There’s a Yiddish word, heymish, that roughly translates to cozy, intimate, homey—in other words, an unmistakable feeling of comfort or familiarity. It’s also the word that KlezKanada chose for its first-ever Yiddish Culture Jam, a new urban festival coming to Montreal on February 26 - March 1, 2026. The choice is deliberate. Heymish captures exactly what the organization hopes to create: not a museum of a bygone culture, but a living room everyone is invited into. As Avia Moore, Artistic Director of KlezKanada and one of the organizers, put it, the event is meant to “feel like you’re [learning] in somebody’s house.”
For 30 years, KlezKanada has run its summer retreat in the Laurentians, drawing participants from around the world for a week of workshops, dance, and music. The Yiddish Culture Jam is different. It’s a shorter, more accessible, urban version of that immersive experience, held in Montreal. The goal is to lower the barrier to entry—to introduce Montrealers who can’t take a week off in the summer or who may never have imagined Yiddish culture as something meant for them to the diversity and beauty of Yiddish.
That accessibility is central to KlezKanada’s broader mission, which pushes back against the idea that Yiddish culture belongs to the past. “We see Yiddish culture as a vibrant living culture,” Moore explained. “Our mission is both cultural transmission, to revitalize culture that was disrupted by the Holocaust, but also to celebrate the ways in which that revitalization has created new artwork, new life.” The rupture of the Holocaust should not be minimized, but, as KlezKanada frames it, it also should not be the end of Yiddish’s story. What began as a Klezmer revival in the 1970s and 1980s has matured into something that, in Moore’s words, “feels like a renaissance and not a revival.”
This year’s Culture Jam channels that spirit of renewal into a dialogue between Yiddish and Québécois traditions. The two cultures share more common ground than one might expect, as emotional musical storytelling is prevalent in both. KlezKanada commissioned a Yiddish translation of the popular Québécois folk song “Le Petit Bonheur,” whose themes of luck, love, and disappointment resonate naturally with Yiddish folk music. At the Culture Jam’s Saturday night kitchen party, dances from both traditions will share the floor. The musical interaction even extends to the addition of Québécois foot percussion to Klezmer. One activity offered is the songwriting workshop led by the Boston-based band, Levyosn, inviting attendees to compose new Yiddish songs. As Moore noted, writing new Yiddish songs in 2026 is not fundamentally different from writing new songs in English. If Yiddish is your language, you create in it.
The weekend’s programming reaches beyond music. There’s a pickling workshop led by Liz Alpern and Jeffrey Yoskowitz, founders of Gefilteria, who approach food the same way KlezKanada approaches music: as a living, evolving tradition. Participants can also try mezuzah-making and embroidery.
Additionally, when working to reinvigorate a culture that experienced a rupture, a question that comes up is how to rebuild the practices and traditions while keeping them authentic. When asked about that, Moore addressed the supposed tension between authenticity and innovation. In her view, the conflict is a false one.Tradition is not static; there was never a singular moment when someone declared it “definitive.” The task is not to replicate the past, but to understand it deeply enough to carry it forward with intention.
For KlezKanada, success at the Culture Jam will look simple: people having a great time and leaving with the understanding that Yiddish culture is more than jokes and pickles. Yiddish culture is, and has always been, an evolving identity, still being shaped in real time.
Concerts, talks, and workshops are still available at https://klezkanada.org/year-round/yiddish-culture-jam/.
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