Menachem Kipnis (1879–1942) was born in Ushomir, Ukraine, into a family of cantors. Kipnis's work as an ethnomusicologist, singer, photographer, and folklorist unfolded at the height of Jewish folkloristic activity in Europe between the world wars. Kipnis died of a stroke in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942.

Sheila E. Jelen is a professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies and Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance.

Raphael Finkel is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Kentucky. He compiled the first version of the Jargon File. Finkel is also an activist for the survival of the Yiddish language.