Judith R. Cohen
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.
[8] She submitted her master's thesis on "The Role of Women Musicians in Medieval Spain in the Christian, Jewish and Moslem Communities".
[6] 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.
[1][6] 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.
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.
[5] 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.
[5] 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.
She has written detailed liner notes for CD collections of Lomax's dance tunes and ballads from many regions of Spain under the Franco regime.
[4] The Judith R. Cohen Collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum contains "digital sound recordings of English and Ladino songs, oral testimony, radio programs, and academic presentation examples" which Cohen compiled in her research of the Sephardic refugee community in Montreal.
[12] In 1981, she produced a Manual of Early Medieval Music Notation for a course taught by Professor Wolfgang Bottenberg at Concordia.
[1] As part of her fieldwork, Cohen learns traditional folk tunes and then performs them in concerts, festivals, and solo recitals.
[1][11] Cohen frequently incorporates songs and instrumental performance into her lectures on Judeo-Spanish, Yiddish, Hispanic, Canadian, French, Balkan, and medieval musical traditions.
[11] For her Radio Canada program "Dans mon chemin j'ai rencontré: Songs of Meetings and Travelling", accompanied by her daughter, Cohen won the Prix Marcel Blouin in 1994.
