The second episode of the Sounding Jewish podcast features Dr. Rachel Adelstein. We discuss her initial entrance into the field of Jewish music studies, and ongoing work on American and British women's cantorial history.
Dr. Rachel Adelstein is an ethnomusicologist, and the Ritual Coordinator at Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel in New Haven, Connecticut. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2013, with a dissertation entitled “Braided Voices: Women Cantors in Non-Orthodox Judaism.” Between 2014 and 2017, she was the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. Her published and forthcoming work addresses women’s music and agency in Jewish sacred spaces, the music of British Reform, Liberal, and Masorti synagogues, and the history and meaning of congregational melodies in Jewish life.
