Dr. Karen Uslin, Director of Research, the Defiant Requiem Foundation
in conversation with
Dr. Rachel Adelstein
The Music of Terezin: Resistance and Memory
IMPORTANT! PLEASE NOTE:
THIS COZ IS ONE HOUR EARLIER FOR UK (4pm), W EUROPE (5pm) & ISRAEL (6pm)
USA TIME ZONES AS NORMAL
How do we remember the music of composers such as Viktor Ullman, Gideon Klein, and Pavel Haas, who were imprisoned in Terezin? How do we evaluate their music apart from its political context – and should we do that? What role can music play in Holocaust education and memorialization? Dr. Rachel Adelstein interviews Dr. Karen Uslin, Director of Research at the Defiant Requiem Foundation in Washington, D.C., to discuss the afterlives of the Terezin composers and the Defiant Requiem Foundation’s work to present these composers in a moving and educational context.
Karen Uslin began researching music in Terezin as an undergraduate music and theater student at Muhlenberg College (BA ’04), and continued her research at Temple University (MM ’06) and The Catholic University of America, where she received a Ph.D. in Musicology/Central & Eastern European Studies in 2015. She is also Adjunct Professor of Jewish Studies at Stockton University. Karen has presented at various national and international conferences, guest lectured at universities in the United States and Europe, and spoken at various churches and synagogues on Catholic-Jewish relations. In addition to her research and public speaking, Karen is an active performer and vocalist. She has sung at various venues around the world, including the Vatican, the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and tours of Italy, Germany and Austria.
Rachel Adelstein is an ethnomusicologist based in New Haven, Connecticut. She received her Ph.D in 2013 from the University of Chicago, where she completed her doctoral dissertation entitled “Braided Voices: Women Cantors in Non-Orthodox Judaism.” Between 2014 and 2017, she was the Donnelley Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, where she conducted fieldwork for a project exploring the musical lives of British synagogues. Currently, she is co-teaching a course in thesis writing online at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan. She has produced a short series of podcasts on music in Jewish life around the world, and has presented her research internationally to academic and public audiences. Her work has been published in Jewish Historical Studies, Musica Judaica, Naxos Musicology International, The Journal of Synagogue Music, and in the Shalvi-Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.