excerpt from AJS Perspectives: http://perspectives.ajsnet.org/sound-issue/sound-editors/
"...With this issue of AJS Perspectives, we seek to highlight a few of the myriad roles that sound, and the study of sound, can play within the world of Jewish Studies. Some authors approach sound through a textual lens: the sound of poetry. Others attend to "intentional" sounds, notably music: its composition, performance, and implicit (and explicit) complexities. Other authors, however, draw our attention to ambient sounds: the sounds of Jewish life and religious practice, domestic and communal. In these essays, through the authors' written words, we "hear" sounds lofty and lowly, banal and exotic, remote and immediate. It is our hope that as our readers engage with these pieces, they will become newly aware of the presence and power of the acoustic as an avenue for intellectual inquiry and a mode of pedagogy."
Jonathan M. Hess
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Laura Lieber
Duke University
Center for Jewish Studies
