Episodes
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The first episode of Season 3 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Naomi Cohn Zentner. We discuss how she came to the field of Jewish music studies, and her ongoing work on music in historical ethnomusicology, sacred songs of the Ashkenazi domestic sphere, and the relationship between Ashkenazi and Sephardi liturgical traditions.
Naomi Cohn Zentner is a lecturer in Bar Ilan University's music department. In 2024 she held the Katz Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania's Katz Center for Advanced Judaic studies and in 2019 she was a visiting Fellow at the Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies focusing on early Jewish Music. Her research interests lie in historical ethnomusicology, sacred songs of the Ashkenazi domestic sphere and the cross-fertilization of Ashkenazi and Sephardi liturgical traditions. In 2022 she was the recipient of a three-year personal research grant from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) for a project titled: Embodying spiritual sound: new musical practices among religious Jewish-Israeli women, which she is heading in collaboration with Dr Abigail Wood of Haifa University. Her work has been published in Hebrew Studies, Ethnomusicology, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, and the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies.
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Enjoy this trailer for the third season of Sounding Jewish, a monthly podcast featuring conversations with musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and sound studies scholars, hosted and produced by Dr. Samantha M. Cooper. The first episode will be released on November 1.
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Episodes manquant?
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The seventh and final episode of Season 2 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Rebecca Cypess. We discuss how she came to the field of Jewish music studies, and her ongoing work on music in early modern Italy, England, and Gregorian England.
Musicologist and historical keyboardist Dr. Rebecca Cypess is Professor of Music and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Mason Gross School the Arts, Rutgers University. In July 2024, she will assume the position of Dean of Stern College for Women and Yeshiva College at Yeshiva University. She is the author of Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo's Italy (2016) and Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022), co-editor of Sara Levy's World: Gender, Judaism and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin (2018) and Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy: New Perspectives (2022), and over 40 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Cypess is founder and director of the Raritan Players, whose concerts and recordings explore little-known performance practices and compositions of the eighteenth century, especially those associated with women. She has been the recipient of two awards from the American Musicological Society: the Ruth A. Solie Award for a collection of musicologist essays of exceptional merit and the Noah Greenberg Award for contributions to historical performance.
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The sixth episode of Season 2 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Jeremiah Lockwood. We discuss how he came to the field of Jewish music studies, and his ongoing work on American cantorial history.
Dr. Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. Both his music performance and scholarship gravitate toward the Jewish liturgical music and Yiddish expressive culture of the early twentieth century, and the reverberations of this cultural moment in present day communities. Lockwood’s research considers the work of cantors as arbiters of social, intellectual, and aesthetic change in times of crisis and cultural transformation. Jeremiah received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2021. His first book, Golden Ages: Brooklyn Hasidic Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era (University of California Press, 2024), illuminates the work of contemporary Hasidic cantors who embrace early twentieth-century cantorial music as a nonconforming aesthetic and spiritual practice that cuts against the grain of musical and social norms of American Jewish life. Jeremiah was a 2022–23 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Fellow, where he conducted research on the khazente phenomenon of gramophone-era women performers of cantorial music and composed a new piece of music responding to this fecund moment in Jewish musical history. Jeremiah has recorded more than a dozen albums over a music career that spans decades with his band The Sway Machinery and other projects.
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The fifth episode of Season 2 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Tina Frühauf. We discuss how she came to the field of Jewish music studies, and her ongoing work on German Jewish music history.
Dr. Tina Frühauf is Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University in New York and serves on the doctoral faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center, where she heads the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation and its largest project, RILM, as Executive Director. An active scholar and writer, the study of Jewish music in modernity has been Dr. Frühauf’s primary research focus. Among Dr. Frühauf’s recent editions and books are Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989 (Oxford University Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards; and the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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The fourth episode of Season 2 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Uri Edman. We discuss how he came to the field of Jewish music studies, and his ongoing work on 18th-century British Jewish Opera Singers.
Uri Erman is a Kreitman postdoctoral fellow at the History Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His research addresses the links between the performing arts and processes of individuation and identity formation, as refracted through such categories as gender, ethnicity, and class. His first book project, under contract at Oxford University Press, focuses on opera singers, gender and national identity in Britain, 1760-1830. His current research project explores the phenomenon of the relationships between actresses and aristocrats in eighteenth-century Britain.
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The third episode of Season 2 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Edwin Seroussi. We discuss how he came to the field of Jewish music studies, and his ongoing work on Sephardic, Ottoman, and Israeli Jewish music.
Edwin Seroussi is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor of Musicology Emeritus and director of the Jewish Music Research Centre at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, he immigrated to Israel in 1971 where he completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, continuing on to receive his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1987. He has taught at Bar-Ilan and Tel Aviv Universities in Israel, and has been a visiting professor at universities in Europe and North and South America. He has published on North African and Eastern Mediterranean Jewish music, on Judeo-Islamic relations in music, and on Israeli popular music.
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The second episode of Season 2 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Jessica Roda. We discuss her forthcoming book about Ultra Orthodox Hasidic and Litvish female artists from New York and Montreal, as well as her new project on music, spirituality and healing in Orthodox Jewish circles.
Jessica Roda is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. She specializes in Jewish life in North America and France, and in international cultural policies. Her research interests include religion, performing arts, cultural heritage, gender, and media. Her articles on these topics have appeared in various scholarly journals, as well as edited volumes in French and English. The author of two books and the editor of a special issue of MUSICultures, her more recent book (Se réinventer au present, PUR 2018) was finalist for J. I. Segal Award for the best Quebec book on a Jewish theme. It also received the Prize UQAM-Respatrimoni in heritage studies. Her forthcoming monograph, For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age, investigates how music, films, and media made by ultra-Orthodox and former ultra-Orthodox women act as agents of social, economic, and cultural transformation and empowerment, and as spaces that challenge gender norms, orthodoxy, and liberalism. For this research, she was awarded the Cashmere Award from the AJS Women’s Caucus (2021) and the Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Award (2021). Immersed in the French and North American schools of anthropology and ethnomusicology, Roda earned Ph.Ds from Sorbonne University and the University of Montreal. She has served as a fellow and scholar in residence at McGill University (Eakin Fellow and Simon and Ethel Flegg), Columbia University (Heyman Center), UCLA (Department of Ethnomusicology), Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Université de Tours, University of Pennsylvania (Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies) and Université de Paris. Her public-facing work has appeared in Times of Israel, LaPresse, TV Quebec, The Huffington Post, Akadem, Radio Canada, Canadian Jewish News, France Culture, The Moment, Glamour, The Conversation US, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and numerous networks in Europe, United-States, and South America (Brazil and Colombia). Beyond her academic life, she is also a trained pianist, flutist, and modern-jazz dancer (City of Paris Conservatory), and grew up in French Guiana, a childhood that shaped her as a person, educator, and a scholar.
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The first episode of Season 2 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Anna Schultz. We discuss her ethnographic fieldwork with the Bene Israel Jewish communities of India and Israel.
Anna Schultz is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, where she is also an associate member of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and a member of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. The core issue animating her research in India and beyond is music’s power to activate profound religious experiences that in turn shape other identities. She explores nationalism in Western Indian Hindu temple performance, gendered translation in Indian Jewish song, diasporic longing in Indo-Caribbean American Hinduism, and rural-urban collisions in the devotional songs of an Indian classical singer. More recently, she has begun turning her attention toward issues of race and migration in American popular musics. Her first book, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, and her second book, Songs of Translation: Bene Israel Gender and Textual Orality, is also under contract with OUP. With Sumanth Gopinath, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society for the article, "Sentimental Remembrance and the Amusements of Forgetting in Karl and Harty's "Kentucky."" Dr. Schultz’s research has been supported by fellowships from Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women, the Hellman Foundation, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the University of Illinois, and Stanford University.
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Enjoy this trailer for the second season of Sounding Jewish, a monthly podcast featuring conversations with musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and sound studies scholars, hosted and produced by Dr. Samantha M. Cooper. The first episode will be released on November 1.
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Please enjoy this very special second bonus episode, and thank you to all of the dedicated listeners who sent in their perspectives!
To submit a recording with your thoughts on what Jewish music and sound mean to you, please send an MP3 file to [email protected] or follow the show on Instagram @theSoundingJewishPodcast!
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Please enjoy this very special first bonus episode!
To submit a recording with your thoughts on what Jewish music and sound mean to you, please send an MP3 file to [email protected] or follow the show on Instagram @theSoundingJewishPodcast!
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The seventh and final episode of Season 1 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Kay Kaufman Shelemay. We discuss her ethnographic fieldwork with the Syrian Jews of Brooklyn and Israel as well as the "Beta Israel" Jews of Ethiopia (also called "Falashas"), as well as her ongoing study of the connections between the African and Jewish musical diasporas.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University and a former Chair of the Department of Music. An ethnomusicologist specializing in both Jewish and African musics, she received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan. The author of numerous articles and reviews, Shelemay's books include Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986; winner of both the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1987 and the Prize of the International Musicological Society in 1988); A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey (1991); and Let Jasmine Rain Down. Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews (1998). In 2022, Shelemay published a book about musicians from the Horn of Africa who have migrated to communities across North American titled Sing and Sing On. Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora. She has a number of other books as well as the WW Norton textbook, Soundscapes. Exploring Music in a Changing World, now in its 3rd edition. Shelemay has been awarded major fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Radcliffe Institute. She is Past-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and in 2012, completed terms as a congressional appointee to and chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Shelemay has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), the American Academy of Jewish Research (2004), the American Philosophical Society (2013), and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences (2014). She held the Chair for Modern Culture at the Library of Congress (2007- 2008) and was the national Phi Beta Kappa/Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar (2010-2011). At Harvard University, Shelemay has been named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow and was awarded the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, and the Everett Mendelsohn Graduate Mentoring Prize.
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The sixth episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Amanda Ruppenthal Stein. We discuss her ongoing study of Jewish identity in the art music of 19th century German speaking Europe, as well as her recent trip with the Cantor's Assembly to visit the Abayudaya Jewish Community of Uganda.
Musicologist Amanda Ruppenthal Stein, Ph.D. is a lecturer in music at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin and at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a 2021 graduate of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, where she was also the Crown Graduate Fellow for the Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies. Amanda’s dissertation, Sounding Judentum: Assimilation, Art Music, and Being Jewish Musically in 19th Century German-Speaking Europe focused on how art musicians approached Jewish identity, assimilation, and acculturation through sonic expression, relationships, and writing. In 2019, Amanda traveled twice to Uganda, conducting fieldwork in collaboration with a solidarity mission and recording project of Cantors Assembly, celebrating 100 Years of the Abayudaya Jewish community in Uganda. She is a board member of the Jewish Studies and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society and has presented at many regional and national conferences in music and Jewish Studies.
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The fifth episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Phil Alexander. We discuss his background as a performing musician, entrance into the academic field of Jewish music studies, research for his recent book Sounding Jewish in Berlin, and ongoing work on the musical life of the Jews of late 19th and early 20th century Scotland.
Dr. Phil Alexander is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where he works on Scottish-Jewish musical interactions. As part of his research, Phil has championed Russian-born Scottish cantor and composer Isaac Hirshow as part of the BBC’s Forgotten Composers project, and he is currently working on a book and radio projects with the aim of bringing his work on Scottish-Jewish music to both academic and lay audiences. Phil is the pianist, bandleader, and driving force behind acclaimed Scottish world-folk band Moishe’s Bagel, and also performs regularly with maverick English folk singer Eliza Carthy and many other UK jazz and folk musicians. He is also active as a composer, with commissions including the Hippodrome Festival of Silent Film, Northern Ballet, and Edinburgh Tradfest – this last resulting in a concert celebrating the diverse musics of recent immigrants to Scotland. Phil has written widely on klezmer, salsa, Scottish music, and accordions, and his monograph Sounding Jewish: klezmer and the contemporary city was published by OUP in 2021.
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The fourth episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Julia Riegel. We discuss their initial entrance into the field of Jewish music studies, and ongoing work on the musical life of the Warsaw ghetto.
Dr. Julia Riegel received their PhD in Modern European History at Indiana University Bloomington in 2021. They are currently a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University. Their research interests include modern Polish-Jewish cultural history, the Holocaust, and music during war and genocide. As a Starr Fellow, they are working on their first monograph, In the Season of Hunger and Plague: Musical Life in the Warsaw Ghetto. This project uses sources written and preserved by ghetto residents to reconstruct how music performance represented, reproduced, and contributed to the ghetto’s complex and contentious social and cultural dynamics. They are also writing an article on portrayals of Ludwig van Beethoven in Yiddish literature and developing a second book project on gender, sexuality, and perceived collaboration in the camps and ghettos during the Holocaust. Their publications include an article on the musician, ethnographer, and journalist Menachem Kipnis in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry and articles for volumes III and VI of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945.
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The third episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Assaf Shelleg. We discuss his entrance into the field of Jewish music studies, recent book publications, and ongoing work on art music by and about Jews.
Assaf Shelleg, a professor of musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of the awards winning book Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project (Oxford University Press, 2020). Shelleg is the current director of the Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, The Yishuv, and the State of Israel at the Hebrew University; he is also a music contributor for Haaretz, and a curator for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
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The second episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Rachel Adelstein. We discuss her initial entrance into the field of Jewish music studies, and ongoing work on American and British women's cantorial history.
Dr. Rachel Adelstein is an ethnomusicologist, and the Ritual Coordinator at Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel in New Haven, Connecticut. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2013, with a dissertation entitled “Braided Voices: Women Cantors in Non-Orthodox Judaism.” Between 2014 and 2017, she was the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. Her published and forthcoming work addresses women’s music and agency in Jewish sacred spaces, the music of British Reform, Liberal, and Masorti synagogues, and the history and meaning of congregational melodies in Jewish life.
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The first episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Gordon Dale. We discuss his initial entrance into the field of Jewish music studies, and his ongoing work on the music of Rabbi Ben Zion Shenker and with the Modzitz Hasidic community.
Dr. Gordon Dale is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Musicology and the Inaugural Dr. Jack Gottlieb, z”l, Scholar in Jewish Music Studies at the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion. Dr. Dale has conducted extensive research in the Hasidic communities of New York and Israel, and has lectured across the United States on topics related to Israeli popular music, and Jewish music and mysticism. Dr. Dale is currently the Executive Director of The Jewish Music Forum, a project of the American Society for Jewish Music, and is a past president of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Special Interest Group for Jewish Music. He holds a Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY, an M.A. from Tufts University, and a B.S. from Northeastern University.
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Trailer for a new podcast of monthly conversations with musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and sound studies scholars, hosted and produced by Dr. Samantha M. Cooper. The first episode will be released on December 1.
