In many Orthodox Jewish (“frum”) communities, women do not sing in front of men, shielding men from women’s singing voices for religious modesty. This practice has often been framed as a “silencing of women’s voices” and a form of patriarchal oppression (Lubet 2011; Koskoff 2014; Borts 2021). However, by focusing on the absence of women’s singing voices in male dominated-spaces, researchers and outside observers effectively re-enact the silencing of these women by failing to notice the actual singing voices of frum women. Rather than focusing on what frum women aren’t doing or where they cannot be heard, it is more productive to investigate what they are doing with their voices and why. Not only do frum women sing, but they have unique and vibrant singing practices and spaces that exist separately from men’s or mixed-gender singing spaces. Using the approaches of scholars who investigate the formation of gendered religious subjectivity (Mahmood 2005) and the construction of conceptions of “the voice” (Weidman 2014; Sundar 2023) as well as interviews and participant observation in New York, I argue that implicit assumptions about singing, agency, and frum women obscure the ways that singing is used in these communities, namely as a tool for collective connection and to consciously form a religious and communal subjectivity. This critical examination of understandings of “the frum voice” has implications for wider musical research that involves religious or non-Western communities which may have misalignments between emic and etic understandings of singing and its purposes.

This talk chronicles the results of a federally-funded project at Concordia University "Sonic Heritage Diversity,” a project that explores the disappearing music and musical and listening practices, as well as related intangible cultural heritage, of Montreal Jews of Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) and North African (Sephardic) origin, and more broadly the practices of communities and individuals fitting outside of “Ashkenormative” parameters such as Yemenite, Ethiopian, or Romaniote (Judeo-Greek). This talk will highlight key moments revealed during fieldwork and archival research.

Montreal is currently home to an unusually diverse population of Jews from different origins. While some came to Canada directly from their places of origin, others came from countries like the United States, Israel and France, to which they had originally immigrated often in order to leave situations that had become unsustainable owing to conflict and/or antisemitism. This talk explores the multi-faceted areas to which the project “Sonic Heritage Diversity” contributes, for instance, how the project stimulated the exploration of innovative research methods to preserve disappearing repertoires of intangible heritage in a context in which Canadian Jewish identity is rapidly changing, and previous intra-Jewish ethnic boundaries are shifting and, in some cases, coalescing. The public-facing aspect, including the ongoing creative activation aspect of the project serves as an important resource through which Jewish subjectivities can remember their musical past and engage with it in the present. The talk also highlights rich, community-led depictions of practitioners, their music, and their diverse journeys and encounters.

This paper examines Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest during the Gaza war by looking at its 2024 (“Hurricane”) and 2025 (“New Day Will Rise”) entries as audiovisual articulations of national mourning in the aftermath of October 7th. Instead of looking at these entries primarily as strategic interventions within a moment of political controversy, I analyze their official music videos as platforms through which collective grief and resilience are rendered visible and audible. Through scholarship on semiotics, trauma and grievability, I argue that the videos mobilize visual and sonic motifs to represent mourning through both personal vulnerability and communal endurance. These mediated discourses address domestic audiences that are still going through the aftermath of trauma, as well as international audiences for whom the scale and impact of October 7 on Israeli civilians have not been fully apprehended within dominant media frames. However, once the contest begins, their expression of grief becomes entangled in geopolitical debates, revealing how public grief acquires political force when mediated transnationally. By examining these entries as sites where mourning is aesthetically shaped and the Eurovision as an international arena where both support and contestation occur, this paper contributes to discussions regarding the intersections between public mourning and geopolitical contestation in global media events, as well as to ethnomusicological studies of music in crisis.