Old and new questions: "What is Jewish music?"

The deceptively simple question "What is Jewish Music?" carries with it a range of assumptions and expectations: Ranging from a sincere search to give a complicated population a sense of common unity and history, to the desire to identify Jewish "influence" in popular culture, to more sinister attempts to distill "Jewish" music and musicians for critique and exclusion.

In this lecture, I hope to start a conversation about why, when, and how we ask the question in the first place, showing how diverse approaches to “Jewish Music” have contributed to larger philosophical debates of identity, meaning, and relevance in, among other fields, Zionism, musicology, and the entertainment industry. - Prof. Judah Cohen from Indiana University Bloomington

Lecture delivered in English with simultaneous translation into Polish.

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The lecture is organized within the Global Education Outreach Program.

The lecture was made possible thanks to the support of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.