Dr. Oded Erez studies popular music and film music, with an emphasis on Israel/Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean. He completed his doctorate in 2016 in the Department of Historical Musicology at UCLA, and did his post-doctoral studies at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows. In 2018- 2022 was a faculty member in the Music Department at Bar-Ilan University. He co-founded the Israeli chapter of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance  (ICTMD) - the principal forum for scholars of traditional and popular music in Israel - and also served as the secretary of the international Mediterranean Music Studies Group of the same organization.

His studies combine research methods from historical musicology, ethnomusicology and cultural studies, and deal with the connections between the political and the aesthetic. His publications have appeared in academic journals such as Popular Music, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the Journal of Levantine Studies, as well as in the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Israel and the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies. He is currently completing an ISF- funded project dedicated to the ethnography of Israeli wedding DJs and their audiences, and a book manuscript on popular music and the making of Israeli ethnicities.

Dr. Erez is the Department’s Undergraduate and Graduate Advisor.

Associate professor (since 2018) in the department. At the center of her research are questions related to our emotional and cognitive responses to music and the relationship between these processes and music theory. Other research interests include: music, space and motion (in collaboration with Prof. Zohar Eitan (Tel Aviv University) and Dr. Timmers (Sheffield University); genetic aspects of musical memory (in collaboration with Prof. Richard Ebstein and Dr. Boaz Bloch); the Human voice and out of tune singing; and the perception of consonance and dissonance in Western vs. Arab listeners (ISF Grant). Her papers have been published in Frontiers in Psychology, Neuropsychologia, Neuroreport, Music Perception, Musica Scientiae, New Music Research, and more.

Music theorist and musicologist who specializes in the theory of 18th-century classical music and in the intersection of music and other arts in the first half of the 20th century. His research combines classical analytical approaches with advanced and innovative quantitative data studies. Yoel is a viola player in the Carmel Quartet, one of Israel's most prominent chamber ensembles, with whom he presents the narrated concert series "Strings and More". He earned a BA in mathematics and computer science, and a master's degree and doctorate in musicology at the Hebrew University under the guidance of Prof. Naphtali Wagner, with post-doctoral training in the department of evolutionary biology at Princeton University. In the years 2012-2023 he was a faculty member and head of the music department at Bar-Ilan University and in 2023 he joined the faculty of the Hebrew University, and was appointed head of the Jewish Music Research Center. His book, How Sonata Forms was published by Oxford University Press (2022), and he has published articles in prominent journals in theory and musicology, including Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory and Analysis, Music and Letters, and Journal of Musicology. He has won several prestigious awards and scholarships, including the outstanding publication award from the Society for Music Theory (2023), the David Kraehenbuehl Award from the Journal of Music Theory (2017), a Fulbright post-doctoral scholarship, and a Tikva scholarship for studies at Princeton University. During his doctoral studies, was awarded a Rothenstreich scholarship and was a Hoffman Fellow for social leadership.

A graduate of the Jerusalem Music Academy and the Hebrew University, Dr. Michael Lukin is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Mandel Scholion Center. His research interests are the traditional culture of Yiddish speakers, musical semiotics, Jewish music, and European ethnomusicology. He has taught courses on Jewish music, Hassidic musical thought, and Yiddish folklore at Sapir College and Bar-Ilan University. During his stay as a Polonsky Fellow at Oxford University, he explored the so-called “mediaeval” Yiddish ballads. His current project addresses the application of digital tools to the study of Hassidic nigunim.

Yossi Maurey is chair of the Department of Musicology and holds the Hans J. Salter Chair in musicology. He teaches at the Department since 2008, and specializes in medieval music, liturgy, and manuscripts.

Office hours can be scheduled by appointment.

Professor Maury specializes in medieval sacred music, liturgy, and ritual, and has a special interest in the confluence of theology, music, manuscript culture and ideology. Maury’s monograph Medieval Music, Legend, and the Cult of St Martin: The Local Foundations of a Universal Saint appeared in 2014 with Cambridge University Press. The book won the 2015 Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines. 

Anat Rubinstein, PhD, is a choral director and musicologist. She completed her PhD
in musicology at The Hebrew University. Anat specializes in research and
performance of Jewish choral music.  She established and conducted various choirs in Israel and the US and have organized
choral events, workshops and choirs gatherings at community and university level.
Anat is now the conductor and music director of the Hebrew University Students
Choir in Jerusalem, Israel, and the coordinator of activities and a lecturer at the
External Studies Institute at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.

Prof. Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower) is the Artur Rubinstein Professor of Musicology at the Hebrew University. She is the recipient of Rothschild Prize in the Humanities, for 2022.  In 2017 she was elected as corresponding member by the American Musicological Society "for outstanding contributions to the advancement of scholarship in music."

Ruth HaCohen graduated in musicology and Jewish thought and received her PhD in Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1992).  HaCohen is the author of books and articles that explicate the role played by music in the west in shaping and reflecting wide cultural and political contexts and processes.  With Professor Ruth Katz she published two volumes on the paradigmatic turn lead by musical thought from art as mimetic to art as worldmaking.: Tuning the Mind: Connecting Aesthetics to Cognitive Science .   וכן: The Arts in Mind: Pioneering Texts of a Coterie of British Men of Letters (Transaction, 2003).  She has explored the contribution of music to the history of emotions, music and religion, society and politics. She has also published studies on the music of Bach, Mendelssohn, Wanger and Schoenberg, and on Jewish music, with an emphasis on semiotic and theological aspects. Her major work, The Music Libel Against the Jews, Yale UP 2011 won the Otto Kinkeldey Award by the American Musicological Society and the first Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines. The book explores the accusation of Jews as producers of noise in a Christian universe dominated by harmonious sounds. Her book with Yaron Ezrahi, Composing Power, Singing Freedom (2017 Heb.) discusses the interplay of music and politics in the west,  from the 17th century until today.  This book also won the Polonsky Prize. HaCohen is about to complete her study on Job the Sufferer, an unlikely Patron of Music. 

 HaCohen founded with colleagues and eventually directed the PhD Honors program of the Humanities at the Hebrew University. She was the Head of the School of the Arts (2013-2015) and the Director of Martin Buber Society of Fellows(2014-2017). She also officiated as the Chair of the Department (2001-4; 2012-13).  HaCohen is a director at the Israel National Library since 2018 and a member in Van Leer Jerusalem's board of trustees. 

Prof. HaCohen has been a resident in in many academic institutions, at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,  Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown, and Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio, she lectured at Oxford, Cambridge and Vienna Universities, UNAM (Mexico), Johns Hopkins, North Carolina, NYU, Duke, Princeton, Central European University, Free University Berlin and Konstanz, among others.  In spring 2022 she will stay in Chicago University as Greenberg Professor in Jewish Studies. 

 

Edwin Seroussi is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor of Musicology and Director of  the Jewish Music Research Centre at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, he immigrated to Israel in 1971 where he took undergraduate and graduate degrees in Musicology at Hebrew University continuing to his Ph.D.  from UCLA in 1987.  He taught at Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv Universities in Israel, and was visiting professor at universities in Europe, North and South America. He has published on North African and Eastern Mediterranean Jewish music, on Judeo-Islamic relations in music and on Israeli popular music. A partial list of his publications is available here.