The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies

Panel Discussion Co-sponsored by the Jewish Music Forum, the American Society for Jewish Music, and the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience Admission: Free Watch the video

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies is a handbook of Jewish music that addresses the diverse range of sounds, texts, archives, traditions, histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field. The thirty-one experts from thirteen countries who prepared the thirty original and groundbreaking chapters in this handbook are leaders in the disciplines of musicology and Jewish studies as well as adjacent fields. Chapters in the handbook provide a broad coverage of the subject area with considerable expansion of the topics that are normally covered in a resource of this type.

Designed around eight distinct sections—Land, City, Ghetto, Stage, Sacred and Ritual Spaces, Destruction/Remembrance, and Spirit—the range and scope of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies most significantly suggests a new framework for the study of Jewish music centered on spatiality and taking into consideration temporality and collectivity. Together the chapters form a truly global look at Jewish music, incorporating studies from Central and East Asia, Europe, Australia, the Americas, and the Arab world.

Join YIVO for a panel discussion of this new handbook with contributors Eléonore Biezunski, Jessica Roda, and Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad, introduced and led by editor Tina Frühauf.

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This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. 

About the Speakers

Tina Frühauf teaches at Columbia University and serves on the doctoral faculty of The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the Executive Director of Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) and Director of the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at CUNY. Among her recent publications are Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989 and Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (2014, with Lily E. Hirsch), which won the Ruth A. Solie Award and the Jewish Studies and Music Award of the American Musicological Society; as well as Postmodernity's Musical Pasts (2020). She has been serving on various committees of the American Musicological Society and as Council Member, and is on the board of the Louis Lewandowski Festival in Berlin and the DAAD Alumni Association USA.

Eléonore Biezunski is an award-winning Parisian singer/violinist/songwriter and scholar now living in NYC. An avid collector of Yiddish music, she has led several projects and has collaborated with a large number of well-known Jewish performers in the US and abroad. Her recordings include Yerushe (IEMJ, 2016) and Zol zayn (2014). Her composition “Tshemodan” was voted Best New Yiddish Song by São Paulo’s 2021 Bubbe Awards. As YIVO’s Sound Archivist since 2016, Eléonore has coordinated the Ruth Rubin Legacy website (ruthrubin.yivo.org). She has a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and has published several book chapters and articles on the history of Yiddish music and culture and co-edited a reissue of the complete recordings of the French Elesdisc label, 1948-1953 (2015, IEMJ). She is also a team member of the Klezmer Institute and is a recipient of an NYSCA Folk Arts Apprenticeship. www.eleonorebiezunski.com

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.

Dr. Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad is a historian musicologist at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and a Bye Fellow at St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge. She specializes in the religio-cultural life of Jews originating in the Arab-Muslim world. Her publications include Judaism and Islam One God One Music (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2019), and “‘There on the Poplars [Arabs] We Hung Up [Rely On] Our Lyres [Jewish Music]’ Rabbi ‘Ovadyah Yosef’s Halakhic Rulings on Arabic Music.” (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017). Merav studied at the universities of Bar-Ilan, Tel-Aviv (Magna cum laude) and Cambridge. She has been awarded numerous UK and international prizes and grants, and she is regularly invited to give academic and public lectures in the UK and abroad. Merav is a trustee on the Board of The Cambridge Junction, where she promotes values of coexistence through the arts. Prior to her academic career, she spent eleven years as a senior investment bank economist in Israel, three years as a nationwide bursar of conservatoires at the Israeli Ministry of Education, and she authored music programs on Jewish-Muslim coexistence.