Awards – Jewish Studies & Music

Submissions are currently closed. The call for the next awards cycle (publications of 2023) will be published in Spring 2025.

Each year, the Jewish Studies & Music study group at AMS recognizes outstanding scholarly work in the field of Jewish music. For the 2024 awards cycle, we welcome nominations of work that was published from January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2023 in the following categories:

A book, monograph, or edited volume.
An article from a journal or a chapter in an edited volume.
Other published scholarly materials. This may include, but is not limited to: liner notes to an audio recording, a film, annotated translations or music manuscripts, web materials.

Eligibility

Submissions may come from any scholar, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, disability, nationality, or academic rank.

Anyone may submit a nomination, and authors are welcome to nominate their own works.
All authors must be members in good standing with the AMS.
All submissions should be published in English, including published translations from other languages.

Evaluation

Submissions will be evaluated by members of the JSMSG board and by outside reviewers.

Application Process

Nominations for materials should be sent to amsjewishmusic [at] gmail [dot] com with “JSMSG 2024 Awards Nomination” in the subject line. Please submit the following materials with your nomination:

The author’s name.
An abstract or brief description of the work.
A PDF or link to the ebook, article, or recording. If you are unable to send PDFs due to copyright restrictions, please include the ISBN along with the publisher information.

Authors may only have one nominated publication per category. Authors may, however, submit publications in more than one category (for instance, one article and one book). If we receive two nominations by the same author in the same category (for instance, if one publication is nominated by the author and another is nominated by someone else), we will ask the author to choose one of these publications.

Award winners will be notified prior to the annual AMS meeting and results will be announced during the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting.

Deadline for applications:

All nominations are due by 11:59pm PT, July 5, 2024, 11:59pm PT.

Previous Award Winners

2024	Jessica 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.
2023	Lynette 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.
2022	Joel 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.
2020	Amy 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).
2019	Rebecca 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).
2017	Joshua 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.
2016	Tina 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).