The fifth episode of Season 4 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Árni Heimir Ingólfsson. We explore the unexpected start of his book Music at World's End, which focuses on the lives and careers of three exiled musicians who made their way from Nazi Germany and Austria to Iceland, and revitalized Iceland's classical music scene in the process.

Árni Heimir Ingólfsson is an Icelandic musicologist and holds a PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University. His primary area of interest is the history of Icelandic music from the Middle Ages to the present. He is the author of several books, including Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland (2019), which was listed as one of that year's best books on music by Alex Ross of The New Yorker. His most recent book, Music at World’s End, is a study of the Jewish musicians who fled Germany and Austria to Iceland in the 1930s, and their significant and lasting contribution to the music scene there. The book was nominated for the 2024 Icelandic Literary Prize (non-fiction category)—Ingólfsson’s third nomination for that award.

Ingólfsson has given lectures and pre-concert talks throughout the world, including in Europe, Asia, and the United States. He was a special guest speaker at the LA Philharmonic’s Reykjavík Festival in 2017, an Erasmus guest lecturer at the Vienna Conservatory of Music, and has held visiting fellowships at Oxford, Harvard, and Yale Universities. In spring 2026, he is Visiting Research Fellow at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. In Reykjavík, he is Senior Researcher at the Reykjavík Academy, working on a book project on modernism in Icelandic music, ca. 1950-1980.

Ingólfsson has wide-ranging experience as performing musician. As conductor of the vocal ensemble Carmina, he is a two-time winner of the Icelandic Music Award, and their CD Melódía won rave reviews, including an Editor’s Choice in Gramophone magazine. He has been interviewed by international media such as The New Yorker, Gramophone, and BBC Radio 3, and has held advisory posts for international foundations such as the Nordic Culture Fund. He is also an active pianist and harpsichordist and has performed on a number of CDs, including Nico Muhly’s Mothertongue (2007).

The fourth episode of Season 4 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Sarah Bunin Benor. We discuss her establishment of the Jewish Languages Project, the connections between language studies and sound studies, and her ongoing research in the field of Jewish language studies.

Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College and Adjunct Professor in the University of Southern California Linguistics Department. She received her B.A. from Columbia University in Comparative Literature in 1997 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics in 2004. She is the author of Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020), as well as many articles about sociolinguistics, Jewish names, and Jewish languages (especially Jewish English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino). Dr. Benor has received several fellowships and prizes, including the Dorot Fellowship in Israel, the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature, and the National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity. In 2024 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Dr. Benor is founding co-editor of the Journal of Jewish Languages and co-editor of Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present (De Gruyter Mouton, 2018) and We the Resilient: Wisdom for America from Women Born Before Suffrage (Luminare Press, 2017). She founded and directs the HUC Jewish Language Project, which runs the Jewish Language Website, the Jewish English Lexicon, and the Heritage Words Podcast, which Dr. Benor hosts and produces. She is currently working on a project analyzing the names Jews give their children and their pets. She and her husband live in Los Angeles and have three young adult children.

Please visit the Transcript to view this episode's Show Notes, including sound clip citations and a full episode transcription.

The third episode of Season 4 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Halina Goldberg. We discuss her childhood in Poland and emigration to the United States, and explore how her love of Chopin eventually led to her scholarship on the music of Polish Jewish daily life, ballet, and synagogues.

Dr. Halina Goldberg is professor of musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She currently serves as director of the Byrnes Institute (REEI) and director of Polish Studies Center at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. She is affiliate faculty of IU’s Borns Jewish Studies Program, Institute for European Studies, and Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. She also serves as the project director for the digital project Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź: https://jewish-lodz.iu.edu.

Goldberg’s interests focus on interconnected Polish and Jewish cultures. Much of her work is interdisciplinary, engaging the areas of cultural studies, music and politics, performance practice, and reception, with special focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland and Eastern Europe, Chopin, and Jewish studies, and has written numerous articles on these topics. She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (Oxford University Press, 2008; Polish translation, 2016; Chinese and Russian translations forthcoming) and editor of The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (Indiana University Press, 2004), Chopin and His World (Princeton University Press, 2017, with Jonathan Bellman), Descriptive Piano Fantasias (A-R Editions, 2021, also with Bellman). In 2024 she was appointed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland to a five-year term on the Programme Board of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, Poland.

In the area of Jewish studies, she edited “Jewish Spirituality, Modernity, and Historicism in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Musical Perspectives,” a special issue of The Musical Quarterly. Her Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery (Rutgers University Press, 2023, with Nancy Sinkoff) is the 2024 winner of PIASA’s Anna M. Cienciala Award and was shortlisted by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages for Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume of 2024. She is a co-designer of “In Mrs. Goldberg’s Kitchen,” a multimedia exhibit at the Central Museum of Textiles in Łodź about the city’s pre-World War II Jewish quarter that received a nomination for the 2012 Sybilla Award, Poland’s most prestigious museum prize. Her latest book, co-edited with Bożena Shallcross, is The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture: Between Practice and Phantasm (Indiana University Press, 2025).

Goldberg’s other honors include the 2021 H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for the article “Chopin’s Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription” (Journal of the American Musicological Society). The book Albuming Beyond Borders: Music, Memory, Material Culture (co-edited with Henrike Rost) is scheduled to come out next year from Oxford University Press.