The Jewish Studies & Music Study Group Award is presented annually by the American Musicological Society’s Jewish Studies & Music Study Group to recognize scholarly contributions at the intersection of music and Jewish studies.

2025 Call For Nominations: Jewish Studies and Music Study Group Book Award

Previous Award Winners

2024Jessica H. Grimmer
‘But I Have No Recollection…’ Representations of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw,” Journal of Musicological Research 42, no. 1 (May 2023), 2-22.

Jeremiah Lockwood
Once Upon a Time the Fire Burned Brighter: Ballads from the Yiddish Gothic, Ayin Press, 2023.
2023Lynette Bowring, Rebecca Cypess and Liza Malamut, editors.
Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy: New Perspectives
(Indiana University Press, 2022).

Samantha Madison Cooper
‘I’d Rather [Sound] Blue’: Listening to Agency, Hybridity, and Intersectionality in the Vocal Recordings of Fanny Brice and Barbra Streisand,” Journal of the Society for American Music 16, no. 1 (February 2022), 24 – 46.
2022Joel E. Rubin
New York Klezmer in the Early Twentieth Century: The Music of Naftule Brandwein and Dave Tarras
(Boydell and Brewer, 2020).

Michael A. Figueroa
“‘Behind the Sounds’: Matti Caspi, Shlomo Gronich, and the Politics of Genre in Israel,” Journal of Musicology 38, no. 4 (Fall 2021), 401–418.

Christopher Silver
The Sounds of Nationalism: Music, Moroccanism, and the Making of Samy Elmaghribi,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52, no. 1 (February 2020): 23-47.
2020Amy Lynn Wlodarski
George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity (University of Rochester Press, 2019).

Uri Golomb and Ronit Seter
“Mordecai Seter’s Midnight Vigil (Tikkun Ḥatzot, 1961): Deconstructing Israelism, National and Biographical Myths,” The Journal of Musicological Research 38:3/4 (2019): 329-347.

Honorable Mention: Lily E. Hirsch
Anneliese Landau’s Life in Music: Nazi Germany to Émigré California (University of Rochester Press, 2019).
2019Rebecca Cypess and Nancy Sinkoff, eds.
Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 

Halina Goldberg
“‘On the Wings of Aesthetic Beauty Toward the Radiant Spheres of the Infinite:’ Music and Jewish Reformers in Nineteenth-Century Warsaw,” The Musical Quarterly 101:4 (Winter 2018): 407-454. 

Elizabeth Weinfeld, director; Sonnambula
Leonora Duarte: The Complete Works (Centaur, 2019). 
2017Joshua Walden, ed.
The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 

Edwin Seroussi
“Sacred Song in an Era of Turmoil: Sephardic Liturgical Music in Southeastern Europe at the Turn of the 20th Century,” Musica Judaica 21 (5776/2015-2016): 1-64. 

Honorable Mention: Thomas S. Grey and Kirsten Paige
“The Owl, the Nightingale and the Jew in the Thorn-bush: Relocating Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger,” Cambridge Opera Journal 28/1 (March 2016): 1-35.  
2016Tina Frühauf and Lily E. Hirsch, eds.
Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014). 

David Brodbeck
Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2014). 

Honorable Mention: Amy Lynn Wlodarski
Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 

Honorable Mention: Evan Rappaport
Greeted with Smiles: Bukharian Jewish Music and Musicians in New York (Oxford University Press, 2014).