The fifth episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Phil Alexander. We discuss his background as a performing musician, entrance into the academic field of Jewish music studies, research for his recent book Sounding Jewish in Berlin, and ongoing work on the musical life of the Jews of late 19th and early 20th century Scotland.

Dr. Phil Alexander is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where he works on Scottish-Jewish musical interactions. As part of his research, Phil has championed Russian-born Scottish cantor and composer Isaac Hirshow as part of the BBC’s Forgotten Composers project, and he is currently working on a book and radio projects with the aim of bringing his work on Scottish-Jewish music to both academic and lay audiences. Phil is the pianist, bandleader, and driving force behind acclaimed Scottish world-folk band Moishe’s Bagel, and also performs regularly with maverick English folk singer Eliza Carthy and many other UK jazz and folk musicians. He is also active as a composer, with commissions including the Hippodrome Festival of Silent Film, Northern Ballet, and Edinburgh Tradfest – this last resulting in a concert celebrating the diverse musics of recent immigrants to Scotland. Phil has written widely on klezmer, salsa, Scottish music, and accordions, and his monograph Sounding Jewish: klezmer and the contemporary city was published by OUP in 2021.

The fourth episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Julia Riegel. We discuss their initial entrance into the field of Jewish music studies, and ongoing work on the musical life of the Warsaw ghetto.

Dr. Julia Riegel received their PhD in Modern European History at Indiana University Bloomington in 2021. They are currently a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University. Their research interests include modern Polish-Jewish cultural history, the Holocaust, and music during war and genocide. As a Starr Fellow, they are working on their first monograph, In the Season of Hunger and Plague: Musical Life in the Warsaw Ghetto. This project uses sources written and preserved by ghetto residents to reconstruct how music performance represented, reproduced, and contributed to the ghetto’s complex and contentious social and cultural dynamics. They are also writing an article on portrayals of Ludwig van Beethoven in Yiddish literature and developing a second book project on gender, sexuality, and perceived collaboration in the camps and ghettos during the Holocaust. Their publications include an article on the musician, ethnographer, and journalist Menachem Kipnis in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry and articles for volumes III and VI of the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945.

The third episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Assaf Shelleg. We discuss his entrance into the field of Jewish music studies, recent book publications, and ongoing work on art music by and about Jews.

Assaf Shelleg, a professor of musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of the awards winning book Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project (Oxford University Press, 2020). Shelleg is the current director of the Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, The Yishuv, and the State of Israel at the Hebrew University; he is also a music contributor for Haaretz, and a curator for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

The second episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Rachel Adelstein. We discuss her initial entrance into the field of Jewish music studies, and ongoing work on American and British women's cantorial history.

Dr. Rachel Adelstein is an ethnomusicologist, and the Ritual Coordinator at Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel in New Haven, Connecticut. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2013, with a dissertation entitled “Braided Voices: Women Cantors in Non-Orthodox Judaism.” Between 2014 and 2017, she was the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. Her published and forthcoming work addresses women’s music and agency in Jewish sacred spaces, the music of British Reform, Liberal, and Masorti synagogues, and the history and meaning of congregational melodies in Jewish life.

The first episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Gordon Dale. We discuss his initial entrance into the field of Jewish music studies, and his ongoing work on the music of Rabbi Ben Zion Shenker and with the Modzitz Hasidic community.

Dr. Gordon Dale is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Musicology and the Inaugural Dr. Jack Gottlieb, z”l, Scholar in Jewish Music Studies at the Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion. Dr. Dale has conducted extensive research in the Hasidic communities of New York and Israel, and has lectured across the United States on topics related to Israeli popular music, and Jewish music and mysticism. Dr. Dale is currently the Executive Director of The Jewish Music Forum, a project of the American Society for Jewish Music, and is a past president of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Special Interest Group for Jewish Music. He holds a Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, CUNY, an M.A. from Tufts University, and a B.S. from Northeastern University.

Trailer for a new podcast of monthly 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.