Jewish Music and the Milken Archive

Dr. Neil Levin discusses the history and the musical creativity and life of American Jewry.

Artistic Director and Editor-in-Chief of the Milken Archive for Jewish Music since 1993, Neil W Levin has devoted his professional and academic life to the scholarly study of the music of Jewish experience from historical, musicological, ethnological, Judaic, and cross-cultural perspectives. While he has lectured, written, and taught courses on a diverse array of Jewish and Judaically related musical subjects spanning a broad spectrum of traditions, his particular areas of focus embrace comparative considerations of eastern and western spheres of Ashkenazi Jewry in terms of their sacred, secular art, theatrical, and folk music; and the musical creativity and life of American Jewry.

As a professor of Jewish music on the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York since 1982, he has taught graduate courses on the history, development, graduate courses on the history, development, and repertoire of synagogue music, cantorial art, Yiddish and Hebrew folksong, the music of modern Israel, and music of American Jewish experience. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities in the field of Jewish music in general, and he is in much demand as a lecturer and presenter at university seminars and academic conferences throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel. As of November 2017, he is the Visiting Professor in Residence in music at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.