Jewish Music Forum

03/15/2026

The Jewish Music Forum is pleased to present journalist Jane Eisner, speaking about her book She Made the Earth Move on the life, music, and Jewish identity of acclaimed singer-songwriter Carole King. We hope you will join us in person at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion tomorrow evening for what is sure to be a very special event!

In person at Hebrew Union College | Monday, March 16 at 7:30pm ET

02/16/2026

We are so looking forward to hosting the following program, and hope you will join us:

"If It Was with Men, It Would Totally Miss the Point":
Religious Women's Selichot Events in Israel
Featuring Drs. Abigail Wood and Naomi Cohn Zentner
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
1:00 PM Eastern
Free on Zoom!

Register at this link: https://www.yivo.org/Womens-Selichot-Events

About the event:
This presentation by Dr. Naomi Cohn Zentner and Dr. Abigail Wood examines a striking recent phenomenon in Israeli Jewish religious life: selichot events performed for and by Orthodox women in the weeks before the High Holidays. Drawing hundreds of participants, these gatherings combine collective singing, performances by well-known singers, and embodied devotional practices. Based on research funded by the Israel Science Foundation, the presentation analyzes how performance and participation function as sites of spiritual and musical labour, illuminating changing forms of religious creativity, leadership, and public culture in contemporary Orthodoxy.

About the speakers:

Abigail Wood is a senior lecturer in ethnomusicology at the Music Division, School of Arts, Culture and Hermeneutics, University of Haifa. Her research is primarily concerned with musical life in urban spaces, from contemporary Jewish music to the reflection of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the contested soundscapes of Jerusalem’s Old City.

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, religious aspects of Israeli popular music, and the cross-fertilization of Ashkenazi and Sephardi liturgical traditions.

This presentation by Dr. Naomi Cohn Zentner and Dr. Abigail Wood examines selichot events in Israel that are by, and for, women.

02/09/2026

Tonight, the Jewish Music Forum is pleased to present "Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust," a book talk featuring Dr. J. Mackenzie Pierce.

There is still time to register to join us this evening! The program will take place at 7pm at the Center for Jewish History in New York. As always, Jewish Music Forum programs are free and open to the public.

About the Program:
Sounds of Survival explores the central role played by Jews in creating classical music in Poland. It examines an integrated Polish and Polish Jewish musical community as its members contended with antisemitism in the 1930s, attempted to survive the N**i occupation, and established a renewed musical culture amid the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust. Reconstructing these musicians' lives from the 1920s into the 1950s, Mackenzie Pierce argues that despite nearly unimaginable violence, many Polish musicians treated the war as a time of reinvention and cultural preservation. Their faith that music was a source of cultural continuity, however, also marginalized experiences of wartime loss, especially those of Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Sounds of Survival not only reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within musical culture in Poland; it also shows why its musical aftermath has been difficult to hear.

About the Author:
Mackenzie Pierce is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and author of Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2025). He is a scholar of twentieth-century musical culture in Eastern Europe, with a focus on Polish-Jewish relations and classical music. Active in both the US and Europe, his research has been supported through fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Register at this link:

Mackenzie Pierce reveals that the Holocaust was a central event within musical culture in Poland and shows why its musical aftermath has been difficult to hear.

11/13/2025

The Jewish Music Forum is pleased to announce our first program of this academic year, featuring musicologist Árni Ingólfsson's new book Music at World's End!

Music at World’s End (SUNY Press, 2025) 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.

We hope you will join us online for this presentation on Monday, November 24 at 12pm EST. Please register to receive the Zoom link.

All Jewish Music Forum programs are free and open to the public.

Árni Ingólfsson examines Robert Abraham, Heinz Edelstein, and Victor Urbancic's formative years in Germany and Austria, their dramatic escapes from the N**i regime, and their triumphs and frustrating setbacks in Iceland.

05/07/2025

The Jewish Music Forum is pleased to partner with the Barry S. Brooks Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center to present “Music, Sound, and Antisemitism,” a four-day symposium.

May 28 (Day 1 – In Person Only)
9:00am-6:00pm ET

May 29 (Day 2 – In Person Only)
9:00am-5:00pm ET

June 4 (Day 3 – Online Only)
10:15am-2:15pm ET

June 5 (Day 4 – Online Only)
10:30am-2:15pm ET

This symposium, presented by the American Society for Jewish Music’s Jewish Music Forum and the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center, with co-sponsorship by YIVO, features presentations that consider the historical and contemporary intersections between music, sound, and antisemitism.

Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging papers by scholars from across the globe explore the variety of ways in which sound and different types of music have been used to convey antisemitism. All papers will be followed by a Q&A session.

Non-presenters can register to participate in lunch on Wednesday, May 28 and Thursday, May 29 for a $30 fee.

For those unable to join us in person at YIVO, additional symposium presentations will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, June 4, 2025 and Thursday, June 5, 2025. Separate registration is required to receive the Zoom link.

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

Please register at the following link:

This symposium features presentations that consider the historical and contemporary intersections between music, sound, and antisemitism.

01/30/2025

The Jewish Music Forum is pleased to announce that we will be hosting "The City Without Jews," A Cine-Concert with Live Original Music Performed by Alicia Svigals and Donald Sosin.

When: Tuesday, February 11, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Where: The Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th St. NYC
Cost: Free!
Registration: https://yivo.org/City-Without-Jews

About the event:
Join the Jewish Music Forum and YIVO for a screening of The City Without Jews accompanied by live original music composed and performed by world-renowned klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals and celebrated silent film pianist Donald Sosin. A Q&A session with the musicians will follow the cine-concert.

About the Film:
The City Without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden), H. K. Breslauer’s 1924 silent masterpiece, is based on the bestselling dystopian novel by Hugo Bettauer. It was produced two years after the book’s publication and, tragically, shortly before the satirical events depicted in the fictional story transformed into all-too-horrific reality. All complete prints were thought to be destroyed, but thanks to the discovery of a nitrate print in a Parisian flea market in 2015, this “lost” film can once again be appreciated in its unfortunately ever-relevant entirety.

Set in the Austrian city of Utopia (a thinly-disguised stand-in for Vienna), the story follows the political and personal consequences of an antisemitic law passed by the National Assembly forcing all Jews to leave the country. At first, the decision is met with celebration, but when the citizens of Utopia eventually come to terms with the loss of the Jewish population – and the resulting economic and cultural decline – the National Assembly must decide whether to invite the Jews back. Though darkly comedic in tone and stylistically influenced by German Expressionism, the film nonetheless contains ominous and eerily realistic sequences, such as shots of freight trains transporting Jews out of the city. The film’s stinging critique of N**ism is part of the reason it was no longer screened in public after 1933.

About the Musicians:
Alicia Svigals and Donald Sosin have been bringing audiences to their feet throughout the US and Europe with their unique and stirring violin and piano scores for Jewish-themed silent films. Sosin is renowned silent film pianist and composer, and Svigals is the world's leading klezmer violinist and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics. After meeting at a silent film festival in Italy, the two soon recorded their first original score for the 1923 German film The Ancient Law, followed by City Without Jews and The Man Without a World.

Donald Sosin (pianist and composer) has performed his silent film music at Lincoln Center, MoMA, the Kennedy Center, BAM, the National Gallery, and major film festivals in the US and abroad San Francisco, Telluride, Hollywood, Yorkshire, Pordenone, Bologna, Shanghai, Bangkok, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and Jecheon, South Korea . He records for Criterion, Kino, Milestone and TCM. He has worked with Alexander Payne, Isabella Rossellini, Dick Hyman, Comden and Green, and has played for Mikhael Baryshnikov, Mary Travers, Marni Nixon, Howie Mandel, Geula Gill, and many others. He records for Criterion, Kino, Milestone, Flicker Alley and European labels, and his scores are heard frequently on TCM. He has had commissions from MoMA, EYE Amsterdam, Deutsche Kinemathek, L'Immagine Ritrovata, the Chicago Symphony Chorus, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Denver Silent Film Festival, and the Best Original Film Score award by the 2022 Mystic Film Festival.

Alicia Svigals, violinist/composer and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, is the world's foremost klezmer fiddler. She almost single handedly revived the tradition of klezmer fiddling, which had been on the brink of extinction until she recorded her debut album Fidl in the 1990’s. Svigals has performed with and written for violinist Itzhak Perlman, and has worked with the the Kronos Quartet, playwrights Tony Kushner and Eve Ensler, poet Allen Ginsburg, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Debbie Friedman and Chava Albershteyn. She was awarded a Foundation for Jewish Culture commission for her original score to the 1918 film The Yellow Ticket and is a MacDowell fellow. In February 2018, Svigals and jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer released Beregovski Suite, their fantasy on klezmer melodies culled from the archive of early 20th century Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski. In May 2023, Svigals was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by the Jewish Theological Seminary for “extraordinary contributions to the arts and Jewish life.” In June 2024 she released her newest album, Fidl Afire, on the Borscht Beat label - a return to her roots with a full-on party band. In August 2024 she was awarded the 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Folk/Traditional arts.

Join the Jewish Music Forum and YIVO for a screening of The City Without Jews accompanied by live original music composed and performed by world-renowned klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals and celebrated silent film pianist Donald Sosin. A Q&A session with the musicians will follow the c...

12/02/2024

On Wednesday, December 4 at 7:30pm EST, the Jewish Music Forum is pleased to present "New Perspectives on Music and the Holocaust," a Zoom program featuring the work of Dr. Mackenzie Pierce, Dr. Jules Riegel, Dr. Tara Jordan, and Dr. Nicolette van den Bogerd.

This roundtable will feature four accomplished early career scholars whose research sheds new light on music and the Holocaust. Dr. Mackenzie Pierce will present the main themes and methodological implications of his forthcoming monograph, Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust. Dr. Nicolette van den Bogerd will focus on how Szymon Laks, a Polish Jewish composer and survivor of Auschwitz, addressed Holocaust memory politics in Poland during the early 1960s from his home in Paris. Dr. Jules Riegel will examine how and why musical performance in the Warsaw Ghetto took on serious political purpose, with a focus on how music and its aesthetics became part of a struggle to assert Jewish belonging in the European cultural canon, even amidst genocide. Dr. Tara Jordan uses "historical-grounded imagining" as a method for understanding the Jewish community of Monastir in the years leading up to the Holocaust, with a focus on the community's 1932 Purim processions. This conversation will be moderated by Dr. Bret Werb of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Register here to receive a Zoom link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/new-perspectives-on-music-and-the-holocaust-tickets-1095614284819

All Jewish Music Forum programs are free and open to the Public.

Learn from a panel of early career scholars at the cutting edge of researching music and the Holocaust. Presented by The Jewish Music Forum.

10/30/2024

On Wednesday, November 6 at 7:30pm, Dr. Zeke Levine will be delivering the lecture "In Search of Greener Fields: Rurality, Nostalgia, and Ideology in Yiddish-American Folksong" for the Jewish Music Forum. We are grateful for the co-sponsorship of the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research. Levine's talk will be followed by a response by Dr. Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto), and a Q/A.

About the Program:
This presentation by Dr. Zeke Levine considers themes of rurality in 20th century Yiddish-American folksong. On one hand, the "fiddler on the roof" image of Yiddish rurality served as a nostalgic salve for American Jews attempting to negotiate their place in post-WWII United States. On the other, contemporary rural Yiddish life, expressed through songs such as "Dzhankoye," carried a radical ideological valence, symbolizing a Soviet-aligned return to the land that broke from the Tsarist past.

Through the analysis of musical performances, liner notes, and concert programs, this lecture unpacks the multitude of meanings of rurality within Yiddish-American folksong, linking this musical tradition not only with Eastern European antecedents but also with the burgeoning American folk revival.

If you'd like to attend this program, please register to receive the Zoom link on the YIVO website here:

Zeke Levine considers themes of rurality in 20th century Yiddish-American folksong amongst Eastern European antecedents and the emerging American folk revival.

10/30/2024

Tonight, the Jewish Music Forum's very own Co-Executive Director Dr. Gordon Dale will be giving a talk at Bohemian Hall in New York. Additional details are below. If you'll be in the area, please go out and support him!

Wednesday, October 30 at 7pm
"Elevating Melodies: Music and Jewish Mysticism in the Czech Lands and Beyond"
Dr. Gordon Dale
Bohemian Hall, 321 East 73rd Street, New York City

09/01/2024

CFP: Symposium on Music, Sound, and Antisemitism

This symposium, co-sponsored by the American Society for Jewish Music’s Jewish Music Forum and The Barry S. Brook Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, invites proposals that consider the historical and contemporary intersections between music, sound, and antisemitism. It is now more important than ever to understand what antisemitism is and how it works, especially in a medium – music – that does not seem to inherently convey hatred. We invite interdisciplinary, global, and wide-ranging papers that explore the variety of ways in which sound and music—art music, popular music, and traditional music, as well as works that synthesize different styles and genres—has been used to inscribe, compose and perform, symbolize, describe and editorialize antisemitism from the Middle Ages to the present. Our objective is to build upon and break open the Eurocentrism that has governed the past twenty years of scholarship on this subject area, while creating new pathways for the future of this field of study.

We are particularly interested in submissions that focus on music and sound as a product of antisemitism, while also taking into account its role in the process of spreading antisemitism. Authors are asked to consider how their subject of study engages with discourses of the forms and types of antisemitism (i.e. political, ethnic, populist, nationalist, religious, economic, and/or institutional), and to justify their terminology, if they elect to choose parallel terms like anti-Judaism or anti-Zionism. Perhaps most importantly, authors are asked to consider, whenever possible, how individuals and communities that were impacted by the antisemitism that they describe subsequently responded to these encounters. Through this approach, we seek to give voice and restore agency to this population.

We especially welcome papers that address:
- music historiography and the history of writing
- geographies outside of Germany, Italy, and the United States
- music theory
- post-World War II era topics (specifically 1945–1980)
- pedagogy and education in the music classroom
- technologies

The symposium will take place in two parts, with the first part in person at the Center for Jewish History in New York City on May 28–29 2025, followed by a Zoom conference on June 3–4, for those unable to travel to New York. Presentations will be 20 minutes, followed by a 25-minute discussion period, with the objective of workshopping papers for eventual expansion and inclusion in a subsequent publication. For this reason, all proposed papers must be previously unpublished in any form. Please submit English-language abstracts of no more than 350 words by September 30, 2024 to this submission form: https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSfyH3lb.../viewform

Please contact the symposium organizers Dr. Tina Frühauf and Dr. Samantha M. Cooper at [email protected] with any questions or concerns. We look forward to receiving your submissions.

08/28/2024

The Jewish Music Forum is pleased to invite you to our first program of the 2024/2025 season, a lecture on Zoom featuring Dr. Liliana Carrizo (Colorado College)!

Program Title: "Singing with Ghosts: Hauntology and Musical-Culinary Remembrance in Iraqi-Jewish Biographical Songs"
Date: Wednesday, September 4, 2024
Time: 7:30pm EST
Place: On Zoom (link available with registration)
Cost: All Jewish Music Forum Programs are Free and Open to the Public

We hope to see you there!

This program explores the secretive practices of biographical Arabic song-making among Iraqi Jews living in Israel. Liliana Carrizo considers how these musical-culinary remembrances relate to theories of ghosting and hauntology, and brings them into a conversation with the burgeoning field of gastro...