Professor Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower; Hebrew: רות הכהן פינצ'ובר) (born 1956) is an Israeli musicologist and a cultural historian.

Ruth HaCohen is the author of books and articles which elucidate the role played by music in the West in shaping and reflecting wide cultural and political contexts and processes from early modernity to the present times.

She investigates, accordingly, the works that constitute such experiential worlds from the viewpoint of their genres and styles; among them, opera and oratorio, artistic and folk songs, as well as film and animation.

The imagined worlds of the arts are not created ex nihilo, she maintains, but rather draw on collective social and psychological tenets, which they eventually refashion.

In the religious sphere, she demonstrates the modes whereby sounds mold sacred time and space (for instance, in J. S. Bach's oeuvres) and vocal communities (such as the synagogue's congregation).

HaCohen tracks down the manifestations and roots of the noise accusation to a variation on the famous blood libel that spread throughout Europe during the Crusades, alleging that Jews murdered Christian boys in order to hush their “intolerable” hymns and canticles.

Stemming from two diametrically opposed performing practices of handling sound in ritual space, the noise accusation, she argues, records the reciprocal rejection, on the part of the two adversarial communities, of their respective sonic worlds.

Transcending the confines of church and synagogue, this study investigates the opening up of the musical sphere towards the Jews' inclusion in the wake of the Enlightenment.

Pivotal to the Jews' struggle for aural accession are certain art works—musical, literary and pictorial—created by both “invaders” into that common audial space and by those considered its privileged “inhabitants.” From Bach through Lessing, Handel, Mendelssohn, and Heinrich Heine to Richard Wagner, George Eliot, and many others, expressions and rebuttals of the noise accusation are traced and compared.

These records are analyzed vis-à-vis the massive restructuring of synagogal practices, in both Reform and traditional communities, throughout the nineteenth century, in Germany and beyond.

As a whole, the book exposes the often neglected, if crucial role of the sonic worlds we live by in shaping modes of religious, communal and ethnic experience, self-perception and perception of the other, which reinforce, in turn— if not determine—major political trends in human culture.