Afropop Worldwide

Jeffrey A. Summit is associate professor of music at Tufts University where he serves as rabbi and executive director of the Hillel Foundation.  He is the author of The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship (Oxford, 2000), and with Richard Sobol, co-author of Abayudaya: The Jews of Uganda (Abbeville, 2002).  A companion CD released by Smithsonian Folkways in 2003 received a Grammy Award nomination.  Rabbi Summit holds rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and a Ph.D. from Tufts University where he studied ethnomusicology in Tufts' interdisciplinary doctoral program. He has been invited to lecture at many universities and has recently spoken at Harvard University, Stanford University, Yale University, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, the University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Chicago.  An accomplished musician, he has performed Jewish and traditional American music throughout the United States, as well as in England and Israel.  During the Yom Kippur War, he performed for Israeli soldiers in the Sinai and Golan Heights. His songs examining those experiences were recorded on his record Shepherd of the Highways. Rabbi Summit is former president of the National Hillel Professional Association.