Featured Milken Center Academic Programs
Since launching in 2020, the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience has initiated numerous academic projects that further our mission of increasing knowledge of the Jewish experience in America.
Sonic Representations of Jewishness, On Screen and Off
April 10-21, 2026
Jews’ longstanding involvement with film and television has drawn much attention from scholars and the general public alike, raising the question of the significance of Jewish heritage and Jewishness more broadly for these creative endeavors, both on screen and behind the scenes. Given the centrality of music to Jewish culture, this conference seeks especially to delve into the ways portrayals of Jewishness are reinforced or made more complicated through music and sound in screen culture.
Schoenberg in Hollywood
May 18, 19, 20, 22, 2025
The Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music was proud to present the West Coast premiere of composer Tod Machover’s chamber opera, Schoenberg in Hollywood, May 18, 19, 20 and 22, 2025 at the newly-renovated UCLA Nimoy Theater. These performances were part of Schoenberg 150, the worldwide celebration of the sesquicentennial of composer Arnold Schoenberg’s birth.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Synagogue – Cantors, Opera Singers, and Jewish Performance Culture
May 10-21, 2024
This conference, which began as a working group in Fall 2022 led by Dr. Daniela Smolov Levy, explores the boundaries between religious and secular life, and highlights the challenges American Jews face in maintaining cultural identity and connecting with diverse audiences in various media, such as opera, musical theater, and film.
Music and Justice
February 27, 2023
Our inaugural conference in February 2023, “Music and Justice: A Dialogue through Thought, Creativity and Music,” was paired with performances of musical works related to this topic. One work in particular, Dave Brubeck’s The Gates of Justice, was written in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a time of rising tensions between Jewish and African American communities. Speakers at the conference–which included three of Brubeck’s sons–explored a range of issues surrounding the history and shared experiences of Jews and Blacks in America and how music like The Gates of Justice can promulgate spiritual messages relevant to the civil rights movement in the 1960s in addition to contemporary social movements.
Journal of Synagogue Music
Through 2020 and 2021, our director Mark Kligman worked with Judah M. Cohen to revisit the topic of contemporary Jewish music, soliciting responses from a diverse set of experts working within this field to explore trends in the last twenty years of Jewish music. This project culminated in the publication of 17 essays in the September 2021 issue of the Journal of Synagogue Music, which together explore the ways in which Jewish music draws on tradition while simultaneously forging new directions; topics run the gamut of musical expression, from liturgical, popular, and art music to Klezmer and music from the Middle East and North Africa.