"If It Was with Men, It Would Totally Miss the Point": Religious Women's Selichot Events in Israel
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Lecture
Produced by the American Society for Jewish Music’s Jewish Music Forum Co-sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Admission: Free Registration is required. |
This presentation by Dr. Naomi Cohn Zentner and Dr. Abigail Wood examines a striking recent phenomenon in Israeli Jewish religious life: selichot events performed for and by Orthodox women in the weeks before the High Holidays. Drawing hundreds of participants, these gatherings combine collective singing, performances by well-known singers, and embodied devotional practices. Based on research funded by the Israel Science Foundation, the presentation analyzes how performance and participation function as sites of spiritual and musical labour, illuminating changing forms of religious creativity, leadership, and public culture in contemporary Orthodoxy.
About the Speakers
Abigail Wood is a senior lecturer in ethnomusicology at the Music Division, School of Arts, Culture and Hermeneutics, University of Haifa. Her research is primarily concerned with musical life in urban spaces, from contemporary Jewish music to the reflection of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the contested soundscapes of Jerusalem’s Old City.
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, religious aspects of Israeli popular music, and the cross-fertilization of Ashkenazi and Sephardi liturgical traditions.