As a part of the Annual Cathy Heifetz Memorial Concert weekend, you will be recognized as this year’s Heifetz award winner. How do you feel about being nominated by your classmates and receiving this award?
I am thrilled and honored! At the moment, I’m trying to avoid going too far into the realm of Sally Field at the Oscars, but… they like me! They really like me! It’s a wonderful graduation present, and I feel loved.
As a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology, your current scholarly interests include contemporary Jewish liturgical music, memorial music of the Holocaust, women’s agency in music and Jewish feminism. Can you expand on these interests and talk briefly about your dissertation?
Is it possible to talk “briefly” about one’s dissertation? I’ll give it a whirl. My dissertation, “Braided Voices: Women Cantors in Non-Orthodox Judaism,” is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. For centuries, all Jewish cantors were male. Not necessarily by Jewish law, but more by tradition, which cannot only have the force of law, but can often be more powerful. Starting in the twentieth century, women started to assume this role. Today, in the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements, more than half of all cantors are female, and many girls going to cantorial school now have grown up with female cantors. This shift caused deep changes in the sound of Jewish worship, in the music that’s used, in people’s conceptions of who could be a religious leader, what it meant to be a religious leader, and what a cantor might or could be. It’s an incredibly powerful shift to happen over the course of just a few decades, and it’s mostly not touched upon in the literatures of either Jewish music or Jewish feminism. In many ways, I wrote the dissertation because it was a subject that I wanted to know more about, and there were no books that could tell me the answers. In order to answer my questions, I had to write my own book!