The second episode of Season 4 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Mark Kligman. We discuss his spiritual and ethnomusicological journey, and explore his scholarship on the music of Brooklyn's Syrian Jewish community and most recently, music among the Orthodox men.

Dr. Mark Kligman is the Inaugural holder of the Mickey Katz Endowed Chair in Jewish Music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music where he is a Professor of Ethnomusicology, Musicology, and Humanities. He is the Director of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, and is the former Chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology. He has served on the Faculty Advisory committees of the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies.

Professor Kligman specializes in the liturgical traditions of Middle Eastern Jewish communities and various areas of the liturgical history of Jewish music and popular Jewish music. He has published on the liturgical music of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn in journals as well as his book, Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (Wayne State University, 2009), a notable selection winner of Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. Maqam and Liturgy shows the interconnection between the music of Syrian Jews and their cultural way of life. His work extends to the liturgical and paraliturgical musical traditions of the Edot HaMizrah (Middle Eastern Jewish communities) with articles in journals and chapters in over one dozen books. He is actively writing his next book on the Orthodox Popular Music from 1960–2010.

In Spring 2024, Professor Kligman held the Thomas and Elissa Ellant Katz Fellowship as a Research Fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University Pennsylvania. He is the academic Chair of the Jewish Music Forum and co-editor of the journal Musica Judaica.

The first episode of Season 4 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Uri Schreter. We discuss his early life in Israel, his educational journey, and how he came to write a doctoral dissertation on Klezmer.

Dr. Uri Schreter is an interdisciplinary musicologist, composer, and performer whose work bridges scholarly research and creative practice. His research centers on twentieth-century Jewish music and history, with a focus on Yiddish culture and the transnational exchange between the United States and Israel. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard University and degrees in history, composition, and musicology from Tel Aviv University. In 2025–2026, he is a Research Fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and the Bader Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish History at Queen’s University.

Headshot Photo credit: Daryl Marshke

Enjoy this trailer for the fourth season of Sounding Jewish, a monthly podcast featuring conversations with musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and sound studies scholars, hosted and produced by Dr. Samantha M. Cooper. The first episode will be released on December 1.