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.
The European Center for Jewish Music: Constructing a Knowledge Architecture of Jewish Music in Germany
Sarah Ross
European Centre for Jewish Music
This paper traces the establishment and positioning of the European Center for Jewish Music
(ECJM) at the Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media within the German academic
landscape as a "knowledge architecture" of Jewish music. Through the lens of Critical Jewish
Heritage Studies, it examines how Jewish musical heritage has been framed, institutionalized,
and academically legitimized in Germany. A key focus is the process of heritagization that led to
the ECJM’s foundation, particularly the role of cantor Isaak Lachmann’s music collection in
shaping the center’s identity. The study highlights how Jewish music, historically marginalized or
instrumentalized within German academia, has been strategically redefined as "German-Jewish
cultural heritage"—a process deeply intertwined with national identity formation, both after 1945
and following reunification. By critically engaging with historical, socio-cultural, and political
dimensions, this paper reveals how the ECJM embodies a shift toward interdisciplinary
approaches in Jewish music studies. It argues that only by contextualizing Jewish musical
heritage within broader heritage discourses can we fully grasp the significance of this institution
as a critical site of knowledge production and cultural negotiation in contemporary Germany.
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