Judith Rita Cohen (born December 9, 1949) is a Canadian ethnomusicologist, music educator, and performer. Her research interests include Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) songs; medieval and traditional music from the Balkans, Portugal, French Canada, and Yiddish; pan-European balladry; and songs from Crypto-Jewish regions in Portugal. She has received numerous research and travel grants to do fieldwork in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Israel, Turkey, Greece, France, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, and has published many journal articles, papers, and book chapters. She plays a variety of medieval musical instruments, and sings and performs as part of her lectures and in concerts and solo recitals. She is also the editor of the Alan Lomax Spanish collection maintained by the Association for Cultural Equity.
Early life and education
Judith Rita Cohen was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her parents are Canadian-born. Cohen is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent; her family traces its lineage to Lithuania and Latvia.
Cohen was attracted to folk music as a child. In summer camp, she learned Hebrew folk songs from Israel, songs from the U.S. civil rights movement, and songs from American and Canadian folk revivals. After attending Iona Avenue Primary School, a Francophone public school, she directed the folk song club in her high school, and learned French-Canadian and Yiddish folk songs as well.
Cohen earned her B.A. in English Literature at McGill University in 1971. At age 20 she visited Yugoslavia with a friend and became interested in Balkan music; after graduation, she decided to spend a year abroad, hitchhiking through Spain, Morocco, the Balkans, and Turkey, where her interest in traditional Sephardic folk music was kindled. She returned to Canada to earn a B.F.A. in Music at Concordia University in 1975 and an M.A. in Medieval Studies at the University of Montreal in 1980. She submitted her master's thesis on "The Role of Women Musicians in Medieval Spain in the Christian, Jewish and Moslem Communities". She went on to earn her PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Montreal in 1989, writing her doctoral dissertation on "Judeo-Spanish Songs in the Sephardic Communities of Montreal and Toronto: Survival, Function and Change". For her fieldwork she interacted with Sephardic Jews who had emigrated to Canada from Morocco and former Ottoman countries.
In 1991 she received a post-doctoral fellowship from the University of Toronto which enabled her to study Judeo-Spanish song in Israel, France, Belgium, New York City, Miami, and Los Angeles. She earned her TESL certificate from the Canadian Centre for Language and Cultural Studies in 1994 and a B.Ed in Secondary French and English from the University of Toronto in 1996.
Career
Scholarship
Cohen is noted as one of the first scholars to develop a specialty in the traditional music of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora. She has received numerous research and travel grants enabling her to study Judeo-Spanish folk music traditions in Spain and among Crypto-Jews in villages in Portugal; other grants have funded her fieldwork in Morocco, Israel, Turkey, Greece, France, Belgium, Canada, and the United States. She has made an effort to dispel the popular myth that Sephardic songs have medieval origins and are unique to Sephardic Jews. She explains that the majority of Judeo-Spanish songs were composed after the expulsion of Jews from Spain, and that both melodies and instrumentation were often borrowed from the neighboring non-Jewish culture.
Among Cohen's research topics is how Judeo-Spanish songs and customs have been incorporated into modern-day festivals, such as the Festa da Istoria in Ribadavia, Galicia, Spain and the "Jewish Festival" in Hervás, Extremadura, Spain. She has also branched out into studies of gender roles in Judeo-Spanish song and Iberian women's drumming. Her fieldwork among Crypto-Jews in communities such as Belmonte and Trás-os-Montes is more circumspect due to the secrecy and suspicion engrained in their lifestyle. Having befriended several families, she and her daughter have been invited to share meals with them, join their prayers (though not to record them), and participate in Passover celebrations. As part of her fieldwork, Cohen also solicits non-Jews for their opinions about Jews and their country's musical traditions.