Assistant Professor (2006)

Jewish History

On Leave: Fall 2009 - Spring 2010

Office Hours: W 1-3 and by appointment

Office: 229 Randall

Phone: (434) 924-6408

Fax: (434) 924-7891

Email: jbl6wvirginia.edu

Education

Publications

The Most Musical Nation: Jews, Culture, and Modernity in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming)

"Richard Wagner's Jewish Music: Anti-Semitism and Aesthetics in Modern Jewish Culture," Jewish Social Studies (forthcoming)

“Concert Music” The YIVO Encyclopedia of East European Jewish History and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

“Joel Engel and the Development of Jewish Musical Nationalism [Russian],” On the History of Jewish Music in Russia, Volume 2., eds. G. Kopytova and A. Frenkel (St. Petersburg: Russian Institute for the History of the Arts, 2006).

“Di Rusishe Progresiv Muzikal Yunyon No. 1 af Amerike: The First Klezmer Union in the United States” in American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots, ed. Mark Slobin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

“Neither the King’s English nor the Rebbetzin’s Yiddish: Yinglish Literature in America,” in American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni, ed. Marc Shell. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Awards and Activities

Academic Vice-Chair, The Jewish Music Forum, Center for Jewish History, 2006-

Irene Fromer Fellow in Jewish Studies, Columbia University, 2005-2006

Hays-Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Research Award to Russia and Ukraine, 2003-2004

National Foundation for Jewish Culture Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 2003-2004

Center for Jewish History Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 2002-2003

Wexner Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1998-2002

Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow in Humanistic Studies, 1998-1999

Current Research

I have recently completed a book  on the relationship between Jewish culture, politics, and identity in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia: The Most Musical Nation: Jews, Culture, and Modernity in the Late Russian Empire. Other current projects underway include articles on the role of European aesthetics and anti-Semitism in early Zionist culture and the influence of Russian Jewish political thought on American Jewish communal life.