In the following interview, Ruthie Abeliovich and Daniela Smolov Levy discuss their research published in the summer 2025 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (vol. 78, no. 2).
Subscribers can access the Journal of the American Musicological Society through the University of California Press. This issue is temporarily available free of charge.
Ruthie Abeliovich is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her research explores modern Jewish theater, popular
culture, sound, voice, and media. She leads the DYBBUK project (ERC, 2021–26), examining popular Yiddish theater at the turn of the century. Abeliovich is the author of Possessed Voices (SUNY, 2019) and coeditor of Borderlines (Sciendo,
2019). Her work has been published in The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Performance Research, Theatre Research International, New Media & Society, and Convergence, as well as in edited volumes including The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies and The Dybbuk Century.
Daniela Smolov Levy is a musicologist who studies the democratization of opera in America, including immigrants’ engagement with the genre, as well as Yiddish operetta. She is a Research Fellow at UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience and additionally teaches at the University of Southern California and Occidental College. From 2021 to 2023, Daniela was part of the DYBBUK project, an interdisciplinary collaboration based at Tel
Aviv University exploring turn-of-the-century popular Yiddish theater. Her work
has been published in The Musical Quarterly, Journal of Synagogue Music, and
Wagnerspectrum.
Jake Johnson is Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Musicology at the Wanda L. Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Jake has written several books on musical theater in everyday life, including Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America (2019), Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America (2021), and Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America (2025). His edited volume, The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas (2023), extends his work on the American musical to explore the city of second chances. Jake is also the author of two imaginative biographies: The Music Room: A Story of Art, Friendship, and Gathering in Betty Freeman’s Beverly Hills Home (2025), and Harline and Washington’s When You Wish Upon a Star (forthcoming), a biography of the song that originated in Pinocchio in 1940.
