The Academy for Jewish Religion
The Academy for Jewish Religion, located at 6301 Riverdale Ave., Riverdale, NY 10471. Phone: 718 543-9360. They train cantors in a Jewish pluralistic environment. Cantors are trained to “lead dynamic, spiritually uplifting, meaningful religious services in all denominational liturgies and nusach.” They also train rabbis. “It offers full or part time study and mechina programs. Cantorial and rabbinic students study and learn together and ordination is conferred on both Rabbinic and Cantorial graduates.” Students are grounded in nusach and in contemporary liturgical music.
http://www.ajrsem.org/
The music world involved in the revival of Jewish national music or recovery of early twentieth century art music of the first order will be dazzled by the new critical edition of Leo Zeitlin’s Chamber Music published by AR Editions, and edited by musicologist and professors Paula Eisenstein Baker and Robert S. Nelson. Texts are presented in original Yiddish, Hebrew, transliterations and English translation. 
Several times in the last year (or so) there have been concerts for women based on the album by Talia Applebaum Flashes in the Darkness. It deserves another look for the humour, fun, a bit of blues, a little jazz, a bit of funk, but mostly American folk. Talia is writing about the stuff of her chosen life with the Breslov Hassidmi, and the way religious devotion permeates her life, blended into ‘the everyday.’ The music gives a window into that world –that Talia obviously relishes– for the rest of us. All music and lyrics are by Talia, including blending English and Hebrew with an all female accompaniment. Occasionally the melody and words don’t quite make it, but most often they do, and music cleverly wraps into the lyric.The best piece, (or maybe better to say, the one more universally related to all Jews’ experience), is “Perservere” with arrangement and piano by Shana Friedman, which could fit into any Jewish denomination’s repertoire.… 
