The first episode of Season 3 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Naomi Cohn Zentner. We discuss how she came to the field of Jewish music studies, and her ongoing work on music in historical ethnomusicology, sacred songs of the Ashkenazi domestic sphere, and the relationship between Ashkenazi and Sephardi liturgical traditions.

Naomi Cohn Zentner is a lecturer in Bar Ilan University's music department. In 2024 she held the Katz Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania's Katz Center for Advanced Judaic studies and in 2019 she was a visiting Fellow at the Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies focusing on early Jewish Music. Her research interests lie in historical ethnomusicology, sacred songs of the Ashkenazi domestic sphere and the cross-fertilization of Ashkenazi and Sephardi liturgical traditions. In 2022 she was the recipient of a three-year personal research grant from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) for a project titled: Embodying spiritual sound: new musical practices among religious Jewish-Israeli women, which she is heading in collaboration with Dr Abigail Wood of Haifa University. Her work has been published in Hebrew Studies, Ethnomusicology, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, and the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies.