The Oxford Handbook Of Jewish Music Studies

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies reflects the current state of scholarship in the field as analyzed by an international team of experts in the different and varied areas represented within contemporary Jewish Studies. Unlike recent attempts to encapsulate the current state of Jewish Studies, the Oxford Handbook is more than a mere compendium of agreed facts; rather, it is an exhaustive survey of current interests and directions in the field.

The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies consolidate an area of scholarly inquiry that addresses how mechanical, electrical, and digital technologies and their corresponding economies of scale have rendered music and sound increasingly mobile-portable, fungible, and ubiquitous. At once a marketing term, a common mode of everyday-life performance, and an instigator of experimental aesthetics, "mobile music" opens up a space for studying the momentous transformations in the production, distribution, consumption, and experience of music and sound that took place between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries. Taken together, the two volumes cover a large swath of the world-the US, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Turkey, Mexico, France, China, Jamaica, Iraq, the Philippines, India, Sweden-and a similarly broad array of the musical and nonmusical sounds suffusing the soundscapes of mobility. Volume 1 provides an introduction to the study of mobile music through the examination of its devices, markets, and theories. Conceptualizing a long history of mobile music extending from the late nineteenth century to the present, the volume focuses on the conjunction of human mobility and forms of sound production and reproduction. The volume's chapters investigate the MP3, copyright law and digital downloading, music and cloud computing, the iPod, the transistor radio, the automated call center, sound and text messaging, the mobile phone, the militarization of iPod usage, the cochlear implant, the portable sound recorder, listening practices of schoolchildren and teenagers, the ringtone, mobile music in the urban soundscape, the boombox, mobile music marketing in Mexico and Brazil, music piracy in India, and online radio in Japan and the US.

Now in its sixth decade, country music studies is a thriving field of inquiry involving scholars working in the fields of American history, folklore, sociology, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and geography, among many others. Covering issues of historiography and practice as well as the ways in which the genre interacts with media and social concerns such as class, gender, and sexuality, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music interrogates prevailing narratives, explores significant lacunae in the current literature, and provides guidance for future research. More than simply treating issues that have emerged within this subfield, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music works to connect to broader discourses within the various fields that inform country music studies in an effort to strengthen the area's interdisciplinarity. Drawing upon the expertise of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook presents an introduction into the historiographical narratives and methodological issues that have emerged in country music studies' first half-century.

The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies consolidate an area of scholarly inquiry that addresses how mechanical, electrical, and digital technologies and their corresponding economies of scale have rendered music and sound increasingly mobile-portable, fungible, and ubiquitous. At once a marketing term, a common mode of everyday-life performance, and an instigator of experimental aesthetics, "mobile music" opens up a space for studying the momentous transformations in the production, distribution, consumption, and experience of music and sound that took place between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries. Taken together, the two volumes cover a large swath of the world-the US, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Turkey, Mexico, France, China, Jamaica, Iraq, the Philippines, India, Sweden-and a similarly broad array of the musical and nonmusical sounds suffusing the soundscapes of mobility. Volume 2 investigates the ramifications of mobile music technologies on musical/sonic performance and aesthetics. Two core arguments are that "mobility" is not the same thing as actual "movement" and that artistic production cannot be absolutely sundered from the performances of quotidian life. The volume's chapters investigate the mobilization of frequency range by sirens and miniature speakers; sound vehicles such as boom cars, ice cream trucks, and trains; the gestural choreographies of soundwalk pieces and mundane interactions with digital media; dance music practices in laptop and iPod DJing; the imagery of iPod commercials; production practices in Turkish political music and black popular music; the aesthetics of handheld video games and chiptune music; and the mobile device as a new musical instrument and resource for musical ensembles.

Disability is a broad, heterogeneous, and porous identity, and that diversity is reflected in the variety of bodily conditions under discussion here, including autism and intellectual disability, deafness, blindness, and mobility impairment often coupled with bodily deformity. Cultural Disability Studies has, from its inception, been oriented toward physical and sensory disabilities, and has generally been less effective in dealing with cognitive and intellectual impairments and with the sorts of emotions and behaviors that in our era are often medicalized as "mental illness." In that context, it is notable that so many of these essays are centrally concerned with madness, that broad and ever-shifting cultural category. There is also in impressive diversity of subject matter including YouTube videos, Ghanaian drumming, Cirque du Soleil, piano competitions, castrati, medieval smoking songs, and popular musicals. Amid this diversity of time, place, style, medium, and topic, the chapters share two core commitments.0First, they are united in their theoretical and methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its central idea that disability is a social and cultural construction. Disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical culture. Second, these essays individually and collectively make the case that disability is not something at the periphery of culture and music, but something central to our art and to our humanity.

Few scholarly fields have developed in recent decades as rapidly and vigorously as Holocaust Studies. At the start of the twenty-first century, the persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subjects of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines and a touchstone of public and intellectual discourse in such diverse fields as politics, ethics and religion. Forward-looking and multi-disciplinary, this handbook draws on the work of an international team of forty-seven outstanding scholars. The handbook is thematically divided into five broad sections. Part One, Enablers, concentrates on the broad and necessary contextual conditions for the Holocaust. Part Two, Protagonists, concentrates on the principal persons and groups involved in the Holocaust and attempts to disaggregate the conventional interpretive categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. It examines the agency of the Nazi leaders and killers and of those involved in resisting and surviving the assault. Part Three, Settings, concentrates on the particular places, sites, and physical circumstances where the actions of the Holocaust's protagonists and the forms of persecution were literally grounded. Part Four, Representations, engages complex questions about how the Holocaust can and should be grasped and what meaning or lack of meaning might be attributed to events through historical analysis, interpretation of texts, artistic creation and criticism, and philosophical and religious reflection. Part Five, Aftereffects, explores the Holocaust's impact on politics and ethics, education and religion, national identities and international relations, the prospects for genocide prevention, and the defense of human rights.

Written by an international and interdisciplinary team of distinguished scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine is an indispensable reference compendium on the day-to-day lives of Jews in the land of Israel in Roman times. Ranging from subjects such as clothing and domestic architecture to food and meals, labour and trade, and leisure time activities, the volume covers all the major themes in an encompassing yet easily accessible way. Individual chapters introduce the reader to the current state of research on particular aspects of ancient Jewish everyday life--research which has been greatly enriched by critical methodological approaches to rabbinic texts, and by the growing interest of archaeologists in investigating the lives of ordinary people. Detailed bibliographies inspire further engagement by enabling readers to pursue their own lines of enquiry. The Handbook will prove to be an invaluable reference work and tool for all students and scholars of ancient Judaism, rabbinic literature, Roman provincial history and culture, and of ancient Christianity.