The Jewish Music Forum is very pleased to introduce the 2005-2006 schedule of our academic seminar series, “New Perspectives on Music in Jewish Life.”
The first speaker will be Dr. Hankus Netsky of the New England Conservatory of Music. On Friday, September 23 at 10 A.M.
at the Center for Jewish History, Dr. Netsky will deliver a lecture, “The Philadelphia Russian Sher Medley: Viewing the Immigrant Experience through a Musical Text.” Dr. Mark Slobin of Wesleyan University will serve as respondent to this talk. All sessions of the Jewish Music Forum take place on Friday mornings,
beginning at 10:00 AM at the Center for Jewish History. For additional information, please contact James Loeffler at 212-294-8328 or jloeffler@jewishmusicforum.org.

The second year of this series continues the Forum’s initial goal of providing new contexts for scholars across Jewish studies to explore ways of incorporating music into their research. We have assembled a broad range of researchers who approach Jewish music from a rich variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives.

Hankus Netsky, Ph.D., is an instructor in jazz and contemporary
improvisation at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he has taughtfor twenty years. He received his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and has published articles on the history of klezmer music in the United States and Eastern Europe. He is also a multi-instrumentalist and composer and the founder and director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band, an internationally renowned Yiddish music ensemble. He currently serves as research director of the Klezmer Conservatory Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to research on Yiddish musical traditions.