Guest Lecture Prof. Dr. Assaf Shelleg

April 23, 2026 18–20 Uhr c.t

Institut für Musikwissenschaft, Goethe-Universität
Room: SKW 4B-112, Rostocker Str. 2
Campus Westend

The Musicology Department at Goethe University, in collaboration with The Jewish Studies Department, Musica Judaica e.V., and the Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik e.V. (fgnm), cordially invites you to:

ABOUT JEWS: NEW AFFORDANCES IN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC

New music written by or about Jews no longer abides by exoticisms, national paraphernalia, territorial nationalism, or the prestige of art music. Instead, disillusioned with (or disinterested in) ideological apparatuses and tropes of Otherness, composers navigate through signs to repurpose, deface, re-signify, or de-signify markers associated with Judaism while introducing new ethnographies in the form of fieldwork recordings, their entextualization, or their simulations. Doing so, they steadily undo the modernist divide between ethnography and art. The talk will situate the proliferation of contemporary Jewish art music in the ecosystem of new music, focusing on works by Chaya Czernowin, Heiner Goebbels, and Olga Neuwirth.

Musicologist Assaf Shelleg specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, focusing on modern Jewish art music. Prior to his appointment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he taught at the University of Virginia and Washington University in St. Louis. Shelleg is the author of the award-winning book Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History (Oxford University Press, 2014), Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project (Oxford University Press, 2020) and, most recently, The State of Afterness: Contemporary Music in and about Israel (Oxford University Press, 2025). Previously the director of the Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel at the Hebrew University, he has also served as a curator for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and as a music contributor for Haaretz. Shelleg’s Jewish Art Music as Art Music is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2026.