Eli Benedict (IL/CA; jiddische Sprache, Tanz)
is a researcher and collector of Yiddish culture, and a performing artist working in traditional Jewish movement and song.
Raised within a Hasidic community, where dance and nigun (melodies without words) were forms of communal expression and inner elevation, he is a native speaker of several Yiddish and Hebrew dialects and Aramaic, and part of a UCL team studying Hasidic Yiddish.
He serves as Program Director at League for Yiddish, producing and hosting its Yiddish YouTube channel, and serves in the leadership of YUNG YiDiSH Museum in Israel and Montreal. He has taught Yiddish internationally - from community classrooms to academic halls - including Workmen’s Circle, New York; University of Vienna; Swedish Jewish Federation; and Jewish Museum & Yiddish Library, Montreal.
As a researcher and performer of klezmer, Hasidic dance, and nigun, he has taught internationally, trained ensembles, and performed on diverse stages. His work bridges scholarship and stage, archive and embodied practice.
He builds unlikely bridges between dance and dusty volumes, Hasidic fire and academic precision, nigun and footnote. For him, Yiddish is not a language of the past, but a language of the future that traveled back in time - weathered, hovering like a poetic prophecy between heaven and uncertainty. His approach to dance is not reconstructed folklore, but a charged physical language born in crowded rooms and wedding circles, where rhythm grips the body, emotion rises, and movement approaches its edge: intense, expressive, and vibrantly alive!
>> YouTube: League for Yiddish (Interviews in Yiddish)
>> YouTube: Various playlists
(Yiddish films, theater, klezmer & Hasidic music, Nigunim, Gramen, and more)
Photo: Shendl Copitman
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