Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower) is the Artur Rubinstein Professor of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she has held various posts, including the Head of the PhD Honors Program and the School of the Arts, and Director of the German-Israeli Martin Buber Society of Fellows.
HaCohen investigates the modes by which music participates in shaping the emotional, religious, social, and political worlds since early modernity. She has explored sound as a source for conflict, and a medium for reconciliation, compassion and solidarity. Her research also probes musical modes of signification, in relation and collaboration with other art forms. Her publications include Tuning the Mind: Connecting Aesthetic Theory to Cognitive Science; The Arts in Mind: Pioneering Texts of a Coterie of British Men of Letters (2003 both with Ruth Katz); The Music Libel against the Jews (for which she won the Kinkeldey Award for the best book in Musicology by the American Musicological society in 2012, and the Polonsky Prize for creativity and originality in the Humanities);Composing Power, Singing Freedom: The Interplay of Music and Politics in the West (2017, in Hebrew, with Yaron Ezrahi, Polonsky Prize). She was honored as a Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society in 2017.