Dr. Neil W. Levin
Professor of Jewish Music, The Jewish Theological Seminary of America

Artistic director and Editor in Chief of the Milken Archive since 1993, Neil W. Levin is recognized as a leading authority on Jewish music, and has lectured and presented at university seminars and academic conferences throughout the United States, Europe, and Israel. Professor of Jewish music at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America since 1982, he teaches graduate courses on the history, development, and repertoire of synagogue music, cantorial art, Yiddish and Hebrew folksong, the music of modern Israel, and music of American Jewish experience. He has served as editor of Musica Judaica, the academic Journal of the American Society for Jewish Music, and has published numerous articles, archival-historical recordings, and books. His work with the Milken Archive earned him a Deems Taylor Award—the annual award given by the American Society of Composers and Publishers for the most original and informative liner notes to a commercially distributed recording. He was recently appointed music editor of the Posen Library of Jewish Civilization and Culture. Levin received his bachelor’s and master degree from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

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Dr. Samuel Adler
Professor of Composition, The Juilliard School

A prolific composer, Samuel Adler studied composition with Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith, Walter Piston, Hugo Norden, and Randall Thompson, as well as conducting with Serge Koussevitzky. He was professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music for more than 30 years, and has taught on the faculties of Ithaca College, the University of Cincinnati, Bowling Green State University, and the University of Missouri. He is currently a faculty member of The Juilliard School. Adler has received commissions and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Ford, Rockefeller, and Koussevitzky foundations; and numerous orchestras and institutions. He is the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Charles Ives Award, the Lillian Fairchild Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship for five seasons, the Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University, and the Aaron Copland Prize for lifetime achievement in composition and composition teaching from ASCAP. He was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 2008.

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Rabbi David Aaron
Professor of Hebrew Bible and History of Interpretation, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati

Rabbi David Aaron was ordained at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, in 1983 and earned his doctorate from the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University in 1991. A leading authority on the Hebrew Bible, Aaron has published widely on issues related to metaphor, interpretation, and historiography.

Dr. Ofer Ben-Amots
Associate Chair and Professor of Music, Colorado College

Israeli-born composer Ofer Ben-Amots gave his first piano concert at nine and won the Chet Piano Competition at 16. He holds degrees in composition, theory, and piano from Hochschule für Musik in Detmold, Germany, and also studied at Conservatoire de Musique in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1987, he came to the United States and studied with George Crumb and Richard Wernick at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his Ph.D. in composition in 1991. Ben-Amots’s chamber opera, Fool’s Paradise, won the Vienna International Competition for Composers in 1994. His composition Fanfare for Orchestra won the Kavannagh Prize in 1988 and he received the Gold Award at South Africa’s 1993 Roodepoort International Competition for Choral Composition. His work for soprano, klezmer clarinet and men’s chorus, Mizmor: Seven Degrees of Praise was premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center in 2003 as part of “Only in America,” an international conference-festival sponsored by The Jewish Theological Seminary and the Milken Archive.

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