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.