On 'Jewry in Music' (public lecture )

Notes, 2013

Placing Wagner's attack on Jewish musicians in the context of the developing music industry of the mid-nineteenth century. In Lecture Series of Arizona State University Jewish Studies Dept., in conjunction with Phoenix Symphony's Concert Series, 'Rediscovered Masters'.

Jewish Studies – Yearbook of the World Union of Jewish Studies vol. 46, 2009

Critical review of paradigms, models and topics in the study of Jewish music.

Musica Judaica

Jewish Social Studies, 2009

"This article examines the reactions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European Jewish musicians to Richard Wagner’s classic antisemitic essay, “Judaism in Music.” The voluminous debates about Wagner’s antisemitism have overshadowed the question of his essay’s impact on Jewish musicians and Jewish musical identity. Strikingly, two of the key intellectual architects of the concept of modern Jewish music, Lazare Saminsky and Abraham Tzvi Idelsohn, embraced selective aspects of Wagner’s myth even as they called for a new kind of Jewish musical nationalism. Recovering their responses to Wagner helps explain the role of antisemitism in the formation of modern Jewish musical aesthetics and cultural nationalism in the Russian Empire and Ottoman Palestine. The article concludes with a discussion of the lingering questions of Wagner’s appeal and controversy among contemporary American and Israeli Jews."

Wagner Spectrum: Judischer Wagnerianer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 2013

Notes, 2010