featured on over 500 albums. His latest recordings include the Klezmer Brass Allstars’ Chronika, The Elders’ Spirit Stronger Than Blood (NY Times Top 10 Jazz Recordings of 2024), the brass trio with percussion Conspiracy Brass (on Tzadik Records), and the spiritual nigunim cycle, In The City of God. His legendary recording Shekhina was just re-released on the Borsht Beat label.
Other recordings include Ghetto Songs; Salomé Woman of Valor (with poet Adeena Karasick); Invocations (cantorial music); the Klezmer Brass Allstars’ Carnival Conspiracy, Di Shikere Kapelye and Brotherhood of Brass; Nigunim and the Zmiros Project (Jewish mystical songs, with Klezmatics vocalist Lorin Sklamberg); the folk opera A Night in the Old Marketplace (based on Y.L. Peretz’s 1907 play); and four releases with the Hasidic New Wave. His first symphony, 1001 Voices: A Symphony for a New America (with text by Judith Sloan and video by Warren Lehrer), premiered in 2012. His Yiddish-Cuban opera, Hatuey Memory of Fire (libretto by Elise Thoron), premiered in Cuba and New York in 2018.
Lorin Sklamberg
Voice, Accordion
Lorin Sklamberg grew up in LA where he was introduced to Balkan, Jewish and other music at a young age. He was already performing as a teenager, but it wasn’t until moving to New York in the mid 80’s that he founded The Klezmatics and really found his voice and claimed his place as the most recognizable and influential voice in Yiddish music. Since then he has earned a Grammy for his work with the Klezmatics while also composing and collaborating numerous other projects, working with such luminaries as Chava Alberstein and Susan McKeown. When he’s not on stage he can be found digging for treasures at the YIVO center in New York where he works as the head archivist.
local faculty
Craig Judelman
Violin/Instrumental Music, Festival Director
Craig Judelman grew up in Seattle and since the age of four, was never more comfortable than when he had a fiddle in his hand. He started with classical music but was quickly drawn to traditional folk cultures, studying Klezmer, Jazz, American and other folk music wherever he could. His passion for engaging with the sounds and stylistic nuances captured in old recordings has led him around the world, performing and teaching klezmer and old time American folk music on both sides of the Atlantic. (see more)