Árni Heimir Ingólfsson is an Icelandic musicologist and holds a PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University. His primary area of interest is the history of Icelandic music from the Middle Ages to the present. He is the author of several books, including Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland (2019), which was listed as one of that year's best books on music by Alex Ross of The New Yorker. His most recent book, Music at World’s End, is a study of the Jewish musicians who fled Germany and Austria to Iceland in the 1930s, and their significant and lasting contribution to the music scene there. The book was nominated for the 2024 Icelandic Literary Prize (non-fiction category)—Ingólfsson’s third nomination for that award.

Ingólfsson has given lectures and pre-concert talks throughout the world, including in Europe, Asia, and the United States. He was a special guest speaker at the LA Philharmonic’s Reykjavík Festival in 2017, an Erasmus guest lecturer at the Vienna Conservatory of Music, and has held visiting fellowships at Oxford, Harvard, and Yale Universities. In spring 2026, he is Visiting Research Fellow at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. In Reykjavík, he is Senior Researcher at the Reykjavík Academy, working on a book project on modernism in Icelandic music, ca. 1950-1980.

Ingólfsson has wide-ranging experience as performing musician. As conductor of the vocal ensemble Carmina, he is a two-time winner of the Icelandic Music Award, and their CD Melódía won rave reviews, including an Editor’s Choice in Gramophone magazine. He has been interviewed by international media such as The New Yorker, Gramophone, and BBC Radio 3, and has held advisory posts for international foundations such as the Nordic Culture Fund. He is also an active pianist and harpsichordist and has performed on a number of CDs, including Nico Muhly’s Mothertongue (2007).

Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College and Adjunct Professor in the University of Southern California Linguistics Department. She received her B.A. from Columbia University in Comparative Literature in 1997 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics in 2004. She is the author of Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020), as well as many articles about sociolinguistics, Jewish names, and Jewish languages (especially Jewish English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino). Dr. Benor has received several fellowships and prizes, including the Dorot Fellowship in Israel, the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature, and the National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity. In 2024 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Dr. Benor is founding co-editor of the Journal of Jewish Languages and co-editor of Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present (De Gruyter Mouton, 2018) and We the Resilient: Wisdom for America from Women Born Before Suffrage (Luminare Press, 2017). She founded and directs the HUC Jewish Language Project, which runs the Jewish Language Website, the Jewish English Lexicon, and the Heritage Words Podcast, which Dr. Benor hosts and produces. She is currently working on a project analyzing the names Jews give their children and their pets. She and her husband live in Los Angeles and have three young adult children.

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Dr. Halina Goldberg is professor of musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She currently serves as director of the Byrnes Institute (REEI) and director of Polish Studies Center at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. She is affiliate faculty of IU’s Borns Jewish Studies Program, Institute for European Studies, and Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. She also serves as the project director for the digital project Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź: https://jewish-lodz.iu.edu.

Goldberg’s interests focus on interconnected Polish and Jewish cultures. Much of her work is interdisciplinary, engaging the areas of cultural studies, music and politics, performance practice, and reception, with special focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland and Eastern Europe, Chopin, and Jewish studies, and has written numerous articles on these topics. She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (Oxford University Press, 2008; Polish translation, 2016; Chinese and Russian translations forthcoming) and editor of The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (Indiana University Press, 2004), Chopin and His World (Princeton University Press, 2017, with Jonathan Bellman), Descriptive Piano Fantasias (A-R Editions, 2021, also with Bellman). In 2024 she was appointed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland to a five-year term on the Programme Board of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, Poland.

In the area of Jewish studies, she edited “Jewish Spirituality, Modernity, and Historicism in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Musical Perspectives,” a special issue of The Musical Quarterly. Her Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery (Rutgers University Press, 2023, with Nancy Sinkoff) is the 2024 winner of PIASA’s Anna M. Cienciala Award and was shortlisted by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages for Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume of 2024. She is a co-designer of “In Mrs. Goldberg’s Kitchen,” a multimedia exhibit at the Central Museum of Textiles in Łodź about the city’s pre-World War II Jewish quarter that received a nomination for the 2012 Sybilla Award, Poland’s most prestigious museum prize. Her latest book, co-edited with Bożena Shallcross, is The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture: Between Practice and Phantasm (Indiana University Press, 2025).

Goldberg’s other honors include the 2021 H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for the article “Chopin’s Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription” (Journal of the American Musicological Society). The book Albuming Beyond Borders: Music, Memory, Material Culture (co-edited with Henrike Rost) is scheduled to come out next year from Oxford University Press.

Dr. Mark Kligman is the Inaugural holder of the Mickey Katz Endowed Chair in Jewish Music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music where he is a Professor of Ethnomusicology, Musicology, and Humanities. He is the Director of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, and is the former Chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology. He has served on the Faculty Advisory committees of the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.

Professor Kligman specializes in the liturgical traditions of Middle Eastern Jewish communities and various areas of the liturgical history of Jewish music and popular Jewish music. He has published on the liturgical music of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn in journals as well as his book, Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (Wayne State University, 2009), a notable selection winner of Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. Maqam and Liturgy shows the interconnection between the music of Syrian Jews and their cultural way of life. His work extends to the liturgical and paraliturgical musical traditions of the Edot HaMizrah (Middle Eastern Jewish communities) with articles in journals and chapters in over one dozen books. He is actively writing his next book on the Orthodox Popular Music from 1960–2010.

In Spring 2024, Professor Kligman held the Thomas and Elissa Ellant Katz Fellowship as a Research Fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University Pennsylvania. He is the academic Chair of the Jewish Music Forum and co-editor of the journal Musica Judaica.

Dr. Uri Schreter is an interdisciplinary musicologist, composer, and performer whose work bridges scholarly research and creative practice. His research centers on twentieth-century Jewish music and history, with a focus on Yiddish culture and the transnational exchange between the United States and Israel. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard University and degrees in history, composition, and musicology from Tel Aviv University. In 2025–2026, he is a Research Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and the Bader Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish History at Queen’s University.

Headshot Photo credit: Daryl Marshke

Dr. Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower) is the Artur Rubinstein Professor Emerita of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. HaCohen is the author of award-winning books and articles that illuminate the role of music in shaping and reflecting broad cultural, religious, and political contexts. Her work explores how artistic languages—especially musical ones—construct imaginative and sacred worlds that invite us to willingly enter artistic illusion or inhabit a holy sphere. She focuses on both Christian and Jewish communities and their creative expressions. Her early work, in collaboration with Ruth Katz, include the volumes Tuning the Mind: Connecting Aesthetics to Cognitive Science (2003) and The Arts in Mind: Pioneering Texts of a Coterie of British Men of Letters (2003). Her central work, The Music Libel Against the Jews (Yale UP, 2011, The Otto Kinkeldey Award) delves into the accusation of Jews as creators of noise in a harmonious Christian universe. In Composing Power, Singing Freedom (2017, Hebrew), co-written with Yaron Ezrahi, the authors discuss the interplay of music and politics in the modern Western world.

Ruth HaCohen has led major programs at the Hebrew University and served as a visiting professor at prominent institutions worldwide. In 2022 she was awarded the Rothschild Prize in the Humanities. She serves as a corresponding member of the American Musicological Society. Currently, she is finalizing a comprehensive study titled Listening to Job: Men of Sorrows in Jewish and Christian Sonic Traditions.

Dr. Judah Cohen is Lou and Sybil Mervis Professor of Jewish Culture, Professor of Musicology, and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Research, and Creative Activity at Indiana University Bloomington’s Jacobs School of Music. A scholar and administrator with both ethnographic and historical training, he has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Israel, Uganda and the Caribbean. He has written three books and several dozen articles on music in Judaism, including The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor: Musical Authority, Cultural Investment (2009), Sounding Jewish Tradition: The Music of Central Synagogue (2011), and Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth Century America (2019). His historical and ethnographic work on Caribbean Jewish life includes his 2004 monograph Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. And his work in the discipline medical ethnomusicology involved fieldwork with HIV/AIDS drama groups in southwestern Uganda, as well as the co-edited volume The Culture of AIDS in Africa (2011, with Gregory Barz). At IU Bloomington, he has served as Director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program and as Associate Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs. In Fall 2025, he will return to Hebrew Union College as the next Provost.

Dr. Danielle Padley is a Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, UK, and regularly contributes to the Faculty of Music. Her research explores professional and amateur music-making activities of Jewish communities in Victorian England. Danielle’s published work includes articles in Music & Letters, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and the British Institute of Organ Studies Journal, and a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership. Until 2023 she was Musical Director of Kol Echad, Cambridge's Hebrew choir, and has also been Deputy Musical Director of the Edgware and District Reform Synagogue choir. Trained in musical theatre performance, outside of academia Danielle regularly performs in theatrical productions and is a member of local folk band Once Again, in which she sings and plays piano, violin and folk harp.

Dr. Judith Cohen is a singer, ethnomusicologist, medievalist and inveterate traveler who specializes in Sephardic songs and related traditions. An unplanned summer in 1970 hitchhiking through then-Yugoslavia with a friend sparked a lifelong fascination with music and dance of the Balkans, followed by years of traveling in Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Morocco and elsewhere, and, in between, a Masters in Medieval Studies and a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology. Her life as a performer and her work as an ethnomusicologist are intertwined: besides Sephardic songs, she works with Balkan, Yiddish, French Canadian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Medieval repertoires. As a storyteller, she weaves together pan-European ballads and the stories of the people who sing them. Judith also pioneered ethnomusicological fieldwork of the Crypto-Jews of rural Portugal, and is the consultant and editor of the Spanish recordings and diary of the legendary Alan Lomax collection.

Judith accompanies her singing and storytelling on frame drums and the medieval bowed vièle, interspersed with medieval, renaissance and folk traditions on recorders and pipe-and-tabor. She teaches part-time at York University in Toronto, and is often based in Spain and Portugal during the summer, doing research and fieldwork, and traveling from there to present concerts, workshops and conference papers, most recently in Germany, Israel, Poland, Morocco and China —where, as part of an applied ethnomusicology conference, she gave graduate students at the Beijing Conservatory a workshop in songs and rhythms of the Balkans.

Dr. Jonathan Branfman is a Research Associate in the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University and a Lecturer in the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University. He has also previously held the Eli Reinhard Postdoctoral Fellowship in Jewish Studies at Stanford University, and a Visiting Assistant Professorship in Jewish Studies at Cornell University. Jonathan's research links Jewish studies, media studies, critical race studies, and gender studies. His first book debuted in June 2024 with New York University Press, titled Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy.

Dr. Joseph Toltz is a Jewish music researcher, composer and performer affiliated to the University of Sydney. Formerly Cantor and Director of Music at Emanuel Synagogue (1995-2008) he has just produced a documentary film with Tim Slade, Singing up the Past: the songs of Guta Goldstein which premiered at the International Jewish Film Festival in Australia in November 2024. His first large orchestral commission, an arrangement of Boaz Bischofswerder’s Phantasia Judaica was premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on 31 October 2024. His first book, Out of the Depths: the first collection of Holocaust songs will be released by Manchester University Press in January 2025. For more information on Dr. Joseph Toltz, please visit: https://www.josephtoltz.com/

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.

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.

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. 

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).

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To submit a recording with your thoughts on what Jewish music and sound mean to you, please send an MP3 file to thesoundingjewishpodcast@gmail.com or follow the show on Instagram @theSoundingJewishPodcast!

To submit a recording with your thoughts on what Jewish music and sound mean to you, please send an MP3 file to thesoundingjewishpodcast@gmail.com or follow the show on Instagram @theSoundingJewishPodcast!