Judah Cohen: Soundscape of the Soul

Soundscape of the SoulJewish Music transplanted from Europe to American, via Hebrew Union College.Judah M. Cohen, Ph.D. is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Provost at Hebrew Union College. Cohen previously served as the Lou & Sybil Professor of Jewish Culture in the Indiana University Borns Jewish Studies Program and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Research and Creative Activity at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.Over the course of four books and over 50 articles, Cohen has explored the idea of Jewish cultural expression as a dynamic and ever-changing process. His research interests include music in Jewish life, American music, musical theater, popular culture, Caribbean Jewish history, diaspora, and medical ethnomusicology.His training as a musicologist and an anthropologist, and his professional activity within Jewish studies, has allowed him to explore many aspects of Jewish culture and history. Cohen holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard, and for his doctoral work he explored the meaning of becoming a Reform Jewish cantor at the turn of the twenty-first century, based on three years of ethnographic study with cantorial students. In his first book, Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., he offered both a historical narrative and a meditation on writing the history of a small community.Subsequent projects have led him to investigate the history of Jewish music scholarship in the United States, musical theater works that address Holocaust memory, contemporary forms of Jewish musical expression and musical representations of such cultural figures as Anne Frank and Shylock. His other books include The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor (2009); Sounding Jewish Tradition: The Music of Central Synagogue (2011), which received the Greater Hudson Heritage Network Award for Excellence; and Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack (2019).Throughout his research, he has focused on the idea of Jewish cultural expression as a dynamic and ever-changing process, created and recreated over time by artists, religious leaders, philosophers and activists. He has aimed to understand this idea largely through the prism of sound and its relationship to ideas of Jewish identity.