Golden Ages

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. He is currently a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Both his music performance and scholarship gravitate toward the Jewish liturgical music and Yiddish expressive culture of the early twentieth century, and the reverberations of this cultural moment in present day communities. Lockwood’s research considers the work of cantors as arbiters of social, intellectual, and aesthetic change in times of crisis and cultural transformation. Jeremiah received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2021. Jeremiah was a 2022–23 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Fellow, where he conducted research on the khaznte phenomenon of gramophone-era women performers of cantorial music and composed a new piece of music responding to this fecund moment in Jewish musical history. Jeremiah has recorded more than a dozen albums over a music career that spans decades with his band The Sway Machinery and other projects.

"Jeremiah’s Lockwood’s Golden Ages stands on its merits as the most insightful book about the dynamics of the cantorate and Jewish expressive culture since Mark Slobin’s Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate (1989)."