Jewish Music : Organizations

ASJM is a non-profit organization for all interested in Jewish music. The society publishes Musica Judaica, a scholarly journal that is unique in the field of Jewish music.

The Jewish Music Institute (JMI), based at SOAS, University of London, encompasses the music of the Jewish people wherever they are and wherever they have been. JMI has a clear mission to preserve and develop this great heritage for the benefit of present and future generations.

The Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture, established in 2010, is under the auspices of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies. The Institute is dedicated to studying and preserving Yiddish music and culture, teaching it to new generations, and supporting scholarship that explores it as an important facet of Jewish and American life. It is named for Sherry Mayrent, an avid collector of historical Yiddish recordings.

The Center for Jewish Studies at UW-Madison was founded in 1991 to coordinate and promote an interdisciplinary program in Jewish Studies. They maintain an events calendar, and offer information on funding opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students.

The Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings, housed at Mills Music Library, is unique in its comprehensive scale and scope. The over 9,000 78rpm discs amassed by Sherry Mayrent include Yiddish theater, popular and traditional music, cantorial songs, klezmer music, poetry, drama, and event ballads and from locations as diverse as the United States, Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Africa and Israel.

Founded in 1990 to document, preserve, and disseminate the vast body of music that pertains to the American Jewish experience, the Milken Archive has become the largest collection of American Jewish music ever assembled. Mills Music Library has CDs from the Archive, and also provides access to them via Naxos Music Library.

The Recorded Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University Libraries began in 2002, and now offers the largest online collection of Jewish music in the world via its Judaic Collection, using technology to ensure that this cultural heritage will be heard around the world for generations to come.

The Library's holdings of Yiddish American popular songs include the Irene Heskes Collection of Yiddish American sheet music (drawn from the archives of the Hebrew Publishing Company during her New York project in 1980) as well as copyright deposits already in the custody of the Library and materials drawn from other sources and gleaned from other Library collections, primarily in the Hebraic Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division and the Music Division. Items are organized according to the serial numbers that Heskes laid out in her catalog.

The Yiddish Sheet Music Collection at Mills Music Library contains over 300 individual songs published between 1897 and 1971 in Yiddish or Hebrew, almost entirely popular songs, and songs from musicals or motion pictures.

ASJM is a non-profit organization for all interested in Jewish music. The society publishes Musica Judaica, a scholarly journal that is unique in the field of Jewish music.

A non-profit organization of people from the music industry and academia who passionately believe Jewish history is best told by the music. The society's activities include re-releasing lost classics and compilations, filming the stories of living musicians to build an archive of oral histories, and curating museum exhibits.