Rabbi Jeffrey Summit’s “Singing God’s Words” at Jewish Music Forum
On Monday, February 13, 2017 at 7pm, Rabbi Jeffrey A. Summit, Ph.D. will speak about his new book, Singing God’s Words: The Performance of Biblical Chant in Contemporary Judaism (Oxford University Press, 2016).
This book is the first in-depth study of the meaning and experience of chanting Torah among contemporary American Jews, describing how this ritual is shaped by such forces as digital technology, feminism and contemporary views of spirituality.
Rabbi Summit will be joined by discussants Dr. Mark Slobin, Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Emeritus at Weleyan University and Cantor Richard Cohn, Director, Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
Center for Jewish History | 15 West 16th Street | New York, NY 10011
This program is co-sponsored by the American Jewish Historical Society.
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Oxford University Press has released the scholarly work of Dr. Tina Fruhauf, The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture. The press descriptions states that the book “examines the powerful but often overlooked presence of the organ in synagogue music and the musical life of German-speaking Jewish communities. Tina Frühauf expertly chronicles the history of the organ in Jewish culture from the earliest references in the Talmud through the 19th century, when it had established a firm and lasting presence in Jewish sacred and secular spaces in central Europe. Frühauf demonstrates how the introduction of the organ into German synagogues was part of the significant changes which took place in Judaism after the Enlightenment, and posits the organ as a symbol of the division of the Jewish community into Orthodox and Reform congregations.…