Course Lecturer

Josh 鈥淪ocalled鈥� Dolgin is a pianist, accordionist, journalist, photographer, puppet maker, rapper, composer, magician and producer based in Montreal, Quebec. He has lectured and led master classes in music festivals around the world, from Moscow to Paris, from London to LA, and from Krakow to San Francisco, and has performed on every continent. With 8-ish solo albums (and one with Vulfpeck鈥檚 Jack Stratton and Michael Winograd as Yiddishe Pirat) and 6 produced musical comedies to his name, he has performed solo or with his band all over the world for more than 25 years. His list of collaborators knows no generational, social, cultural or religious boundaries: Chilly Gonzales, Itzhak Perlman, Lhasa de Sela, Fred Wesley, Andy Statman, Adam Cohen, Boban Markovic, the Mighty Sparrow, Roxanne Shante, Irving Fields, Killah Priest, Matisyahu, Theodore Bikel, Fanfare Ciocarlia, Enrico Macias and Derrick Carter, to name-drop a few. Dolgin was the subject of 鈥淭he Socalled Movie鈥�, a 2010 feature documentary produced by Gary Beitel and the National Film Board of Canada. Always active doing special projects, he toured Yiddish programs with Austria鈥檚 Lungau Big Band and Germany鈥檚 Kaiser Quartett, creates themesongs (like the As It Happens remix, heard every night across the country on CBC), directed and released an indie erotica film and created a special program using first world war internment camp archives at the Weimar festival of Yiddish culture. He is working on the next Socalled record, developing a new Yiddish musical for New York's Folksbiene.

Josh has been a course lecturer in Jewish Studies since 2024. His courses explore the history of Eastern European Jewish music and provide a framework for students to engage with the many archives of Jewish music housed in Montreal.