A Horrifying Threat to Ethnomusicology
I don't think it really started at the October 2023 meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Ottawa, but the virus of academic antisemitism sure did make a banging public entrance at that conference. Since then, SEM has been quietly tolerating a push for a BDS amendment to their constitution that would harm Israeli ethnomusicologists, Jewish ethnomusicologists, non-Jewish ethnomusicologists who want to study Levantine music, non-Jewish ethnomusicologists who work with any of the above, and both the work and credibility of the Society itself while -- and this is key -- also providing aid and comfort to precisely zero (0) Gazans.
I love ethnomusicology. It's been my discipline for over twenty years. I am a Jewish scholar of Jewish music. I look forward to going to SEM every year -- it's music camp! It's where I get to hang out with colleagues and friends and learn really interesting new things! It's sad if I can't go! I'm never not going to be an ethnomusicologist.
But for the first time since I went to my very first SEM conference in 2006, I don't want to go to SEM this year. It's not even the antizionist cult that took up residence in the conference common area at SEM 2025 (though they were annoying), or the fact that the same cult hijacked the President's Roundtable with what was effectively a 90-minute advertisement for their BDS amendment proposal. It's that so few of the non-Jewish ethnomusicologists who attended the conference seemed to either notice or care.
I know that this affects relatively few of you here, but if it does . . . please spread this around. My friend Cantor Austerklein up there isn't an SEM member, and he got wind of this because of another mutual friend, a Jewish music scholar who rescued the news from behind SEM's paywall. The world -- or, at least, academia -- needs to know about this. Jewish scholars are being marginalized, and we need the help of non-Jewish voices. There just aren't enough of us, even if we all cry out. And, honestly . . . do you really think that people would listen if it were just the Jewish scholars making noise anyway?
I'm retaining my SEM membership because they are not going to get the satisfaction of driving this Jewish scholar out of the Society. I'll be taking my annual conference budget to a different conference this year, but I will never not be an ethnomusicologist. This isn't the end. There's still a chance for SEM to do better, and to live up to what it says are its good and worthwhile reasons for existing. But the Society is in a dangerous place right now, and it needs help and clear heads steering it.