2010: Aaron Lansky & Bryna Wasserman

Aaron Lansky is the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, an organization he created to help salvage Yiddish language publications. When he began saving books in the early 1980s, most experts believe that there were fewer than 70,000 Yiddish volumes extant.  In fact, he has saved over one million books. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 for his work.  He is also the author of Outwitting History (2004), an autobiographical account of how Lansky saved the Yiddish books of the world, from the 1970s to the present day. It won the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award. 

Bryna Wasserman studied at the Tisch School of Fine Arts (NYU) before working at theatres around the world including the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Centre, Mercer Street, Vancouver Opera House, American Place and four seasons at the Folkesbiene Yiddish Theatre. Among the productions she has directed in Yiddish are Mirele Efros, The Sages of Chelm, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The Threepenny Opera, The Dybbuk, and Old Wicked Songs.   Ms. Wasserman instituted a series of exciting initiatives for her 1999-2000 season as head of the SBC, including bringing in Soulpepper, housing Bill Glassco's new Montreal Young Company at the house, and co-producing with Winnipeg Jewish Theatre.  For this, she received the Montreal English Critics Circle Award for distinction, as well as the award for best production, amateur or semi-professional for her production of Houdini. 

2009: The Klezmatics & Dr. Barney Zumoff 

The Klezmatics are a Grammy Award winning American neo-klezmer music group based in New York City, who have achieved fame singing in several languages, most notably mixing old Yiddish tunes with other types of more contemporary music of differing origins.  Current members include composers Matt Darriau, wind instruments, and Frank London, on trumpet, Paul Morrissett playing bass and tsimbl cimbalom, vocalist Lorin Sklamberg on accordion and Lisa Gutkin on violin.  The group formed in NY's East Village in 1986.  They have appeared numerous times on television, including PBS Great Performances series, with Itzhak Perlman.  

Dr. Barney Zumoff is the current vice-president of the Frorward Association, and a noted leader of The Workmen's Circle and numerous other Yiddish oriented national organizations, as well as the former Chief Emeritus, division of endocrinology and metabolism at Beth Israel Medical Center.  He has been at the forefront of efforts to sustaing Yiddish as part of the Jewish community's general identity for decades. He is a published translator of Yiddish poetry and prose, and was a longtime friend and colleague of the late Yosl Mlotek.

2008: Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett & Theodore Bikel 

Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett is University Professor in the Department of Performance Arts at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York University. She is the award winning author of numerous books that illuminate the experience of Jews in Eastern Europe between the two World Wars, including the most recent  They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust, with Mayer Kirshenblatt (University of California Press, 2007), and the widely praised bestseller Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust, with Lucjan Dobroszycki (New York: Schocken, reissue 1995). Her books and essays have covered a wide range of topics, touching on history, and the arts. 

Theodore Bikel is a beloved icon of American and international folk-music, an actor, speaker, and a passionate advocate for multiple causes dear to his heart.  Born in Vienna in 1923, Bikel was raised in a progressive, Yiddish speaking environment. When he was 13 his family moved to Palestine, where he began an artistic journey that would lead him to the pinnacle of success in theater, film, television, recordings, concerts, and radio.  Theodore Bikel's genre-defining recordings of Yiddish folksongs since the 1950's have contributed tremendously to their preservation and dissemination. 

2007: Dr. Hankus Netsky & Mikhel Baron

Dr. Hankus Netsky is an American klezmer musician, teacher, composer, and researcher. He is a founding member and director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band as well as research directory for the Klezmer Conservatory Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to researching and perpetuating Jewish music. He has collaborated with numerous artists, including Itzhak Perlman, Robin Williams, Joel Grey, and Theodore Bikel.  Netsky is currently an instructor in jazz and contemporary improvisation at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and Bachelors and Masters degrees in composition from New England Conservatory. He has also taught Yiddish Music at Hebrew College, the New England Conservatory, and Wesleyan University, and has lectured extensively on the subject in the US and abroad.

Michael (Mikhel) Baron and his lifelong companion, Millie have dedicated their lives to yiddishkayt and education.  Mikhl was born in Oshmiany (near Vilna, Lithuania).  He studied at the prestigious Vilna Real Gynmasium.  After fleeing Nazi occupation in 1941, Mikhl fought in the Soviet Army and after the war, reunited with his shtetl sweetheart, Millie Persky, they emigrated to the U.S. in 1949.  Since then, Mikhl has served the North American Jewish community as an educator, summer camp director, Yiddish school teacher, Professor of Jewish Studies at Queens College, and Scholar-in-Residence at Circle Lodge.  Mikhl and Millie’s daughters carry on the family tradition of education and the arts: Ruth teaches public school, directs WC/AR shuln and inspires generations of children as Music Counselor at Camp KinderRing; Janice teaches English as a Second Language to sixth graders in the New York City public school system.  Mikhl Baran helped shape the Jewish identities of thousands of young people as Director of The Workmen’s Circle’s CampYungvelt in Ontario, Canada, the Bund’s Camp Hemshekh and as longtime Jewish Culture Director of Camp Kinder Ring.  For over twenty years he has been the sustaining force behind the Workmen’s Circle’s Yiddish and Russian-speaking Branches and is known the world over as the voice of Yiddish radio on The Forward Hour.   

2006: Dr. David Roskies & Dr. Eugene Orenstein

Dr. David Roskies is the Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture and a professor of Jewish Literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary. After learning Yiddish in secular schools in Montreal, Roskies was educated at Brandeis University, where he received his doctorate in 1975.  In the 1970s, he lived in the Havurat Shalom, a small egalitarian chavurah in Somerville, MA, best known as the first such lay-led community in the US.  His major focuses of study have been the Holocaust, the folklore of Ashkenazic Jewry, and Yiddish culture-- writing nine books and receiving numerous awards on such subjects.

Dr. Eugene Orenstein is a distinguished professor of Yiddish and Modern Jewish History at McGill University and a published scholar in the culture of Eastern European Jewry. He has taught Yiddish language and literature at YIVO, Oxford University, University College, London and at the Centre for the Study of Jewish Civilization, and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.