Arts • Culture • Jewish Creativity

San Diego Jewish Arts Festival Celebrates Jewish Creativity in 2026

From comedy and music to theater, climate-inspired performance and stories of Jewish courage, JFest 2026 offers a vibrant season of artistic expression.

The San Diego Jewish Arts Festival, widely known as JFest, returns in 2026 with a rich and wide-ranging program that reflects the beauty, humor, resilience and creative spirit of Jewish life. This year’s festival brings together nationally known performers, local artists, musicians, writers and community voices for a season designed to entertain, inspire and connect.

The 2026 lineup spans comedy, theater, cabaret, sacred music, Jewish history, climate-centered performance and musical tribute. The result is a festival that feels both rooted in tradition and alive with contemporary imagination.

One of the marquee events of the season is An Evening with Alex Edelman, featuring the acclaimed Jewish comedian whose work has brought sharp, thoughtful and deeply personal storytelling to audiences around the world. Edelman’s presence gives the festival a major contemporary cultural voice, combining humor with the kind of intelligence and humanity that has long defined great Jewish comedy.

Another standout is Regenerate!, presented at Coastal Roots Farm. The event brings Jewish artists into conversation with the natural world through performance, music, dance and ritual. With original works inspired by ecology, spirituality and climate awareness, Regenerate! shows how Jewish wisdom can speak powerfully to today’s environmental challenges.

The festival also embraces theatrical storytelling through Samuel, His Widow and the Whispering Flowers, a colorful and moving production set in a shtetl. Through music, dance and dramatic imagination, the story explores love, faith, community and the stubborn endurance of hope.

JFest’s beloved Women of Valor returns for its 17th year, honoring six inspiring San Diego Jewish women through stories, songs and performance. The program continues a tradition of celebrating leadership, service, courage and Jewish meaning through the lives of women who have strengthened their community.

Music is also at the heart of the 2026 festival. Israeli singer Ohad Moskowitz appears with Colin Schachat and the San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir for an evening of uplifting Jewish song. Meanwhile, Looking for Leonard brings Broadway star Patrick Page and Grammy-nominated singer Perla Batalla together for a moving tribute to Leonard Cohen, one of the most poetic and spiritually resonant Jewish songwriters of the modern era.

With Nusach San Diego, the festival turns its attention to the musical identity of the region itself. The cabaret-style program blends Jewish prayer, Broadway melodies, popular music and local cultural influences, asking a joyful and surprisingly profound question: what does San Diego sound like?

The season concludes with the powerful new musical Budapest, Budapest, by Ali Viterbi and Toby Singer. Set against the backdrop of 1940s Budapest, the work explores Hannah Senesh, Rudolf Kastner and the difficult moral choices faced during the Holocaust. It is a fitting example of JFest’s larger mission: using the arts to wrestle with history, memory, identity and the meaning of heroism.

Taken together, the 2026 San Diego Jewish Arts Festival is more than a performance series. It is a celebration of Jewish imagination across generations. It honors memory while welcoming innovation, and it reminds audiences that Jewish culture continues to thrive wherever artists, storytellers and communities gather to create meaning.