The fourth episode of Season 4 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Sarah Bunin Benor. We discuss her establishment of the Jewish Languages Project, the connections between language studies and sound studies, and her ongoing research in the field of Jewish language studies.

Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College and Adjunct Professor in the University of Southern California Linguistics Department. She received her B.A. from Columbia University in Comparative Literature in 1997 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics in 2004. She is the author of Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020), as well as many articles about sociolinguistics, Jewish names, and Jewish languages (especially Jewish English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino). Dr. Benor has received several fellowships and prizes, including the Dorot Fellowship in Israel, the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature, and the National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity. In 2024 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Dr. Benor is founding co-editor of the Journal of Jewish Languages and co-editor of Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present (De Gruyter Mouton, 2018) and We the Resilient: Wisdom for America from Women Born Before Suffrage (Luminare Press, 2017). She founded and directs the HUC Jewish Language Project, which runs the Jewish Language Website, the Jewish English Lexicon, and the Heritage Words Podcast, which Dr. Benor hosts and produces. She is currently working on a project analyzing the names Jews give their children and their pets. She and her husband live in Los Angeles and have three young adult children.

Please visit the Transcript to view this episode's Show Notes, including sound clip citations and a full episode transcription.

The third episode of Season 4 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Halina Goldberg. We discuss her childhood in Poland and emigration to the United States, and explore how her love of Chopin eventually led to her scholarship on the music of Polish Jewish daily life, ballet, and synagogues.

Dr. Halina Goldberg is professor of musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She currently serves as director of the Byrnes Institute (REEI) and director of Polish Studies Center at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. She is affiliate faculty of IU’s Borns Jewish Studies Program, Institute for European Studies, and Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. She also serves as the project director for the digital project Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź: https://jewish-lodz.iu.edu.

Goldberg’s interests focus on interconnected Polish and Jewish cultures. Much of her work is interdisciplinary, engaging the areas of cultural studies, music and politics, performance practice, and reception, with special focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland and Eastern Europe, Chopin, and Jewish studies, and has written numerous articles on these topics. She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (Oxford University Press, 2008; Polish translation, 2016; Chinese and Russian translations forthcoming) and editor of The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (Indiana University Press, 2004), Chopin and His World (Princeton University Press, 2017, with Jonathan Bellman), Descriptive Piano Fantasias (A-R Editions, 2021, also with Bellman). In 2024 she was appointed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland to a five-year term on the Programme Board of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, Poland.

In the area of Jewish studies, she edited “Jewish Spirituality, Modernity, and Historicism in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Musical Perspectives,” a special issue of The Musical Quarterly. Her Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery (Rutgers University Press, 2023, with Nancy Sinkoff) is the 2024 winner of PIASA’s Anna M. Cienciala Award and was shortlisted by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages for Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume of 2024. She is a co-designer of “In Mrs. Goldberg’s Kitchen,” a multimedia exhibit at the Central Museum of Textiles in Łodź about the city’s pre-World War II Jewish quarter that received a nomination for the 2012 Sybilla Award, Poland’s most prestigious museum prize. Her latest book, co-edited with Bożena Shallcross, is The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture: Between Practice and Phantasm (Indiana University Press, 2025).

Goldberg’s other honors include the 2021 H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for the article “Chopin’s Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription” (Journal of the American Musicological Society). The book Albuming Beyond Borders: Music, Memory, Material Culture (co-edited with Henrike Rost) is scheduled to come out next year from Oxford University Press.

The second episode of Season 4 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Mark Kligman. We discuss his spiritual and ethnomusicological journey, and explore his scholarship on the music of Brooklyn's Syrian Jewish community and most recently, music among the Orthodox men.

Dr. Mark Kligman is the Inaugural holder of the Mickey Katz Endowed Chair in Jewish Music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music where he is a Professor of Ethnomusicology, Musicology, and Humanities. He is the Director of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, and is the former Chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology. He has served on the Faculty Advisory committees of the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.

Professor Kligman specializes in the liturgical traditions of Middle Eastern Jewish communities and various areas of the liturgical history of Jewish music and popular Jewish music. He has published on the liturgical music of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn in journals as well as his book, Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (Wayne State University, 2009), a notable selection winner of Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. Maqam and Liturgy shows the interconnection between the music of Syrian Jews and their cultural way of life. His work extends to the liturgical and paraliturgical musical traditions of the Edot HaMizrah (Middle Eastern Jewish communities) with articles in journals and chapters in over one dozen books. He is actively writing his next book on the Orthodox Popular Music from 1960–2010.

In Spring 2024, Professor Kligman held the Thomas and Elissa Ellant Katz Fellowship as a Research Fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University Pennsylvania. He is the academic Chair of the Jewish Music Forum and co-editor of the journal Musica Judaica.