The Sounding Jewish Podcast Dr. Samantha M. Cooper

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.