2026 Featured Artists & Performers

Stay tuned for more bios!

People toss their handkerchiefs in the air during the landsmanshaft mutual aid banquet at KlezCummington 2025.

2026 ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE

Lya Finston

Original artwork of a hand by Lya Finston

“My artistic practice is an investigation of worry, and the ways in which religion and perception construct themselves around it. My reflections on Jewish folk culture legitimize superstition, holding it sacred for the cultural legacy and promises of safety it provides. Here we find less intellectualized, and more inherited frameworks for understanding the world, whose very unprovability lend them validity. These traditions speak volumes to the human experience, illuminating the regional and historical circumstances from which they were born, and mirroring timeless anxieties of humankind. My prints and sculptures exist within a blended domestic-spiritual landscape. By enlisting the inherent authority of the graphic mark, I am able to bolster so-called superstitions, reifying my depictions of them in a visual language that is at once historical and contemporary.

I am a Jewish artist who is interested in investigating, bolstering, and celebrating the diasporic, anti-zionist Jewish culture with which I identify. Traditions that are categorized as "superstition" are of particular interest to me because they so often blend into the landscape of the home, encompassing the experiences of women and other marginalized groups within traditional Jewish practice. I am committed to engaging with Jewish traditions in the direction of universal emancipation for all people.”

Brivele

Brivele is a Seattle-based ensemble who braid together Yiddish song, anti-fascist and labor balladry, folk-punk, and contemporary rabble-rousing in stirring vocal harmony.

In Yiddish, Brivele (בריוועלע) means "little letter." Like letters, songs travel — through time and over borders. They pick up dirt, aromas, fingerprints. They are sent to lovers, they foment revolution, they get stolen and censored, burned and salvaged, sewn into our clothes.

We journey into the archives of Yiddish anti-fascist musical tradition, bringing together anti-authoritarian satire, mournful remembrances, and the disguised political commentary in folk ditties and theater classics. These songs are a correspondence: our ancestors' voices speak clearly and uncompromisingly, sometimes sweetly, to our present moment.

Veretski Pass playing music

Cookie Segelstein

Cookie Segelstein is a founding member of Veretski Pass: Taking its name from the mountain pass through which Magyar tribes crossed into the Carpathian basin to settle what later became the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Veretski Pass offers a unique and exciting combination of virtuosic musicianship and raw energy that has excited concertgoers across the world. Veretski Pass plays Old Country Music with origins in the Ottoman Empire, once fabled as the borderlands of the East and the West. In a true collage of Carpathian, Jewish, Rumanian and Ottoman styles, typical suites contain dances from Moldavia and Bessarabia; Jewish melodies from Poland and Rumania; Hutzul wedding music from Carpathian-Ruthenia; and haunting Rebetic aires from Smyrna, seamlessly integrated with original compositions. Their CDs have repeatedly been on the 10-best recording lists of journalists since 2002.

Jordan Wax with his accordion

Jordan Wax

Jordan Wax is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer based in New Mexico. For the past twenty-five years he has studied intergenerational music traditions with elders from a variety of cultural lineages in the Ozarks, Mexico, Ecuador, New Mexico, and throughout Yiddishland, and directed collaborative ensembles in the context of Ashkenazi, Ozark, and Indo-Hispanic cultural revitalizations. He began his formal study of Yiddish with Peysakh Fiszman in 2000, and since has worked with Perl Teitelbaum and informally with elders who have shared with him the warmth and complexity of Yiddish’s musical and spoken dialects. In addition to ongoing projects with poly-ethnic traditions in New Mexico, his current work centers his songwriting in Yiddish. His debut album, טײַטש | The Heart Deciphers was released in January 2025 by Borscht Beat, and was followed by פּאַנטאַקאָזאַק | Pantakozak, a collection of original Yiddish/English songs for children and families.

Ira Temple and firends play music at KlezCummington

Ira Khonen Temple

Ira Khonen Temple is a multi-instrumentalist, music director, and embedded cultural organizer living in Brooklyn, NY. Ira plays on and off Broadway; Recent credits include playing in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club on Broadway, Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, and music directing Indecent at the Weston Playhouse. Ira’s debut album Strange Tongue / Mistame-Loshn is a collection of traditional Yiddish songs, reimagined and expanded in English by Ira, where queer, trans songwriting meets the urgent, living breath of Yiddish culture. From Transylvanian dance music to protest poetry from the lost Jewish capitals of Europe, these songs hold grief, joy, and radical defiance.

Ira says: “These songs we’ve inherited—about heartbreak, about rebellion—they’re not meant to sit behind glass. They need us. They need to be sung.” A singer and tradition-bearer in the modern Yiddish revival, Ira brings us into a soundscape where language and legacy breathe again, not just as nostalgia, but as cultural survival.

A Glezele Tey klezmer trio with their instruments in the woods

A Glezele Tey

A Glezele Tey (Yiddish for “a little glass of tea”) invites you into their living room for a little glass of tea from the samovar, bringing audiences into an intimate world of klezmer, Yiddish folk song, and tkhines (traditional Ashkenazi prayers centering the experiences of women, trans, and gender non-conforming people, set to new melodies). A Glezele Tey’s music is an act of deep care—rooted in community gathering, lineage, and ritual, we lift our collective voices to move through grief, inspire action, and build a frayer velt (a freer world). ​

Performers in Jenny Romaine's Eggplant Pageant perform at KlezCummington

Jenny Romaine

Jenny Romaine is a director, designer and puppeteer and co-founder/artistic director of the OBIE winning Great Small Works visual theater collective. She is music director of Jennifer Miller’s CIRCUS AMOK and artist in residence at Milk Not Jails and Inside Change. With Great Small Works Romaine performs, teaches, and directs in theaters, schools, parks, libraries, museums, prisons, street corners, and other public spaces, producing work on many scales, from gigantic outdoor spectacles with scores of participants, to miniature shows in living rooms. She has directed and designed community based spectacles for numerous projects in New York City and around the world. Romaine was a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 13 years and for several decades has drawn on Yiddish/Pan Jewish primary source materials to create art that has contemporary meaning.