A musician and Jewish music researcher affiliated with the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney, Joseph’s field of expertise is in the musical experiences and memories of Jewish Holocaust survivors. He has interviewed over 120 survivors and descendants across four continents over a period of 30 years. In 2010 he was awarded the Barbara and Richard Rosenberg Fellowship at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington DC), the world’s premier institution for Holocaust research. He is currently the Manager of Research Support in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, at the University of Sydney.

Academic research

Joseph speaks regularly at academic conferences and for the public. In April 2018 he gave the Al and Malka Green Lecture in Yiddish at the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He has presented eight commissioned (fully funded) papers at venues including the Sibelius Academy in Finland, the Society for Ethnomusicology’s annual conference in New Orleans, Arizona State University, the Center for Jewish History (NYC) and others. He has also presented 24 papers in national and international conferences since 2007.

Joseph has received competitive funding from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (2007), the Australian Federal Government (Postgraduate Award 2006–2009), the Ian Potter Foundation (2012), the Worldwide Universities Network (2013-14), the Herbert and Valmae Freilich Foundation (2014–16). The most significant funding he has received was as Co-Investigator for a large grant awarded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.  This £1.8 million grant ran Performing the Jewish Archive from 2014 to 2018, and involved performance-based research on four continents. 

Joseph continues to write on the place of Jewish music in memory and commemorative contexts, and is examining the impact that displaced European Jewish music and musicians have had on diasporic Jewish communities in the Anglosphere. Together with the acclaimed migration scholar, Associate Professor Anna Boucher, he has completed a monograph for Manchester University Press on the first collection of Holocaust songs, originally published in Bucharest in June 1945.  He is working closely on the music and life of Wilhelm Grosz, a promising Austrian Jewish composer who fled to the UK and became a writer of hit popular songs of the 1930s. 

Joseph is a founding member of the NeuroMusic Collaborative at the University of Sydney. This interdisciplinary team (neurology, music performance research, musicology, biomedical engineering, dementia and ageing research, music cognition, neuropsychology) is running clinical trials, asking whether intensive music tuition for patients susceptible to neurodegeneration will improve their neuroplasticity. His interest in this topic has been amplified by personal experiences interviewing musically active Holocaust survivors, most of whom have healthy mental capacity. He believes that active engagement with music not only builds neuroplasticity, but also enables older people to access long-term trauma memories with safety and personal agency.

Musical work

Joseph’s research is always based in creative work. In August 2014 he produced and directed the first Sydney performances of the children’s opera Brundibár at City Recital Hall, Angel Place. Originally completed in 1938 for a Czechoslovak Education Ministry competition, the score of this small work was secretly smuggled into the Terezín ghetto (Theresienstadt), where it became the most popular, most performed and most beloved work for the residents of the ghetto. The production in Sydney was informed by memories conveyed by Holocaust survivors in Sydney, Israel, the UK and the USA, in particular Ela Weissberger z”l, Jerry Rind z”l, and Edith Sheldon.

His most recent creative research project involves the musical experience and memories of Guta Goldstein, a child survivor in the Łódź Ghetto who lives in Melbourne. Together with director Tim Slade he produced a documentary on Guta’s musical life, where interviews with her were interspersed with her songs and scenes from the town of her birth. This documentary, Singing up the Past,  premiered in the 2024 Jewish International Film Festival (Australia), and has featured at the Ehmaliges Jüdisches Waisenhaus Pankow (2025), screened at the Museum for Jewish Heritage (2026) and at the Glen Eira Storytelling Festival (2026).

Joseph is a pianist, composer, arranger, conductor and singer. He began as a  trumpet and French horn player, shifting to percussion under the tutelage of Colin Piper (SSO). Since the age of 12 has sung professionally: as a boy soprano with Opera Australia (Boris Godunov 1982, Tosca and La Bohème 1983). During his professional choral career, he sang with the Australian Chamber Singers, the Contemporary Singers, Cantillation, Philharmonia Motet Choir and others. From 1995-2008 he was Cantor and Director of Music and Pastoral Care at Emanuel Synagogue. He was Choirmaster at the Great Synagogue (1992-1994), vocal consultant and choir coach for Central Synagogue, and he continues my family’s 76-year association with North Shore Synagogue as their Choirmaster. 

Borowsky Chazanut Singers

Through the vision of Dr Ted Arnold he leads a male voice choir unaffiliated to any Synagogue, called the Borowsky Chazzanut Singers. The performers come from a variety of congregations – the Great, Central, North Shore, Emanuel, Kadimah and others. Our name honours the magnificent baritone Bob Borowsky, who sadly passed away in 2023. Bob’s contribution to the world of Orthodox Jewish choral music cannot be over-estimated. A co-founder of the Johannesburg Jewish Male Choir, he was a towering ambassador for the traditions of Jewish chazzanut (the cantorial tradition), with an outstanding dramatic baritone voice that scarcely wavered in almost 90 years of active singing career. 

Contact me here!