Borns Jewish Studies Program

My training as a musicologist and an anthropologist, and my professional activity within Jewish studies, has allowed me to explore many aspects of Jewish culture and history. As a child, I spent two years in St. Thomas, USVI; and I returned to this island in my first book (Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, USVI [Brandeis University Press, 2004]), which is both a historical narrative and a meditation on writing the history of a small community. Since then, I have explored the meaning of becoming a Reform Jewish cantor at the turn of the twenty-first century, based on three years of ethnographic study with cantorial students. Subsequent projects have led me to investigate the history of Jewish music scholarship in the United States, musical theater works that address Holocaust memory, contemporary forms of Jewish musical expression, and musical representations of such cultural figures as Anne Frank and Shylock.

 Throughout my research, I address Jewish cultural expression as a dynamic and ever-changing process, created and recreated over time by artists, religious leaders, philosophers and activists. I aim to understand this idea largely through the prism of sound, and its relationship to ideas of Jewish identity.