The Sounding Jewish Podcast

The first episode of Season 4 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Uri Schreter. We discuss his early life in Israel, his educational journey, and how he came to write a doctoral dissertation on Klezmer. 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

Enjoy this trailer for the fourth 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 December 1.

The seventh and final episode of Season 3 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Ruth HaCohen. We discuss her early encounters with Ashkenazi liturgy and Israeli soundscapes. We then explore her ongoing work on music in the Book of Job, as well as the powers and dangers presented by certain historical and contemporary "vocal communities."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.

The sixth episode of Season 3 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Judah Cohen. We discuss how he came to the field of Jewish music studies, and his ongoing work on and beyond the field of American Jewish music.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.

The fifth episode of Season 3 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Danielle Padley. We discuss how she came to the field of Jewish music studies, and her ongoing work on the music of Jewish communities in Victorian Britain. 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.

The fourth episode of Season 3 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Judith Cohen. We discuss how she came to the field of Jewish music studies, and her ongoing work on Sephardic music and contrafacta among the Crypto-Jewish communities of Brazil and Portugal. 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.

The third episode of Season 3 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Jonathan Branfman. We discuss how he came to the field of Jewish media studies, his recent book Millennial Jewish Stars, and his ongoing work on the representation of Jewish characters in contemporary television and popular culture.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.

The second episode of Season 3 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Joseph Toltz. We discuss how he came to the field of Jewish music studies, and his ongoing work collecting the musical experiences of Holocaust survivors, and early German Jewish musical life in Australia.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/

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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).

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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 thesoundingjewishpodcast@gmail.com or follow the show on Instagram @theSoundingJewishPodcast!

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 thesoundingjewishpodcast@gmail.com or follow the show on Instagram @theSoundingJewishPodcast!