Jews Across the Americas, 1492-present

Learning and Teaching Jewish American History

Jews Across the Americas, 1492-present

Simone Salmon

Simone Salmon is a PhD candidate in the Ethnomusicology Department at UCLA where she specializes in Sephardic Jewish music from the late-Ottoman Empire to today. She received her master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Oxford in 2014 and her bachelor’s degree in Music from UCLA in 2011. Simone has several online and forthcoming publications in Jews Across the Americas, Smithsonian Pathways, Musica Judaica, Oxford Annotated Bibliographies, The Journal for Synagogue Music, and others. Simone has presented internationally in Istanbul, Essaouira, Paris, and at conferences across America. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants from Foreign Language and Area Studies, American Research Institute in Turkey, Bluma Appel, Maurice Amado, Rotter, Y&S Nazarian, Stephen Wise, Lowell Milken Fund, and others. Simone’s current focus is recordings of her family from Sephardic Turkey and Jewish music in Istanbul today. She plays the oud for several Middle Eastern and Balkan bands and hosts a radio show called Los Bilbilikos about music in Judeo-Spanish.

CV:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y4kBwdBevdfY18iD043OdHjVH5VZ6jyR/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=106474229448062704715&rtpof=true&sd=true

Laura Leibman

Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America, and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She is the author of "The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects" (BGC 2020), "Indian Converts" (UMass Press, 2008) and "Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), which won a National Jewish Book Award, a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and was selected as one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. Laura has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, Utrecht University, the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center. Laura, who earned her PhD from UCLA, is currently at work on a book that uses material culture to trace the history of members of a multiracial family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean but became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York.