Ruth HaCohen

Ruth HaCohen was married to Yaron Ezrahi, until his death in 2019. She has a son and four grandchildren from her previous marriage.

Ruth HaCohen is a member of the board of directors at the Israel National Library since 2018 and a member of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Board of Trustees since 2016. She was a member of the Polyphony Foundation (an organization aiming to bridge the divide between Arab and Jewish communities in Israel through music and to serve as a worldwide model for cooperation) and the Reinhard Strohm Balzan Prize Project “Towards a Global History of Music.” She has also been a member of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra board.

Ruth HaCohen has pursued her entire academic career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, climbing the ladder of academic promotions. In 2013 she was appointed as the Artur Rubinstein Professor of Musicology. During the 1980s, she was the main Academic Assistant to Ruth Katz and Carl Dahlhaus for the composition of their monumental Contemplating Music: Source Readings in the Aesthetics of Music series. HaCohen founded, in collaboration with other colleagues, the PhD Honors Program in the Humanities at the Hebrew University (2008) and eventually chaired the program. She was Head of the School for the Arts (2013-2015) and the Director of The Martin Buber Society of Fellows (2014-2017). In 2014, she received the Rector Prize for outstanding research, teaching and active participation in university life.

Her major work, The Music Libel Against the Jews (2011), is a wide-ranging study of the historical Christian exclusion of the Jews, accused of producing noise in a musical universe dominated by harmonious sounds. Associating harmonies with divine grace, Christians interpreted the "Jewish noise" issuing from medieval synagogues as a sign of divine forsakenness. 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.

The Music Libel Against the Jews was winner of the Otto Kinkeldey Award, bestowed by the American Musicological Society, for the most distinguished book in musicology published in 2011. It was also the winner of the 2012 Polonsky First Prize in the research category for creativity and originality in the humanistic disciplines.

Her early work, in collaboration with Ruth Katz, includes the volumes Tuning the Mind: Connecting Aesthetics to Cognitive Science (2003) and The Arts in Mind: Pioneering Texts of a Coterie of British Men of Letters (2003). These works discuss the paradigm shift in the traditional notion of art as mimetic toward a view of art as worldmaking, a turn beaconed by musical thinking. Engaging the perspectives of both the thinking of late-eighteenth-century English men of letters and the tenets of modern cognitive science, these volumes analyze music as "sense formations without predication," by way of intrinsically analyzing musical contemporary styles and genres, and extrinsically examining the relation of music to its "sister arts." Concomitantly, the books underscore the debt of present-day cognitive theories to historical aesthetic ideas and artistic practices.

Prof. HaCohen has been a resident in many academic institutions, as a visiting scholar in Oxford in 1996-7; as a research fellow/visiting professor at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2004-5), the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University (2008), the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. (2011), and the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center (2012). She has lectured in Oxford, Cambridge and Vienna Universities, UNAM (Mexico), Johns Hopkins, North Carolina, NYU, Duke, Princeton, Central European University, the George Washington University, the Free University of Berlin and the University of Konstanz, among others.

Professor Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower; in Hebrew רות הכהן פינצ'ובר) (born 1956, in Jerusalem, Israel) is an Israeli musicologist and a cultural historian. She holds the Artur Rubinstein Chair of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Ruth HaCohen is the recipient of the 2022 Rothschild Prize in the Humanities. In 2017, she was elected as Corresponding member by the American Musicological Society (AMS) "for outstanding contributions to the advancement of scholarship in music."

Ruth HaCohen grew up and was educated in Jerusalem. Her parents emigrated from Germany to Palestine (later Israel) in the 1930s. She did her army service in the Nahal (a paramilitary IDF program) mainly as a leader in informal education. She graduated in Musicology and Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1980 and received her PhD in Musicology (summa cum laude) under the supervision of Prof. Ruth Katz at the Hebrew University (1992).