The Online Program of events for the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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“We will dance again”: Amplifying Jewish Joy in the Face of Contemporary Trauma
Time:
Thursday, 14/Nov/2024:
7:30pm - 9:30pm
Location:Crystal
3rd floor, Palmer House Hilton Hotel
Session Topics:
Evening [2 hours max], Judaica, Race / Ethnicity / Social Justice, Religion / Sacred Music
Presentations
“We will dance again”: Amplifying Jewish Joy in the Face of Contemporary Trauma
Chair(s): Ezekiel Levine (New York University), Nicolette van den Bogerd (Indiana University)
Discussant(s): Samantha Madison Cooper (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee)
Presenter(s): Rachel Baum (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee), Philip V. Bohlman (University of Chicago)
Organized by the Jewish Studies and Msuic Study Group.
On October 7, 2023, during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, Hamas terrorists massacred over 360 people at a music festival in Re’im, Israel. In the wake of the festival, released Israeli hostage and festival survivor Mia Schem tattooed “We will dance again 7.10.23” on her arm in a dual declaration of personal resilience and a call for a future of communal joy in the face of overwhelming violence. Invested in the place of Jewish perspectives within music studies, our panel takes Schem’s provocation as an opportunity to meditate on the sonic assertion of joy as a strategic counter to the trauma of contemporary antisemitism.
Schem’s insistence on joy as a prescription for communal strength follows similar calls from within and beyond the academy to re-prioritize joy as an expression of group pride and solidarity. We situate our discussion of “Jewish Joy” against the backdrop of recent scholarship in and beyond music studies devoted to understanding the joy of other ethno-racial groups as a powerful act of resistance in a world in which their members feel fundamentally unsafe (see Johnson 2015, Stewart 2021, Ashcroft 2022, and Combs 2023). While Jewish studies scholars have investigated the concept of “Jewish Joy” in relation to the Holocaust, Jewish lifecycle events, and the writings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (see Klepfisz 1986, Ehrlich 2018, and Soloveichik 2023), this panel seeks to address “Jewish Joy” in relation to music and sound.
Our study group session will begin with remarks by Holocaust studies scholar and life coach Rachel Baum (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee), who will reflect on the function of “Jewish Joy” as an inroad to communal strength in both historical and contemporary contexts. Subsequently, ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman (University of Chicago) will meditate on his recent work on the performance of Cabaret as a space in which Jewish trauma and joy are placed into sonic conversation. Our session will conclude with a response on future directions for the study of “Jewish Joy” in the field of musicology by Samantha Cooper (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee) before opening up the floor for a Q/A.
