Episode 4: Judith Cohen (York University)

The fourth episode of Season 3 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Judith Cohen. We discuss how she came to the field of Jewish music studies, and her ongoing work on Sephardic music and contrafacta among the Crypto-Jewish communities of Brazil and Portugal.

Dr. Judith Cohen is a singer, ethnomusicologist, medievalist and inveterate traveler who specializes in Sephardic songs and related traditions. An unplanned summer in 1970 hitchhiking through then-Yugoslavia with a friend sparked a lifelong fascination with music and dance of the Balkans, followed by years of traveling in Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Morocco and elsewhere, and, in between, a Masters in Medieval Studies and a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology. Her life as a performer and her work as an ethnomusicologist are intertwined: besides Sephardic songs, she works with Balkan, Yiddish ...