Variety the Spice of Festival : Valley Jewish event will present a vast array of offerings, from a famed singer of Sephardic music to kosher Chinese food to an African American group singing in Hebrew.

Its organizers hope that Sunday’s Valley Jewish Festival will draw 40,000 people, making it, in the publicist’s phrase, “the largest outdoor Jewish gathering west of Chicago.”

However many actually show up, the event will be remarkable, if only for the diversity of its cultural offerings.

You want dance, the festival will have everything from Keshet Chaim, an American-Israeli contemporary dance troupe, to Zadonu, a West African dance troupe whose coordinator, CalArts staffer Alan Eder, has written Passover music with a reggae beat.

As Neal Brostoff, coordinator of the day’s entertainment, explains, the festival on the bucolic campus of Pierce College in Woodland Hills isn’t strictly multicultural.

“The emphasis is on Jewish arts,” Brostoff says. “But it will be inclusive, not exclusive.”

That means that visitors can expect to experience some of the extraordinary variety of Jewish culture, just as they can taste kosher food in its Chinese and Latin American guises, as well as the more familiar Mediterranean and Eastern European modes.

Music will be especially well represented and diverse. As an example, Brostoff points to the appearance Sunday morning of Isabelle Ganz, “to my way of thinking, the foremost singer of Sephardic music in the United States.”

Sephardic music traces its roots back not to ancient Israel or the shtetls of Poland, but to the Iberian Peninsula, from which the Jews were expelled by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in 1492.

“Sephardic music is so hot,” Brostoff enthuses, “so colorful, so spicy. It’s delicious music, with sounds that are not completely unfamiliar to us because we hear Spanish music so much in Los Angeles.”

Ganz, who lives in Houston, will appear at 11 a.m. Some of her selections will be sung in Ladino, a language that fuses pre-expulsion Spanish and Hebrew much as Yiddish merges Hebrew and medieval German. She will be accompanied by Los Angeles artists John Bilezikjian, playing the lute-like Armenian oud, and Josh Tamar, on the dumbek, an Arabic drum. As Brostoff notes, “L. A. is so rich in people who play ethnic instruments.”

The festival, held every two years, is sponsored by the San Fernando Valley Alliance of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. According to Chairman Dan Shuster, the event will give participants a chance to celebrate their Jewishness. “We designed this festival to bring Jews together in a joyous environment showcasing the beauty of Jewish culture and heritage.”

A highlight of the afternoon program will be an appearance by 40 members of the new Los Angeles Jewish Symphony. Brostoff, a pianist and the symphony’s executive director, says it was founded in 1984 and reflects the view “that a Jewish orchestra, that would play Jewish music, whatever Jewish music means, was something the city needs.”

Brostoff is clearly proud of the program that the orchestra will perform. “It’s the most accessible, easy to listen to, enjoyable music we could find,” he says.

It is also remarkably varied, albeit all Jewish music of one sort or another. The program will include a suite of klezmer music, “the raucous Eastern European music often associated with weddings” (think clarinet); a suite from John Williams’ score for the film “Schindler’s List”; work by Israeli composer A. U. Boskovich, and a preview of “Liberation,” a new work by Los Angeles composer and cantor Meir Finkelstein written to commemorate the liberation 50 years ago of the Nazi death camps.

Several outstanding local cantors, including Finkelstein, will perform during the grand finale program, which begins at 2:30 p.m. Also appearing will be the Pacoima Mass Choir, an all-African-American group that will perform in Hebrew along with the choir of the University of Judaism.

Other features of the festival will include a children’s park, information booths sponsored by various nonprofit organizations and synagogues, a pavilion on Israel sponsored by its consulate and the sale of arts, crafts and other items.

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WHERE AND WHEN

What: Valley Jewish Festival.

Location: Pierce College, 6201 Winnetka Ave., Woodland Hills.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.

Price: $4 general, $1 for seniors and children 12 and younger.

Call: (310) 587-3205.