Jewish Music and Antisemitism

From the Middle Ages to the present, individuals involved in making and writing about music have engaged in behaviors, creations, and discourses steeped in hatred of Jews. This presentation examines the ways in which these individuals have used music to perform and inscribe, symbolize, describe, and editorialize antisemitism.

Selected case studies—including Crusader songs, the Renaissance madrigal, the case of Wagner, and hip hop—serve as a window through which to address the types of Jew-hatred that have become known since the mid-nineteenth century as antisemitism—religious, national and ethnic, political, populist, economic, and institutional—as well as hate speech or “hate talk” and the Jewish responses to it.

Tina Frühauf is the Director of the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City and Executive Director of its largest project, the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale. Among Dr. Frühauf’s recent editions and books are Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989 (Oxford University Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards; and the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies (Oxford University Press, 2023). An active scholar and writer, Dr. Frühauf’s current research focuses on the historiography of music scholarship and migration, examining the mass dislocation of peoples in the 20th century and the conditions of globalization, genocide, exile, and minority experience as well as musicology and coloniality.

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