People in Jewish Music

Bio

Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University. Shelemay was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has been awarded a number of major postdoctoral fellowships, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute. She is Past-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and in 2012 completed terms as a congressional appointee to and former chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Shelemay is currently preparing the third edition of Soundscapes, and is writing a book on musicians from the Horn of Africa in transnational motion based on ethnography carried out across North America.

Area of Specialization

She is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the musics of Africa, the Middle East, and the urban United States.

Select Publications

1. Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986)
2. Ethiopian Christian Chant: An Anthology (3 vols., 1993-97) (co-authored with Peter Jeffery)
3. Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews (1998)

Bio

Mark Slobin is the Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Emeritus at Wesleyan University, having taught there from 1971-2016. He is the author or editor of many books, on Afghanistan and Central Asia, eastern European Jewish music, film music, American music, and ethnomusicology theory, two of which have received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award: “Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World” and “Tenement Songs: Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants.” He has been President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for Asian Music. He retired in 2016 after 45 years at Wesleyan and lives in Manhattan.

Area of Specialization

He is an ethnomusicologist specializing in musics of Afghanistan and Central Asia, Jewish music, film music, American music, and theory & method of ethnomusicology.

Select Publications

1. Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate (1989)
2. Tenement Songs: Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants (1996)
3. Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (2000)

Bio

Mark Kligman is the Mickey Katz Chair in Jewish Music at UCLA, the nation’s first endowed chair in Jewish music. He is also the director of The Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, where he teaches in the musicology and ethnomusicology departments. He is the academic Chair of the Jewish Music Forum and co-editor of the journal MusicaJudaica, and he was on the board of the Association for Jewish Studies from 2014-2016. Presently, he is the Chair of the Jewish Studies and Music Group for the American Musicological Society; Orthodox popular music is the subject of his current work.

Area of Specialization

He specializes in the liturgical traditions of Middle Eastern Jewish communities and various areas of popular Jewish music. Many of his publications focus on the intersection of contemporary Jewish life and various liturgical and paraliturgical musical contexts.

Select Publications

1. “Contemporary Jewish Music in America” (2001)
2. “Arab Music and Aesthetics as a Basis for the Liturgical Structure of the Sabbath Morning Service of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, New York” (2005-2006)
3. Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (2009)

Bio

Edwin Seroussi is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor of Musicology and Director of  the Jewish Music Research Centre at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In collaboration with Dr. Josef Sprinzak Mushon Zer-Aviv, Seroussi initiated the development of the interactive web map application, Jewish Cultures Mapped, which is designed to explore and experience Jewish cultures in their historical development from a perspective of time and space. He also founded Yuval Music Series and is editor of the acclaimed CD series Anthology of Music Traditions in Israel.

Area of Specialization

He has published on North African and Eastern Mediterranean Jewish music, on Judeo-Islamic relations in music and on Israeli popular music.

Select Publications

1. Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Music in Reform Sources from Hamburg (1996)
2. Popular Music and National Culture in Israel (2004; with Motti Regev)
3. Sonic Ruins of Modernity: Judeo-Spanish Folksongs Today (2022)

Bio

Phil Bohlman is the Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, Music and the Humanities in the College and is Associate Faculty at the Divinity School, both at the University of Chicago. His teaching and research draw upon diverse methods and perspectives in music scholarship to forge an ethnomusicology built upon foundations in ethnography, history, and performance. He is particularly interested in exploring the interstices between music and religion, music, race, and colonial encounter, and music and nationalism. The study of Jewish music in modernity has provided a primary focus for his research for four decades, and since 1998 has provided the context for his activities as a performer, both as the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society and in stage performances.

Area of Specialization

He specializes in Jewish music and history (and music and religion more broadly); the history of ethnomusicology as a discipline; the music of South Asia and the Middle East; along with Cabaret and the Eurovision Song Contest.

Select Publications

1. Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe (2002)
2. The Cambridge History of World Music (ed.; 2013)
3. Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee (2021)

Bio

Judah M. Cohen is professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he is also the Lou and Sybil Mervis Professor of Jewish Culture in the department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and the director of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences. His work investigates the history of Jewish music scholarship in the United States, musical theater works that address Holocaust memory, contemporary forms of Jewish musical expression and musical representations of such cultural figures as Anne Frank and Shylock. Throughout his research, he has focused on the idea of Jewish cultural expression as a dynamic and ever-changing process, created and recreated over time by artists, religious leaders, philosophers and activists. He has aimed to understand this idea largely through the prism of sound and its relationship to ideas of Jewish identity.

Area of Specialization

Music in Jewish life, American music, musical theater, popular culture, Caribbean Jewish history, diaspora, and medical ethnomusicology.

Select Publications

1. Sounding Jewish Tradition: The Music of Central Synagogue (2011) 
2. The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor: Musical Authority, Cultural Investment (2019)
3. Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack (2019)

Bio

Now Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology, in 1980 Ellen Koskoff joined the Eastman faculty, where she was director of the Ethnomusicology programs and director of the Balinese Gamelan Lila Muni until her retirement in 2017. She has served as editor of Music Cultures in the United States (2004), and as the general editor of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Vol. 3: United States and Canada; she has also edited and contributed to countless academic journals and collections. 

Area of Specialization

Ethnomusicology and women in music

Major Publications

1. Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective (ed.; 1989)
2. Music in Lubavitcher Life (2000) 
3. A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender (2014)