2025 Call For Nominations: Jewish Studies and Music Study Article Award

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. This year, the award honors an article, book chapter, or scholarly work of similar scope of exceptional merit published in English (including translations) that advances the understanding of music in Jewish culture and history through a variety of theoretical and methodological frameworks. Eligible works for the upcoming award cycle must bear a copyright date between January 1, 2024, and December 31, 2025.

The JSMSG Article Award Committee will select a single award recipient from all eligible candidates. Anyone may submit a nomination or self-nomination; however, all nominated authors must be members in good standing of the AMS. Nominators are kindly asked to provide access to the articles they nominate. 

Nominations should be submitted via this form below no later than July 31, 2026. The committee aims to notify all authors about the results by the end of September. The winner will be announced during the study group’s session at the online annual meeting of the AMS in November.

Previous Award Winners

2025	Tina Frühauf, editor. The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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).