Symposium on Music, Sound, and Antisemitism

This symposium, co-sponsored by the American Society for Jewish Music’s Jewish Music Forum and The Barry S. Brook Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, invites proposals that consider the historical and contemporary intersections between music, sound, and antisemitism. It is now more important than ever to understand what antisemitism is and how it works, especially in a medium – music – that does not seem to inherently convey hatred. We invite interdisciplinary, global, and wide-ranging papers that explore the variety of ways in which sound and music—art music, popular music, and traditional music, as well as works that synthesize different styles and genres—has been used to inscribe, compose and perform, symbolize, describe and editorialize antisemitism from the Middle Ages to the present. Our objective is to build upon and break open the Eurocentrism that has governed the past twenty years of scholarship on this subject area, while creating new pathways for the future of this field of study.

We are particularly interested in submissions that focus on music and sound as a product of antisemitism, while also taking into account its role in the process of spreading antisemitism. Authors are asked to consider how their subject of study engages with discourses of the forms and types of antisemitism (i.e. political, ethnic, populist, nationalist, religious, economic, and/or institutional), and to justify their terminology, if they elect to choose parallel terms like anti-Judaism or anti-Zionism. Perhaps most importantly, authors are asked to consider, whenever possible, how individuals and communities that were impacted by the antisemitism that they describe subsequently responded to these encounters. Through this approach, we seek to give voice and restore agency to this population.

We especially welcome papers that address:

• music historiography and the history of writing
• geographies outside of Germany, Italy, and the United States
• music theory
• post-World War II era topics (specifically 1945–1980)
• pedagogy and education in the music classroom
• technologies

The symposium will take place in two parts, with the first part being in person at the Center for Jewish History in New York City on 28–29 May 2025, followed by a Zoom conference scheduled for June 3–4, for those unable to travel to New York. Presentations will be 20 minutes, followed by a 25-minute discussion period, with the objective of workshopping papers for eventual expansion and inclusion in a subsequent publication. For this reason, all proposed papers must be previously unpublished in any form. Please submit English-language abstracts of no more than 350 words by 1 September 2024 to this submission form at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfyH3lb_4ZI8XCBR0glbtjTMNV2zEJh1WVD13v987DQTVt7yQ/viewform

Please contact the symposium organizers Dr. Tina Frühauf and Dr. Samantha M. Cooper at [email protected] with any questions or concerns. We look forward to receiving your submissions.