Dr. Galeet Dardashti is an Iranian-descended anthropologist and performer/composer with a well-earned reputation as a trail-blazing performer, educator and advocate of MENA Jewish culture. As a scholar, her publications examine Israeli music/media and Mizrahi cultural politics; she is currently writing a book on the Mizrahi piyyut (sacred song) phenomenon in Israel. Dardashti has held postdoctoral fellowships at NYU and Rutgers and most recently was Assistant Professor of Jewish Music/Musician in Residence at the Jewish Theological Seminary. As Affiliated Fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center in 2020/21 she’s begun research on young Sephardi/Mizrahi North American Jews. As a performer/composer, Dardashti is the first woman to continue her family’s tradition of distinguished Persian and Jewish musicianship. She is widely known as leader/founder of the all-woman Middle Eastern Jewish ensemble Divahn, and through her multi-disciplinary commissions The Naming and Monajat; she will be the Artist-in-Virtual-Residence at Indiana University’s Jewish Studies program in spring 2021.

Rabbi Yosef Goldman is a singer and composer, prayer leader, and educator whose original Jewish music is sung in synagogues, schools, and camps across the country. As a performer and composer, Yosef weaves together musical forms from both his Mizrahi and Ashkenazi heritage—including Chassidic niggunim (devotional melodies), Sephardic piyyutim (sacred song), and contemporary American Jewish sacred music. His first album, Open My Heart, released by Rising Song Records in winter 2019, is both deeply innovative and firmly rooted in traditional sacred Jewish music.

A sought-after vocalist, Yosef performs and records with a wide range of Jewish artists. He is a longtime featured vocalist with Joey Weisenberg in the Hadar Ensemble and a founding member of the Middle Eastern Jewish music ensemble the Epichorus. Along with trombonist Dan Blacksberg, Yosef was selected by the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts for its 2018–19 Jazz Residency.

Yosef received rabbinic ordination and a Masters in Sacred Music from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and his rabbinate has included serving as a congregational rabbi and music director, and as a hospital chaplain. As a Jewish educator, Yosef’s teaching facilitates people finding authentic and meaningful experience in Jewish prayer and practice, including singing as an embodied spiritual practice. As a consultant, Yosef advises synagogues and prayer communities seeking to deepen the communal spiritual experience through musical prayer. He has served as a ba’al tefillah (prayer leader) for some of the most spiritually vibrant and creative prayer communities in the United States and Israel, including Romemu and B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan, the Kitchen in San Francisco, and Nava Tehila and Beit Tefila Yisraeli in Israel. As co-director of Hadar’s Rising Song Institute, alongside Joey Weisenberg, Yosef initiated the year-long Jewish Music Residency program for emerging musical-spiritual artists and established its record label, Rising Song Records. Yosef continues to serve Rising Song Institute as an artist and Senior Advisor.

This summer, Yosef and his wife, Rabbi Annie Lewis, will join Shaare Torah Congregation in Gaithersburg, MD to serve as co-Senior Rabbis