Ruthie Abeliovich
Principal Investigator
Ruthie Abeliovich is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Theatre Arts at Tel Aviv University and the DYBBUK Project Principal Investigator (PI).
Abeliovich (PhD from Tel Aviv University, 2013) teaches and researches in the fields of Jewish theatre and performance, popular culture, theatre history, sound, voice and media. Between 2014-2017 Abeliovich was a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Abeliovich received a European Research Council (ERC) grant to pursue research on the themes, forms and practices of the popular Yiddish theatre at the turn of the century and established the DYBBUK research project (2021-2026)—an interdisciplinary collaborative project of scholars and artists researching various facets of Yiddish performative culture between 1880-1920.
Abeliovich is the author of Possessed Voices: Aural Remains from Modernist Hebrew Theatre (SUNY 2019), finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award (2020), co-editor (with Linda Ben-Zvi and Sharon Aronson Lehavi) of A Stage of Their Own: 7 American Feminist Plays (Hebrew), and co-editor (with Edwin Seroussi) of Borderlines: Essays on Maps and The Logic of Place (Sciendo, 2019). She has published articles in the journals TDR, Theatre Journal, Performance-Research, Theatre Research International, Journal of Classical Sociology.
Einat Tamir
Project Manager
Einat Tamir holds a B.A in communications and Jewish history (2012-2015) and an M.A in Jewish history (2015-2019), both from the University of Haifa. Her master thesis, titled “Key Characters and Motifs in 20th Century Eastern and Central Europe Yiddish Cinema,” identified plot structures and characterizations in Yiddish films. Among others, the thesis focused on the films "Der Dybbuk" and "Tkias Kaf" (1937), analyzing their shared folk-legend source-material.
Between 2016-2020, Tamir was a research assistant at the Dead Sea Scroll Project at the University of Haifa, where she specialized in visual reconstruction of scrolls and ancient font design. In 2017, Tamir was a production coordinator of Haifa International Film Festival. Between 2018-2019, she worked as a lab manager and research assistant in "Elijah-Lab" at the University of Haifa, specializing in digital humanities. Currently, she works as a researcher for the Zalman Shazar Center at the "Otzarot – history in letters" research project.
In the DYBBUK project, Tamir serves as project manager, coordinating the team work and project execution.
Edwin Seroussi
Senior Research Fellow
edwin.seroussi@mail.huji.ac.il
Edwin Seroussi is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor of Musicology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Director of the Jewish Music Research Centre since 2000 as well as Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College since 2007. He has previously taught at the Department of Music of Bar Ilan University and has been a visiting professor at several institutions of high learning in Europe, North and Latin America.
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Prof. Seroussi immigrated to Israel in 1971 where he studied at the Department of Musicology at the undergraduate and graduate levels continuing into his doctoral studies at the University of California Los Angeles (1981-1987). As a faculty member of the Department of Musicology at The Hebrew University, he teaches ethnomusicology, world music, theory and methodology in the study of oral traditions and popular music. His research focuses on the musical cultures of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, interactions between Jewish and Islamic cultures and popular music in Israel exploring process of hybridization, diaspora, nationalism and transnationalism. He founded Yuval Music Series and is editor of the acclaimed CD series Anthology of Music Traditions in Israel. Besides his academic activities he is active in the music scene of Israel and abroad in diverse capacities as producer, advisor, member of the board of musical institutions and representative to the International Music Council (UNESCO). He has been awarded several prestigious prizes, among them the Israel Prize in the field of musicology for 2018.
In the DYBBUK project Seroussi contributes to the study of the musical expressions related to the staging of the Dybbuk topic throughout the ages.
Oren Cohen-Roman
Research Fellow
Oren Cohen Roman is a research fellow at the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa. His main research interests include the cultural history of Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish literature in all periods. Cohen Roman received his Ph.D in 2015, from the Department of Yiddish, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also received from the Hebrew University an M.A. in Yiddish Studies (magna cum laude, 2008) and a B.A. in Yiddish Studies, musicology, and art history (magna cum laude, 2003). He was a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford (2012), a post-doctoral fellow at The Hebrew University, Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History (2015–2016), a post-doctoral fellow of the Minerva-Stiftung (Munich) at Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf (2016–2018), and a Kreitman post-doctoral fellow at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (2018–2020).
His book, Joshua and Judges in Yiddish Verse: Four Early Modern Epics, is forthcoming by De Gruyter / Dusseldorf University Press. Cohen Roman is currently working on a scientific edition of the Old Yiddish masterpiece Shmuel-bukh (the Book of Samuel), a project he initiated and which is supported by the Israel Science Foundation.
In the DYBBUK Project Cohen Roman will conduct research on the representation of speech disorders in modern Yiddish drama. The project will touch upon matters of ‘proper’ and disabled speech in modern Yiddish culture, the manner in which people with speech disorders are portrayed, methods used for the treatment of speech disorders, as well as the poetic and semiotic tools employed by writers to portray speech disorders. The project will also strive to compare its findings with parallel cases in the literary sphere and the social sphere.
Miriam Trinh
Postdoctoral Fellow
Miriam Trinh was born in Poland, grew up in Germany and immigrated to Israel after finishing High School. She completed her undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Yiddish at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, obtained her Master's degree in Yiddish literature at the Universities of Paris-Sorbonne and Strasbourg (France), her Ph.D. at the Hebrew University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She has taught Yiddish language and literature since 1999, in Paris, Oxford, Strassbourg, Vilna, New York, Baltimore, Tel Aviv and is currently teaching Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
She has published works in the field of Modern Yiddish Literature and especially on Holocaust literature (ed. From Destruction to Reconstruction, Volume 1: The Correspondence between M. Strigler and H. Leyvick,1945 - 1952, Jerusalem, 2015). She is also engaged in translation from and into Yiddish (Die Zertrennung: Aufzeichnungen eines Mitglieds des Sonderkommandos [German], Berlin, 2019).In 2018, she founded YO-Yiddish-Ort, a centre for Yiddish, based in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, offering internationally a diversity of Yiddish courses and activities.
In the DYBBUK Project, she will be responsible primarily for the linguistic, historical and cultural aspects of the Yiddish dramatic corpus, ranging from deciphering and analysing texts and sound material, to overseeing their digitalization and the preparation of the performances. She will also contribute with her international connections all over the Yiddish world to establish necessary contacts with relevant scholars, archives and institutions. In addition, she will serve as an advisor for anything related to German and Polish, either in written or oral form.
Daniela Smolov Levy
Postdoctoral Fellow
Daniela Smolov Levy is a musicologist who studies the history of efforts to democratize opera in America, including those aimed at Yiddish speakers in the early twentieth century. Her work analyzes trends in the ways that producers have employed diverse promotional strategies, including modifying opera’s content or presentation format, to attract different target audiences. Daniela holds a doctorate in Musicology from Stanford University, a Master’s degree in Piano Performance from New York University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Music from Princeton University. Her work has been published in the Musical Quarterly, Journal of Synagogue Music, and Wagnerspectrum. She has presented papers at many conferences, including national and chapter meetings of the American Musicological Society, and she also serves as Secretary of her local chapter. In addition, she has given invited talks at UCLA, the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language, and the Jewish Music Forum. She has taught opera history at Pomona College and courses on music and class in American society as well as the sociology of culture at the University of Southern California.
As a postdoctoral fellow in the DYBBUK project, Daniela will be exploring the musical elements that contributed to the appeal of the popular Yiddish theater of the early twentieth century. She also plans to examine the musical connections between the popular and highbrow spheres of the Yiddish theater.
Uri Brener
Composer
Uri Brener was born 1974 in Moscow and has been playing the piano since the age of four. His first composition attempts go back to the age of seven, his first acclaimed opuses appeared at the age of 12. After studying and performing in Russia, Germany and Holland, Uri moved to Israel, where he got his PhD cum laude in composition from the University of Bar-Ilan.
Uri`s music is performed worldwide, among performers of his music are Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Metha, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra under Frédéric Chaslin, Israel Chamber Orchestra, “Tel-Aviv Soloists” orchestra, “Aviv” quartet, “Continuum” ensemble (NY, USA), New Julliard Ensemble (NY, USA), Blumina Trio (Germany), Igudesman & Joo Duo, Sergey Nakaryakov (France) and many others. Uri has written dozens of compositions in a wide variety of styles and genres, works for piano, chamber music, vocal, choral, symphonic opuses and crossover music. Among them three piano sonatas, two Piano Concertos, two Double Concertos, “Faust-Concerto”, "Symphonic Chronicles" for symphony orchestra and choir, dozens of chamber pieces, Oratorio “Shunamit“, symphonic poems and much more. Uri has won a series of prestigious awards and scholarships, among them the 2006 and 2017 Israel Prime Minister Prize for composition, an ACUM award, which he has been awarded three times (2008, 2010 and 2015) and many others. Since 2007 Uri is active as a composer in residence of the Israeli Sinfonietta Orchestra and since 2016 he is a music director of the `Mikro` Theater in Jerusalem. In 2017 Uri became the director of a oldest conservatory in Israel – “Ron Shulamit” (Jerusalem).The opening of the 2018-19 IPO season under the button of the great maestro Zubin Metha was marked by the performance of Uri’s symphonic poem "The Prophet" for orchestra, choir and piano, composed at the age of 14, with a composer performing the piano solo part.
In the DYBBUK project Uri will lead the musical reconstruction, arrangement and musical adaptation of the music for Joseph Lateiner’s operetta Der Dibek.
Sinai Rusinek
Digital Humanities Consultant
Dr. Sinai Rusinek (PhD, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is a Digital Humanities consultant on projects at the Open University and at The University of Haifa, where she also teaches courses on Digital Humanities. In 2016 and 2017 Sinai won the Pelagios resource development grant for the project “Kima: Towards a Hebrew Historical Gazetteer” in which she led a team in assembling Geographical toponyms used throughout Jewish history into an open, linked data resource and tool. In 2018-2019 she received a grant from the Rothschild Europe foundation for her project “DIJEST: Digitizing Jewish Studies”, introducing new digital platforms and methods to Jewish studies domains.
In the DYBBUK project, Sinai will be responsible for modelling, instructing, and implementing the digital aspects of the project: from setting an open infrastructure for the data, through the creation of digital edition of the plays, and to digitally assisted research of the growing corpus.
The DYBBUK team is an interdisciplinary polyglot group of scholars at various stages of their academic careers, speaking and reading a variety of European languages, who have come together to study the Yiddish popular theatre at the turn of the century.
The DYBBUK team consists of musicologists, theatre historians, Yiddish experts, a composer, and a digital humanities consultant. An ongoing teamwork of performance reconstruction, drama translation, and historical analysis, combined with practical theatre and music research, will enable us to trace and study the acting and vocal techniques, images, and themes staged in the Yiddish popular theatre.