Arnold Aronson is a professor of theater at Columbia University and writes frequently about scenography. He is co–editor of the journal Theatre and Performance Design and his most recent book is Ming Cho Lee: A Life in Design (2014).
Hasia Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University. She is the author of numerous books on American Jewish and immigration history, particularly Lower East Side Memories: The Jewish Place in America (2002) and most recently, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migration to New Worlds and the Peddlers Who Led the Way (2015).
Stefanie Halpern is a doctoral candidate in Jewish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her dissertation, “Crossing Over from the Yiddish Rialto to the American Stage,” deals with the intersection of the Yiddish and English–language stages in America. Her article “Kate Bateman: Sanitizing the Beautiful Jewess” appeared in the Drama Review, and her “A Meeting of Life and Death: Ritual and Performance at the Ohel,” appeared in the Journal of Ritual Studies.
Barbara Henry teaches at the University of Washington, Seattle, in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and at the Stroum Jewish Studies Center. She is the author of Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish Drama (2011), and co–editor, with Joel Berkowitz, of Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business (2012).
Edna Nahshon is professor of Jewish theater and drama at the Jewish Theological Seminary and senior associate at Oxford University's Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. In her work, she focuses on the multiple aspects of the nexus of Jews and theater. Her books include Yiddish Proletarian Theatre: The Art and Politics of the Artef, 1925–1940 (1998); From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill's Jewish Plays (2005); Jews and Shoes (2009); Jewish Theatre: A Global View (editor/contributor, 2009); Jews and Theater in an Intercultural Context (editor/contributor 2012); and Stars, Strikes and the Yiddish Stage: The Story of the Hebrew Actors' Union 1899–2005 (companion catalog to YIVO exhibition, 2009). Her latest book (co–authored with Prof. Michael Shapiro), titled Wrestling With Shylock: Jewish Responses to ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2016.
Edward Portnoy teaches in the Jewish Studies Department at Rutgers University and serves as the academic advisor at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Nahma Sandrow is the author of Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (1977–1996). She has published books and articles about Yiddish and other theaters, and translated Yiddish plays. She wrote librettos for the opera Enemies, A Love Story and the musical comedy Kuni–Leml, both based on Yiddish material.
Alisa Solomon is a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Her most recent book is Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of 'Fiddler on the Roof' (2013).
Judith Thissen is associate professor of film history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She is a specialist of immigrant Jewish leisure culture in New York City in the early 20th century. This research has been widely published in international journals and numerous anthologies including The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (2008) and Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance and Show Business (2012). She recently co–edited Contemporary Culture: New Directions in Art and Humanities Research (2013) and Cinema beyond the City: Small–town and Rural Film Culture in Europe (forthcoming 2016).
Joshua S. Walden is a member of the musicology faculty of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature and Musical Modernism (2014) and editor of Representation in Western Music (2013) and The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music (2015). He received the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for his 2014 article “The ‘Yidishe Paganini’: Sholem Aleichem’s Stempenyu, the Music of Yiddish Theatre, and the Character of the Shtetl Fiddler,” in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association.