CALL FOR PAPERS

Sonic Representations of Jewishness, On Screen and Off

In-person conference at UCLA, April 19-21, 2026

Jews’ longstanding involvement with film and television has drawn much attention from scholars and the general public alike, raising the question of the significance of Jewish heritage and Jewishness more broadly for these creative endeavors, both on screen and behind the scenes. 

Given the centrality of music to Jewish culture, this conference seeks especially to delve into the ways portrayals of Jewishness are reinforced or made more complicated through music and sound in screen culture. 

The conference will feature two keynote speakers: contemporary film composer Sharon Farber, and Michael Beckerman, UCLA’s new Dean of the School of Music.

Potential questions that conference presentations might address include: What is the significance of the sound accompanying Jewish elements in film, television, streaming series, and online media more broadly? How do these sonic representations of Jewishness interact with visual markers? How does the style or the performance of music affect the characterization and perception of Jewish subjects and performers? How are Jewish characters and scenes, including religious rituals, portrayed on screen by both Jewish and non-Jewish creators? Behind the scenes, how does the Jewish heritage of composers, performers, directors, or producers matter, and for whom? What is the significance of attempts to hide or promote this heritage? To what degree do creators’ experiences with religious observance influence their creative output?

Other possible areas of inquiry:

• studies of how Jewish visual or sonic (including linguistic) representation differs in explicitly Jewish versus non-Jewish contexts

• portrayals of Jews and/or Jewishness in fictional vs. non-fictional contexts/documentary films

• how the representation of Jewishness is related to the representation of other identities 

• cross-national differences in Jewish representation and participation in screen culture

• representations of the Holocaust in film

• nationalist frameworks, including American Jewish identity and Zionism 

• connections between film and theater, including the Yiddish theater and Broadway musicals

• representations of Jewish women on screen

• characters “coded” as Jewish in their characteristics or behavior without explicit identification with Jewishness

• stereotypical versus idiosyncratic portrayals of Jewish subjects in screen culture

We encourage submissions from scholars from all fields and at all career stages, and we especially welcome presentations that include live performance. Submissions from pre-constituted panels are welcome. Understanding the nature and trajectory of the representations and significance of Jewishness in screen culture is today as pressing an issue as ever, and this conference hopes to deploy interdisciplinary dialogue to bring these issues to light.

Sponsored by the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience and the Center for Musical Humanities.

Program Committee: Mark Kligman, Raymond Knapp, Holley Replogle-Wong, Daniela Smolov Levy, and Kathryn Agnes Huether

NB: If you have questions as you are developing your proposal, especially regarding how your event might combine performance and scholarship, and how it might involve students and faculty from across UCLA, we invite you to contact either the Director or Program Director of the Center for Musical Humanities (Raymond Knapp, knapp@humnet.ucla.edu, or Holley Replogle-Wong, holley@ucla.edu).

Please send a 250-word abstract by November 17, 2025, by email to Eiden Choe, echoe5522@g.ucla.edu