The seventh and final episode of Season 1 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Kay Kaufman Shelemay. We discuss her ethnographic fieldwork with the Syrian Jews of Brooklyn and Israel as well as the "Beta Israel" Jews of Ethiopia (also called "Falashas"), as well as her ongoing study of the connections between the African and Jewish musical diasporas.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University and a former Chair of the Department of Music. An ethnomusicologist specializing in both Jewish and African musics, she received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan. The author of numerous articles and reviews, Shelemay's books include Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986; winner of both the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1987 and the Prize of the International Musicological Society in 1988); A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey (1991); and Let Jasmine Rain Down. Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews (1998). In 2022, Shelemay published a book about musicians from the Horn of Africa who have migrated to communities across North American titled Sing and Sing On. Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora. She has a number of other books as well as the WW Norton textbook, Soundscapes. Exploring Music in a Changing World, now in its 3rd edition. Shelemay has been awarded major fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Radcliffe Institute. She is Past-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and in 2012, completed terms as a congressional appointee to and chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Shelemay has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), the American Academy of Jewish Research (2004), the American Philosophical Society (2013), and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences (2014). She held the Chair for Modern Culture at the Library of Congress (2007- 2008) and was the national Phi Beta Kappa/Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar (2010-2011). At Harvard University, Shelemay has been named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow and was awarded the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, and the Everett Mendelsohn Graduate Mentoring Prize.
