Thu, Oct 19
01:00PM
Thu, Oct 19
01:00PM

panel discussion

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies - Live on Zoom

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 BiezunskiJessica Roda, and Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad, introduced and led by editor Tina Frühauf.

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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.

Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad is a musicologist who specializes in all types of Arabic and Middle Eastern music prevalent among Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities across and outside the Middle East. She focuses on the interaction of this music with issues of identity, nationalism, and Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, in their wider historical, religious, and cultural contexts. Her PhD research was on the Paraliturgical Song of Babylonian Jews in the context of Arabo-Islamic culture and religion. Previously, she was a Research Associate, in both Royal Holloway and the Institute of Musical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and a Research Fellow, in Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, New York. She has been a Visiting Scholar at St Edmund's College, Cambridge, since she completed her PhD studies, and taught at both the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Muslim College.

Prior to her academic career, she was a senior economist and a lecturer at the United Mizrahi Bank, Tel Aviv, for eleven years; a nationwide bursar of fifty musical conservatories at the Israeli Ministry of Education, for three years; and an author of music programs for school children, aimed at developing values of peace between Jews and Muslims in Israel.


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panel discussion