Episode 3: Dr. Halina Goldberg (Indiana University Bloomington)

The third episode of Season 4 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Halina Goldberg. We discuss her childhood in Poland and emigration to the United States, and explore how her love of Chopin eventually led to her scholarship on the music of Polish Jewish daily life, ballet, and synagogues.

Dr. Halina Goldberg is professor of musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. She currently serves as director of the Byrnes Institute (REEI) and director of Polish Studies Center at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. She is affiliate faculty of IU’s Borns Jewish Studies Program, Institute for European Studies, and Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. She also serves as the project director for the digital project Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź: https://jewish-lodz.iu.edu.

Goldberg’s interests focus on interconnected Polish and Jewish cultures. Much of her work is interdisciplinary, engaging the areas of cultural studies, music and politics, performance practice, and reception, with special focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland and Eastern Europe, Chopin, and Jewish studies, and has written numerous articles on these topics. She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (Oxford University Press, 2008; Polish translation, 2016; Chinese and Russian translations forthcoming) and editor of The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (Indiana University Press, 2004), Chopin and His World (Princeton University Press, 2017, with Jonathan Bellman), Descriptive Piano Fantasias (A-R Editions, 2021, also with Bellman). In 2024 she was appointed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland to a five-year term on the Programme Board of The Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, Poland.

In the area of Jewish studies, she edited “Jewish Spirituality, Modernity, and Historicism in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Musical Perspectives,” a special issue of The Musical Quarterly. Her Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery (Rutgers University Press, 2023, with Nancy Sinkoff) is the 2024 winner of PIASA’s Anna M. Cienciala Award and was shortlisted by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages for Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume of 2024. She is a co-designer of “In Mrs. Goldberg’s Kitchen,” a multimedia exhibit at the Central Museum of Textiles in Łodź about the city’s pre-World War II Jewish quarter that received a nomination for the 2012 Sybilla Award, Poland’s most prestigious museum prize. Her latest book, co-edited with Bożena Shallcross, is The Jewish Inn in Polish Culture: Between Practice and Phantasm (Indiana University Press, 2025).

Goldberg’s other honors include the 2021 H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for the article “Chopin’s Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription” (Journal of the American Musicological Society). The book Albuming Beyond Borders: Music, Memory, Material Culture (co-edited with Henrike Rost) is scheduled to come out next year from Oxford University Press.