The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies is the most comprehensive and expansive critical handbook of Jewish music published to date. It is the first endeavor to address the diverse range of sounds, texts, archives, traditions, histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field. The thirty-one experts from thirteen countries who prepared the thirty original and groundbreaking chapters in this handbook are leaders in the disciplines of musicology and Jewish studies as well as adjacent fields. Chapters in the handbook provide a broad coverage of the subject area with considerable expansion of the topics that are normally covered in a resource of this type. Designed around eight distinct sections -- Land, City, Ghetto, Stage, Sacred and Ritual Spaces, Destruction / Remembrance, and Spirit -- the range and scope of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies most significantly suggests a new framework for the study of Jewish music centered on spatiality and taking into consideration temporality and collectivity. Within each chapter, authors have selected what they consider to be the most important material relevant to their topic and, drawing on the most authoritative insights from historical and ethnomusicology, Jewish studies, history, anthropology, philology, religious studies, and the visual arts, have taken a genuinely inter- or transdisciplinary approach. Integrated chapter bibliographies provide material for further reading. Together the chapters form a first truly global look at Jewish music, incorporating studies from Central and East Asia, Europe, Australia, the Americas, and the Arab world. Together they span world history, from antiquity until the present day. As such, the Handbook provides a resource that researchers, scholars, and educators will use as the most important and authoritative overview of work within music and Jewish studies.

A global history of Jewish music from the biblical era to the present day, with chapters by leading international scholars.

What Happened to Me: My Life with Books, Research Libraries, and Performing Arts is a personal memoir, providing insight into the world of research libraries and particularly colorful librarians in the U.S. from the 1960s through the 1990s. It focuses largely on the authors own experiences in leadership positions at Marlboro College, The Newberry Library, The Johns Hopkins University, The New York Public Library, and Syracuse University. Told partly as an exploration of predestination and free will, the story begins with the authors childhood in a Christian fundamentalist environment, and goes on to recount frankly his distinctly secular coming-of-age experiences through the Navy, the arts world in New York City, the Vermont scene of the 1960s, his many years of involvementsurprising to himin some rarified academic and research circles, the philanthropic world of New York, and the integration in later years of personal interests in music, local community, family, and classical music and musicians.