Dr. Tanya Sermer is faculty in the Unit of English as a Foreign Language at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and serves as coordinator of EFL’s Academic Writing Program. She has developed graduate and undergraduate courses in academic writing across the disciplines and teaches at all four campuses of the Hebrew University. She is a member of the Israel Forum for Academic Writing (IFAW) and a co-founder of the IFAW Special Interest Group for instructors of doctoral level writing.
She has also taught academic writing at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music of Tel Aviv University, English at Leyada—the Hebrew University High School, as well as courses in music at TAU School for Overseas Students, Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion (Year in Israel program), and the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.
Dr. Sermer brings her multidisciplinary approach to her English language teaching. Music and language share the demand for extensive practice and are both subject to stylistic trends, cultural particularities, and political concerns that all affect expression and creativity; she has found many similarities between teaching music and teaching language, and has brought engaging elements from music teaching into her language classes.
Her research focuses on music of Israel and the Arab Middle East, as well as Jewish and Islamic music and chant. She investigates the politics of music and sound in the public sphere, including the role of music in nation-building, protest, conflict, gender politics, and the production of space. She is particularly interested in what musical expression can teach us about Israeli and Palestinian experience, identity, and religiosity since October 7. Her research is situated within a growing body of scholarship on expressive culture that aims to problematize the distinction between symbolic and instrumental action, challenging the binary distinction between the “cultural” and the “political.”
Selected Publications:
Sermer, T. (forthcoming). Kol Nidre as audiotopia in a secular Jerusalem neighborhood. In R. Abeliovich & M. Kligman (Eds.), Kol Nidre in performance. Oxford University Press.
Sermer, T. (2025). When the cannons roar, are the muses silent? The Israeli soundscape since October 7, 2023. In M. Miller (Ed.), Classical and popular music in Israel: Transcultural dialogues and contrasts (pp. 368-404). University of Rochester Press. https://boydellandbrewer.com/book/classical-and-popular-music-in-israel
Sermer, T. (2025, April 29). It’s time to rethink the Memorial Day sirens [Hebrew]. Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/opinion/2025-04-29/ty-article-opinion/.premium/00000196-7c13-de13-add7-7f7b44d50000
Sermer, T. (2024, February 4). Review of City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem, by M. A. Figueroa. Musica Judaica Online Reviews. https://mjoreviews.org/2024/02/04/city-of-song-music-and-the-making-of-modern-jerusalem/
Sermer, T. (2019). Women of, for, and at the Wall: A performative analysis of gender politics at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 23, 48-74. https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2019.0003
Sermer, T. (2014). Jewish spiritual healing, Mi Shebeirach, and the legacy of Debbie Friedman. In G. J. Andrews, P. Kingsbury, & R. Kearns (Eds.), Soundscapes of wellbeing in popular music (pp. 77-88). Ashgate.
Sermer, T. (2014). The politicization of neo-Hasidic popular music: The musical discourse of Religious Zionism and its role in the struggle to claim the public sphere of Jerusalem. In Y. Shaked (Ed.), Moods and modes of Jewish music (pp. I-XI). University of Haifa.