our Team
Staff
Margot Seigle
Co-director & Co-Founder
Fundraising, Operations & Finance
Margot (they/them) is a community builder, cultural organizer and music maker who believes in the power of song to heal and transform. Margot is a co-founder of Linke Fligl and Let My People Sing! who loves Shabbos, direct communication and slow cooking meat. They come from a lineage of Eastern European Jews who assimilated into whiteness in the Chicago suburbs. After a decade of living in the Hudson Valley on occupied Schagticoke / Mohican land they are now based in Minneapolis, MN. They are thrilled to be ushering in this next chapter of LMPS!
Batya Levine
Co-director & Co-Founder
Programs, Creative Direction & Communications
Batya (they/them) uses song as a tool for cultivating healing and resilience in their work as a communal song leader, musician, shaliach tzibur (Jewish prayer leader) and cultural organizer. They believe in the liberatory power of song to untie what is bound within us, and sustain us as we build a more just and beautiful world. Batya is one of the co-founders of Let My People Sing! They are a recording artist, teacher, and alumni of Rising Song Institute’s programs. Batya offers song, ritual, and workshops in a variety of communities, and composes original music made of Ashkenazi yearning, queer heart-medicine, and emunah (faith/trust). Batya released their first album, Karov, with Rising Song Records in 2020. They are also a lover of the ocean, living room dance parties, and puns. Batya is honored and stoked that they get to do the cultural organizing work of their dreams with LMPS! Learn more at www.batyalevine.com
Marques Hollie
Program Faculty
Marques Hollie (they/he) is a operatically-trained vocalist, ritual leader, and theatre maker, who has been telling (and singing!) stories for as long he can remember. Marques believes that Jewish practice and ritual are expansive, resilient containers and they enjoy exploring their identities as a Queer, Black, Jewish person through original songs and niggunim, liturgy, and theatrical work. Following a two year course of study, Marques received ordination as a Maggid (sacred storyteller), and is now a rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. In his spare time, Marques takes pole and aerial classes, plays dodgeball with Stonewall Sports, serves on the board of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva, and dreams about playing the Baker in Into The Woods. For more information about Marques and what they're up to, check out www.marqueshollie.com.
Advisory Circle
Anthony Russell
For the past ten years Anthony Russell has been a vocalist, composer and arranger specializing in music in the Yiddish language. Anthony's work with klezmer trio Veretski Pass resulted in Convergence, an exploration of a century of African American and Ashkenazi Jewish music. His recent release on the Borscht Beat label with accordionist and keyboardist Dmitri Gaskin, Kosmopolitn, features their original settings of Yiddish modernist poetry for voice and string ensemble. Anthony has also been a culture essayist in a number of publications, including The Forward, Tablet Magazine, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, PROTOCOLS, Full Stop Magazine, Ayin Press and Jewish Currents.
Ida Assefa
Ida Assefa is an organizer and community health care worker living in on Massachusetts land in Boston, MA. Ida is a founding member of the Jews of Color, Indigenous, Sephardi, and Mizrahi caucus of Kavod, a multiethnic and multiracial community led by young Jews in Greater Boston, a member of the Cultural Organizing Team at Linke Fligl, and an organizer with Muslim Justice League and the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network. She provides care and support for youth living with HIV through her work at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Jessica Lurie
Jessica Lurie (ALTO SAX /FLUTE /ELECTRONICS ) is a multi-instrumentalist performer and composer based in Brooklyn, NY and Seattle, WA. She embraces a wide range of musical influences, including funk, blues, eastern-European folk musics and improvisation-heavy jazz. She leads the Jessica Lurie Ensemble, Tiptons Sax Quartet & Drums and several other groups.Jessica participated in LMPS’s first summer retreat as an instructor of Sephardic music with Katie Down and has been an enthusiastic supporter ever since! She has performed and collaborated with musical icons in the traditional and experimental Jewish music scene, including John Zorn, Frank London, Jenny Romaine, Susan Watts, David Krakauer, Michael Winograd, Basya Shechter, Jon Madof’s Zion80, Jewlia Eisenberg, Shira Kline and Naomi Less of LabShul. She currently finishing Sofie Salonika's album of Sephardic and original compositions to be released in 2023. www.jessicalurie.com
Laynie Soloman
Laynie Soloman (they/them) is a teacher and Torah-lover who seeks to uplift the piously irreverent, queer, and subversive spirit of rabbinic text and theology. Laynie serves as the Associate Rosh Yeshiva at SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva, where they co-founded the Trans Halakha Project. They have learned and taught in various batei midrash (homes for Jewish learning) for almost a decade, and they have served on the faculty of Yeshivat Hadar, Romemu Yeshiva, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Laynie is a third generation Ashkenazi Philadelphian, and when they’re not learning Talmud, you can find Laynie reading about liberation theology, laying in their hammock, and singing nigunim.
MizraḤi / Mena Consultants
Galeet Dardashti
Iranian-descended anthropologist/vocalist/composer Dr. Galeet Dardashti has earned a reputation as a trail-blazing performer, educator and advocate of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish culture. As a performer, 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 renowned all-woman Middle Eastern Jewish ensemble Divahn, which released its newest album, Shalhevet, in 2020 and through her multi-disciplinary commissions The Naming and Monajat. Time Out New York described Dardashti’s music as “urgent, heartfelt and hypnotic;” The Huffington Post called it “heart-stopping.” Dardashti is currently working on recording Monajat, her reinvention of the Persian musical ritual of Selihot, as the Artist-in-Virtual-Residence at Indiana University. She is also Musician-in-Residence at JCP Downtown in Manhattan.
As a scholar, she holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and has garnered many fellowships for her academic research including Fulbright Hays, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Foundation for Jewish Culture. Her writings cover Mizrahi cultural politics and music, Arab/Jewish artistic “coexistence,” and the political economy of cultural production. Her current book project explores the Mizrahi piyyut (sacred song) phenomenon in contemporary Israel. Dardashti has also begun research on progressive Millenial Sephardi/Mizrahi North American Jews. Her recent positions have included Postdoctoral Fellowships at NYU and Rutgers University and most recently Assistant Professor of Jewish Music & Musician in Residence at the Jewish Theological Seminary. She is currently Visiting Professor at NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies. Dardashti fell in love with LMPS on faculty in the summer of 2018!
Nadav David
Nadav has found political and spiritual home at Kavod, a Boston-based community that integrates spiritual practice and organizing, and in other Jewish left organizations. His primary role currently is working at Resource Generation as the New England Regional Organizer, where he organizes his peers, young people with access to wealth and/or class privilege, towards the equitable (re)distribution of wealth, land and power. He also organizes locally and nationally towards a world, and communities, beyond prisons and policing and solidarity economies beyond capitalism. Nadav has been part of building several projects and organizations that connect and nourish Jews of Color, Indigenious Jews, Sephardim and Mizrahim (JOCISM), including Kavod’s JOCISM Caucus in Boston, Mizrahi Collective and Jewish Liberation Fund’s Steering Committee.
He attended LMPS for the first time in the summer of 2018 and had a transformative experience, especially learning songs, piyyutim and tunes from Sephardi and Mizrahi lineages. He supported the organizing team in following years with the JOCISM scholarship and programming, and is excited to see LMPS continue to grow and develop.
CO-Founders & Past Core TEam members
Ilana Lerman
Co-founder & Core Team Member, 2015-2022
Ilana Lerman (she/her) grew up in Milwaukee, WI surrounded by Jewish music, rooting in a deep knowing that culture, lineage, and practice are essential for a joyful and connective life. She is dedicated to interweaving song and intentional silence into the spaces she facilitates with young people, healers, clergy, and intergenerational racial justice leaders. She is a graduate of Shefa Gold’s Kol Zimra program for chant leaders and supported the inoculation of song throughout IfNotNow’s culture and strategy. Ilana is awed by the transformative power of singing and is humbled constantly by the new music emerging from this community. She currently lives on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia, with her partner and her toddler, who is teaching her how to drum on every single thing.
Rabbi Noam Lerman
Co-founder & Core Team Member, 2015-2021
Rabbi Noam Lerman (they.he.zi) is a story-collector, musician, healer, restorative justice circle keeper, nature and shabbes lover, anarchist, writer, amulet maker, and soferex (Hebrew scribe). Noam is one of the five co-founders of Let My People Sing, and worked as a language wordsmith, teacher recruiter/supporter, feedback collector, and workshop facilitator from 2015-2021. They founded Der Tkhines Proyekt, which provides experimental and songful workshops that give life to Ashkenazi spontaneous supplications that were/are composed and prayed by trans and gender-expansive-people and women. Noam also organizes with Sha'arey Ometz * Gates of Resilience, an intergenerational community that centers disability justice and healing processes by and for folks from the margins. Noam has been a chaplain for elders, incarcerated youth, and previously incarcerated fathers fighting courageously for survival, and was an associate clergy member on the ritual team at Lab/Shul. Noam has learned from their mentors that conflict and teshuva (repairations) can be viewed as a brave opportunity for growing, and restorative/transformative justice is a practice that is to be infused into all interactions and moments. They believe that facing conflict and teshuva is part of unraveling and unlearning colonialism, capitalism, and carceral culture so we can bring the world that is coming.
Rabbi Mónica Gomery
Co-founder & Core Team Member, 2015-2021
Rabbi Mónica Gomery currently lives on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia, where she serves on the clergy team of Kol Tzedek Synagogue, and teaches on the faculty of SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. She is a lover of poetry and song, which share a common name in Hebrew: shirah. Her years on the Let My People Sing! co-founders and leadership team created some of the most formative and joyful singing experiences of her life, and she is so grateful that LMPS is moving into its next iteration.