Conference Agenda

The Online Program of events for the SEM 2025 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early October.

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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 18th Oct 2025, 04:47:21pm EDT

 
 
Session Overview
Session
Import to your local calendar
04J: Architectures of Knowledge: Jewish Music, Heritage, and Minority Agency
Time:
Thursday, 23/Oct/2025:
4:00pm - 5:30pm

Session Chair: Miranda Crowdus, Concordia University
 Location: M-109

Marquis Level

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Presentations

Architectures of Knowledge: Jewish Music, Heritage, and Minority Agency

Chair(s): Jessica Roda (Concordia University,)

This panel explores Jewish music as an "architecture of knowledge" (Amin/Cohendet 2009), focusing on the networks, institutions, and individuals that shape its meaning, transmission, and representation within specific contexts and its global implications. It examines the mechanisms through which Jewish music is produced, disseminated, and categorized, offering a framework to conceptualize Jewish music as a repository of both normative (expert) and experiential (folk) knowledge. By framing Jewish music as both a social category and a form of cultural heritage, we highlight how its study has often been confined to music theory, aesthetics, and identity politics. Instead, we foreground the infrastructures that sustain Jewish musical knowledge, scrutinizing how institutions, scholars, and cultural actors define, preserve, and transmit this heritage across generations and geographies. Drawing on Foucault’s (1977) insights on knowledge and power, we argue that Jewish music is not merely an object of study but a dynamic field of knowledge production, shaped by specific pathways and networks that determine its interpretation and reception.

This panel seeks to map the diverse cultural, social, and political forces that influence Jewish musical heritage across different regions, including Europe, the USA and Canada. By incorporating perspectives from ethnomusicology, archival studies, and cultural history, we aim to reconceptualize Jewish music not only as a sound or tradition but as an evolving body of knowledge that reflects broader historical transformations and power dynamics. In doing so, we underscore the role of Jewish musical heritage as an active and contested space of cultural memory, identity negotiation, and intellectual discourse.

 

Presentations in the Session

 

Alternative Architectures: Sounding Jewishness in Dead Spaces

Miranda Crowdus (Concordia University)

This talk investigates the sounding of diverse Jewish musical heritage by living subjects to prompt a counter-heritagization process that reimagines and reforms conventional definitions of heritage, as well as different forms of hegemonic resistances to such soundings. This study explores “sonic interventions” of sounded Jewish prayer music at the Villa Seligmann in Hannover, Germany at which for some years the European Centre for Jewish Music (ECJM) was housed. Through a social, spatial, and musical analysis of Jewish sonic interpolations at a site designated “Jewish Heritage” by the German state, this talk shows how the sounding and hearing of living Jewish music has the potential to transform Jewish encounters – particularly the “haunted” encounters in heritage sites (Navaro-Yashin 2009). Sounding is investigated as both a positive embodied statement of Jewish communal identity and Jewish diversity. The different forms of resistance in response to the “sounding” or “hearing” of diverse musics at the ECJM reveals tensions between minority agency and broader social norms and remembrance culture in German society characterized by an imposition of “acceptable” Jewish musical genres in the German landscape, and more broadly, a conflict between the normative promulgation of “anti-anti-semitic” discourse in German society (Lapidot 2020) and the agencies of Jewish subjects in response to it.

 

Transylvanian Fantasy: Jews, Revival and Heritage in the Musical Landscape of Northern Romania

Jeremiah Lockwood (UCLA)

This talk will explore the intertwined ethnic music revivals of the Northern Romanian region of
Transylvania through an ethnography of the work of Jewish American klezmer revivalists who
have worked in the area.
Transylvania has historically been home to multiple ethnic groups, including Hungarians, Roma,
Saxons (a German ethnic group), Romanians and Jews. Jewish Americans are among many
groups who have sought to discover “roots” in the musical traditions of this regions. Among the
ethnic groups still living in the region (Jews and Germans are mostly absent from Transylvania
in the present day), Hungarians and Romanians have mostly ceased to maintain music as a
family trade, as was the norm until the mid-20th century, but were never the main professional
musicians in the region. Roma musicians typically occupied this professional niche. But in the
current folk music ecology of Transylvania, revivalists play a dominant role. Since the 1970s,
musicians and activists in the Hungarian táncház folk music revival movement have established
networks of music camps and venues of performance in Transylvania that are more or less
accessible to American musicians. This paper will offer observations from the musical lives of
American musicians Bob Cohen, Jake Shulman-Ment and Zoë Aqua and their Transylvanian
interlocutors to explore strands of folklore, identity heritage reclamation movements, and
localized political meanings that are invoked through the memory of Jews in the tapestry of
Transylvanian musical memory.