Assaf Shelleg

Assaf Shelleg (Hebrew: אסף שלג‎) is an Israeli-American musicologist and pianist, a senior lecturer of musicology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was previously the Schusterman Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology and Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia (2011–2014), and had taught prior to that as the visiting Efroymson Scholar in the Jewish, Islamic & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department at Washington University in St. Louis (2009–2011). Shelleg specializes in twentieth-century Jewish and Israeli art music and has published in some of the leading journals in both musicology and Israel Studies on topics ranging from the historiography of modern Jewish art music to the theological networks of Israeli art music.^[1][2]

Shelleg's book, Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History, appeared in November 2014 with Oxford University Press.^[3] The book studies the emergence of modern Jewish art music in central and Western Europe (1910s–1930s) and its translocation to Palestine/Israel (1930s–1970s), exposing the legacies of European antisemitism and religious Judaism in the making of Israeli art music. Moving to consider the dislocation of modern Jewish art music the book examines the paradoxes embedded in a Zionist national culture whose rhetoric negated its pasts, only to mask process of hybridizations enchained by older legacies. Jewish Contiguities has won the 2015 Engel Prize for the study of Hebrew Music,^[4] and the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award.^[5]

Shelleg's new book Theological Stains; Art Music and the Zionist Project appeared in November of 2020 with Oxford University Press. This is the first in-depth study on art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first, exploring the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers. In the process, Theological Stains also traces composers' turn to diasporic Jewish cultures and their shift to autonomous aesthetic that ceased to be conditioned by territorial constraints.

Shelleg is also a regular musical contributor to Haaretz newspaper.^{[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]}

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