The Milken Archive of Jewish Music is a non-profit organization dedicated to expanding the awareness and appreciation of Jewish music. Thus far focused on music pertaining to the American Jewish experience, the Archive's primary assets comprise more than 700 recorded works, as well as hundreds of hours of taped oral histories from composers, performers, cantors, educators, and others central to Jewish music's history and development. The Milken Archive released a portion of its recorded repertoire on 50 CDs between 2003 and 2006. The remainder of the extant recordings and any future additions, as well as much of the ethnographic and documentary material, will be made available through this website between 2010 and 2014. Plans for the Archive in 2014 and beyond are currently under discussion. To learn more about the founding of the Milken Archive, read Lowell Milken's welcome message.

Established in 1990, the Milken Archive is the result of the vision and initiative of Lowell Milken, chairman of the Milken Family Foundation, whose love of synagogue music deepened into a recognition of the value and scope of Jewish music in general. In keeping with the Foundation's educational goals, Lowell Milken translated his enthusiasm for this repertoire into an ongoing project, under the artistic direction of Dr. Neil W. Levin, intended to increase the public's awareness of and appreciation for the quality and variety of music reflecting the American Jewish experience. Special recognition is due composer Michael Isaacson who served as a catalyst to the Archive's creation, and collaborated with the Milken Family Foundation in its work during the Archive's early years.

Each recording included on this website features direct purchase links to the most common online music retailers. To make a purchase, click the "Buy" button in the right hand column of the "works list" and select a service from the popup (iTunes, Amazon, or Classics Online).

The links will open a new browser window or tab and display the relevant product detail page for the selected recording. You can purchase the recordings by track, album, or, if available, CD.

The 20 volumes are multimedia collections comprising music, video, photographs, essays, oral histories, and more based on historical, cultural, and religious themes from the world of Jewish music. For the sake of making an entire volume's musical recordings available for purchase at a reasonable price, each volume's tracks have been compiled into standard length digital albums. The 50 Milken Archive CDs issued by Naxos in the years 2003–2006, which comprise less than half of the Archive's collection of original recordings, represent a cross-section of the volumes. There is some duplication of entire CDs within particular volumes, but in some cases, the music contained on a particular CD will fall into multiple volumes. As of 2010, the Milken Archive began releasing all previously-unreleased recordings as digital downloads only. The 50 Milken Archive CDs are available in both physical and digital formats.