Past Event: On Joy and Sorrow: Jewish Music-Making in Muslim Lands

Peter Cole (b. 1957, Paterson, NJ) is the author of three books of poems, most recently Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions, 2008). This April, The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition was published as part of Yale U. Press’s Margellos World Republic of Letters series. A book of non-fiction,Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, written with Adina Hoffman, was published in 2011 by Schocken/Nextbook.  Cole’s other volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton), Aharon Shabtai’s War and Love, Love and War: New & Selected Poems (New Directions), Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New & Selected Poems 1973-2005 (Copper Canyon), and Hebrew Writers on Writing (Trinity).  Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem  and New Haven, and co-edits Ibis Editions, has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan University, and Middlebury College.

Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Association of American Publishers’ Hawkins Award for Book of the Year, the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year, and a TLS Translation Prize. He is the recipient of a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007 was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Dr. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz is described as “a kind of one-woman roving museum of her own” by The New York Times. Her work focuses on the cultural histories of sound in the diasporic regions of 1492’s expulsion, describing how issues of transmission, regeneration and the negotiations of gender and power intersect with sound, philosophy, and belief. Currently Research Associate of the Faculty of Music and Senior Research Associate of Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge, she is working on the UKRI funded project “Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media & Power, 1789-1922”. She has been a Senior Research Fulbright Fellow, a Marie Slodowska Curie Fellow, a Posen fellow, and a Hadassah Brandeis Research fellow. Dr. Elbaz is often a consultant for documentaries, radio and media having features in the New York Times, France 24, L’Express, NPR and others. She was granted her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne’s CERMOM research group of the INALCO with félicitations du jury, has a M.M. from the Early Music Institute of Bloomington, Indiana, and began her studies at the Andes University in her native Bogotá, Colombia. In 2012 she founded KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive in Casablanca. She serves on the Boards of the Jewish Music Institute, the Tangier American Institute for Moroccan Studies and the Institute for Tolerance Studies. She is the Chair of the International Council for Traditional Music’s Mediterranean Music Studies Group. Her first monograph on Sephardi women’s voices in Northern Morocco is due to be published with Brill, she is editing a volume on Sound, Music and Memory for the British Academy, and a special journal issue on Judeo-Spanish songbooks for les presses de l’INALCO.

Hadar Feldman Samet is an assistant professor at Tel Aviv University’s department of Jewish History, where she teaches the history of Jews in Muslim contexts. Currently she is also a 2023- 24 fellow at the Katz Center, UPenn. Her research focuses on Jewish life in the Eastern Mediterranean Muslim world, particularly the Sephardi diaspora in Ottoman society. Her scholarship examines the Sabbatian movement, entangled histories of Jews and Muslims, interfaith encounters, affinities between mysticism and popular culture, and the relationship between mundane and revolutionary practices. She also explores how expressive culture and performative dimensions of historical phenomena—especially music and embodied devotional experiences—reveal diverse and multifaceted representations of people of the past. After completing her doctorate at the Hebrew University, she was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center (2018-19), the Harry Starr fellowship at Harvard University (2019-20), and the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center at the Hebrew University (2020-22). Her forthcoming book is entitled Sabbatian Songs of Faith: Ritual, Community, and Interreligious Encounters in the Late Ottoman Empire (Magnes Press).

A Black and Amazigh Indigenous scholar from Morocco, Brahim El Guabli is an Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. His first book, entitled Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship a�er State Violence, was published by Fordham University Press in 2023. His forthcoming book is entitled Desert Imaginations: Saharanism and its Discontents. His journal articles have appeared in PMLA, Interventions, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Arab Studies Journal, META, and the Journal of North African Studies, among others. He is co-editor of the two volumes of Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco During the “Years of Lead” (1966- 1988) (Liverpool University Press, 2022) and Remembering Jews in Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Media (Pennsylvania State University Press). El Guabli is co-founder and co-editor of Tamazgha Studies Journal as well as the Amazigh Studies Series (Georgetown UP).

Dr. Torjman Thomas teaches ethnomusicology and Sephardic Studies at City University of New York (Hunter College and John Jay College). He is a multi-instrumentalist (saxophone, oud, nay), vocalist (Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish), founder and artistic director of ASEFA and the New York Andalus Ensemble. He is a faculty member for both the ALEPH and Academy of Jewish Religion Cantorial Programs, and is Director of Musical Arts at the Sephardic Center in Brooklyn. Dr. Torjman Thomas researches and performs musics of North Africa, the Middle East, and Global Jazz. His scholarship centers on musics of the Middle East and North Africa, worldwide Jewish musics, and jazz-based traditions. He is a frequent guest speaker, ḥazzan, and facilitator in ecumenical spaces, cultural institutions, and music and spiritual retreats worldwide.

Edwin Seroussi is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor Emeritus of Musicology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Chair of the Academic Committee of the Jewish Music Research Centre, Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College and, in 2023/4, Fellow at the Herbert G. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on Jewish musical cultures of the Mediterranean and Middle East and their interactions with Islamic cultures, Judeo-Spanish song and music in Israel. He explores processes of hybridization, diaspora, nationalism and transnationalism in diverse contexts and historical periods such as the Ottoman Empire, colonial Morocco and Algeria, Germany’s Second Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Zionist yishuv in Palestine and the Judeo-Spanish-speaking diaspora.

Ilana Webster-Kogen is an ethnomusicologist and Jewish/Middle East studies scholar working on diaspora, migration networks, and gender in ritual. She is the Joe Loss Reader (associate professor) in Jewish music at SOAS at the University of London, supported by the Jewish Music Institute. Her first book, Citizen Azmari: Making Ethiopian Music in Tel Aviv (2018, Wesleyan University Press) was awarded the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Jewish Music Section Publication Prize. At ISM, she will be working on a project about cantillation and veneration of Torah scrolls in North African liturgy. Initial articles from this project are published in Musica Judaica and Contemporary Jewry.