Enjoy this trailer for the fourth 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 December 1.

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.