Inaugural Philly Jewish Music Festival aims to showcase talent from across the region
By Samantha Witchen
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When Jamie Marx walked into a music industry happy hour at the Philadelphia Folk Song Society’s headquarters in February 2019, little did he know that—just over seven years later—he’d be launching a Jewish music festival that would be a first for the Philadelphia region. Marx, the cantor at Temple Sholom in Broomall, PA, had shown up to the happy hour to meet other like-minded musicians and maybe make some connections in the Philly music scene. He ended up meeting Philly Music Lab’s co-founders, Alexandra Cutler-Fetkewicz and Samantha Wittchen, and within a few months, they were on the path to putting together the inaugural Philly Jewish Music Festival.
A native Californian who moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia in 2014 when he took the position at Temple Sholom, Marx noticed that while a synagogue may hire a musical group for a performance at their synagogue, there wasn’t really a communal event in the region centered around music that brought together Jews from across the greater Philadelphia area to celebrate Jewish music and musicians. For several years he dreamed of changing that. When he met Philly Music Lab’s Cutler-Fetkewicz and Wittchen, he thought he might have found a pair who could see the potential in his dream. As it turned out, he was right.
Cutler-Fetkewicz and Wittchen started Philly Music Lab to support and amplify the music of cross-genre and cross-cultural performers, as well as musicians who perform folk, ethnic, and world music. They spent years connecting these musicians to performance opportunities and curating shows that featured such musicians. When they met up with Marx for coffee after the happy hour, Cutler-Fetkewicz asked him what his dream gig was. When Marx then told them about his big idea for a Jewish music festival, they immediately agreed to help.
“It was a total no-brainer for us,” recalls Cutler-Fetkewicz. “The idea of an event centered around music and cross-cultural exchange was so in line with what we do that it felt like we’d be crazy not to do it.”
The trio had started working on festival planning when the pandemic struck. The festival—and everything else—got put on the back burner for a couple of years while everyone tried to figure out how to return to live, in-person events. Then, in 2022, when things were beginning to return to normal, the team decided it was time to dust off the concept and start working in earnest to make the festival happen.
From the beginning, Marx knew he wanted the festival to feature a wide range of musical genres so it wouldn’t only focus on typical contemporary synagogue worship music. The goal was to showcase that the music made by Jews is just as varied as the diaspora itself. Marx wanted to create something with broad appeal, not just across the Jewish community but beyond to all music-lovers in the Philadelphia region. The other non-negotiable was that the festival needed to feature musicians from the Philly area.
“Philadelphia has an incredible number of Jewish musicians working both in the synagogue world and playing regular clubs and venues,” says Marx. “It just seemed crazy to me that there wasn’t some big community event that really highlighted the amazing talent in our own region.”
What the three founders landed on was a one-day, non-profit festival built around a big name Jewish headliner with regionally-known musicians comprising the majority of other performances. To encourage families to attend, it would include kids programming in the morning and other family-friendly musicians and activities throughout the day. Being a non-profit meant they could seek out grants and donations to help launch the festival while not having to rely completely on ticket sales. They set a date for the festival, May 17, 2026, sufficiently far in advance to allow time to raise money for a festival of the scale they were envisioning.
Over the next few years, the team laid the necessary groundwork to launch an event that could draw as many as 1,000 people to the inaugural event. They found a venue in South Philadelphia and they secured the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, located in Philadelphia, as a partner. The Recording Academy, producer of the GRAMMYs, is also a partner thanks to Cutler-Fetkewicz’s affiliation as President of the Philadelphia Chapter. The founders’ hope is that, if this first festival is a success, it will become an annual or biennial event.
“The dream is that this first festival brings people together, that it gets attention and support from within the Jewish community and also from the broader Philly community, and that we have the funding to roll right into the next one in 2027. The number of musicians who have reached out to us wanting to play the festival shows that we could create line-ups for years. And that’s what we would love to make happen.”
For the programming, the initial vision that Marx, Cutler-Fetkewicz, and Wittchen had for the festival appears to have become a reality. The festival is headlined by international touring artist Matisyahu. Himself a native of West Chester, PA, the GRAMMY-nominated musician has a broad fan base among Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike. The rest of the line-up includes regional and Philly-local musicians who span hip-hop, rock, R&B, singer/songwriter, and Mizrachi, Sephardic, and klezmer musical traditions.
The music is, indeed, as varied as the Jewish diaspora. New York-based musician Lily Henley highlights the Ladino language in her expressive Sephardic Jewish ballads, while Philly-based Souls on Fire fuses Jewish melodies with progressive rock. Philadelphia singer/songwriter Avi Wisnia blends West Coast jazz with contemporary piano-pop and Brazilian bossa nova, and Kedmah spins powerful traditional Jewish melodies into boldly modern adaptations. Hip-hop collective Rappers & Rabbis will lead attendees in a high-energy Ma’ariv (evening prayer) experience, and Jewish Learning Venture’s jkidphilly is providing musical programming for children. The entire festival is emceed by comedian Eitan Levine, known for his hit TikTok gameshow Jewish or Antisemitic, which is part trivia and part satire.
While music may be the organizing theme of the festival, Marx says that building connection and bridges of understanding is the ultimate goal. “If you want to fight antisemitism, commercials aren’t gonna cut it,” argues Marx. “You don’t fight antisemitism by telling people not to be antisemitic. You do it by bringing people together, by showing the world what it means to be joyfully Jewish, and welcoming in your friends and neighbors to be joyful with you.”
“That’s why we wanted Matisyahu,” he adds. “Because he’s such a huge artist, he can draw people who don’t identify as Jewish to our festival, and we can all just be in the moment together, rocking out to community.”
The first ever Philly Jewish Music Festival will take place on May 17, 2026 at the 2300 Arena in Philadelphia. Visit phillyjewishmusic.org for more information and tickets.
About the Author:
SAMANTHA WITTCHEN is a Philadelphia-based harpist and co-founder of Philly Music Lab. She is one of the founding organizers of the Philly Jewish Music Festival.
