Barbara Ostfeld is a cantor, an author, and a mental health advocate, as well as having served as an editor and administrator. Ostfeld became a cantor because, as she said, “it filled in all the details of my life.” She was musical from very early childhood, singing constantly; from the age of eight, knew she wanted to be a cantor because it combined the music in her life with her Jewishness, which informed every part of her life. 

Ostfeld—who acquired the nickname “Barbi” as a youngster—was born on December 24, 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Adrian Ostfeld (1926-2011), was an epidemiologist and professor of public health; her mother, Ruth Vogel Ostfeld (1925-2016), was an occupational therapist and classically trained cellist who studied at Indiana University and played in chamber groups and orchestras. 

Ostfeld started singing by imitating songs on the radio while driving in the car with her parents. When she heard a song she liked, she wanted to listen to it endlessly. Her parents encouraged her, and she loved listening to rehearsals of her mother’s string quartet at their home, sneaking out of bed to listen so she could “hear all the notes” (Interview, 2024).

Early on, Ostfeld started piano lessons with a woman named Mrs. Lingas. These lessons led her to apply her keyboard skills beyond piano; at age fifteen she switched to harpsichord, playing Bach inventions and Renaissance music. From there, her love of early music only grew. In high school, she sang in a madrigal group and a select chorus that went to all-state competitions. As she put it, “I learned that there were so many people, more and more people, who loved music as I did, and who were so opened up by the ensemble sound and the double choir sound and trumpets echoing back and forth, and it was just sublime” (Interview, 2024).  

Ostfeld’s parents were regular attenders at the synagogue when they settled in Oak Park, Illinois. Ostfeld loved imitating the singing of the cantor there. She later recalled: “It was the high point of every week for me. My mother would light candles and we would have a Shabbat dinner. Then we would go to temple, and…for me, it was everything…. [F]eeling the organ through my feet, it all came together when the ark was open—something in me opened and I was captured” (Interview, 2024). The songs were very traditional Reform composed pieces, by composers such as Louis Lewandowski and Solomon Sulzer, and the cantor, Martin Rosen, had been trained at Hebrew Union College. The hymns were mostly English; one favorite was “All the World Shall Come to Serve Thee.”

Ostfeld recalled Cantor Rosen as her first teacher and “kind of like my idol. He looked like a TV star….he was delightful and he was nurturing and he smiled a lot and he drew out children” (Interview, 2024). Rosen started Ostfeld singing in their temple’s children’s choir, giving her an occasional solo. When she was eleven, he sent her to a local Chicago-based voice teacher, Bernice Taylor, for more vocal training. Ostfeld felt very grown up traveling on the “L” to Taylor’s studio in Chicago to take lessons. She auditioned for and won a role in the children's chorus of Chicago's Lyric Opera, but her father decided against her taking part.

In 1968, the Ostfeld family moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Ostfeld’s father took a job as a professor of Public Health at Yale University. She attended OSRUI, a Reform summer camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where she experienced a great deal of music, informal Torah study, and group singing in worship and taught herself guitar. At OSRUI, her love of Judaism and love for music became forever entwined. As she recalled:

Music defined the daily worship and it was the…coming together of the community for worship, which we designed and created that just made it come home to me…. I became very serious about Judaism and Torah study as a camper at Oconomowoc, and I decided then that I wanted to learn to play the guitar because it was clearly such a cool thing.… I wanted to have a bit of that coolness. So, I taught myself over a summer with a chord book and never was very good but was happy…. It was the immersion in the camp experience that introduced me to the way of life that I sought to have for myself. A life in community, a life punctuated by sacred music, a life in which Torah study and deep questions were part of an everyday discipline (Interview, 2024).

In 1969, when completing high school and considering conservatories in which to study music, Ostfeld decided to apply to Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York out of her desire to combine her Jewish interests with music. 

For Ostfeld, it was a straightforward idea. The decision was not particularly rooted in feminism, for she was not really cognizant of the politics of women in synagogue life at age seventeen. She was also unaware that women had not not previously been admitted to the cantorial school. In terms of the admission process, as Ostfeld recalled, she simply applied and, as she described it, “I never had a bit of difficulty. I had an interview and an audition” (Interview, 2024).

At that time, the college offered a five-year  Bachelor program in sacred music that led to ordination as a cantor. Ostfeld found that the other students welcomed her, but the students in the first-year class were all men and older than she. Her main interactions outside class involved being asked to babysit for their children. She found the experience occasionally isolating and lonely, with little of the female companionship she had known in high school. 

Moreover, not all experiences were welcoming. During her first year’s performance, Ostfeld was asked by a vocal coach at the school to lip sync during concerts in order not to change the all-male choral sound with her soprano voice. She found this strange, given the long history of four-voice SATB choral singing in Reform congregations, but she nevertheless complied. While Ostfeld was the first woman to enroll, she was soon followed by two other women, Sheila Cline and Mimi Frishman, in the program her second year, and there was no more lip syncing. Cline and Frishman were invested as cantors a year after Ostfeld, on May 30, 1976. 

Overall, Ostfeld loved her studies at HUC-JIR. She particularly recalls learning Hebrew and “just fell in love with it...with finding roots and comparing this word to that word. It was a great pleasure for me” (Interview, 2024).

Ostfeld was deeply moved by the opportunity to work with great cantors and other students. Arthur Wolfson, the cantor at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Ave in New York City, had a particularly profound impact on her life. Ostfeld described Wolfson as a “pure soul and sweet singer of impeccable integrity” (Interview, 2024). He taught her both contemporary Reform music and traditional nusach (the musical style or tradition of a Jewish community, especially the chants used for recitative passages during worship) and showed her that a cantor, even in the Reform movement, needs to be grounded in the nusach. 

While at HUC-JIR, Ostfeld met Frederick C. Herman, who was also a cantor, and they married in 1972. They divorced in 1976. 

Ostfeld graduated and was ordained on June 6, 1975, at Temple Emanu-El, when she was just 22 years of age. Presaging the difficulties of acceptance for a woman clergy, despite having just received investiture, a New York Times article (June 9, 1975:65) never once referred to her as “Cantor,” despite the fact that she had just received investiture. Media that attended her ordination included local New York television, which broadcast footage of it as a news item. 

For the 1975-1976 year, Ostfeld served Temple Beth Shalom of Clifton, New Jersey, where she had had a student pulpit, as cantor-educator. From 1976 through 1988, she served Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, a congregation of over 1400 families that proved to be an extraordinary experience. Her teaching load was enormous, totaling over 100 b’nai mitzvah a year. She fulfilled the full range of cantorial responsibilities, including funerals, weddings, and leading services. She directed a children’s choir. She “learned everything there” with the help of the Rabbi Jerry Davidson. During this time, she met and married Mark Horowitz in 1981. The marriage ended in 1997.

One of the challenges in being a “first” for anything involves not having role models. In Ostfeld’s early career, congregants paid a great deal of attention to her clothes, shoes, hair style, and make up. She tried to please people by changing her “looks” but ultimately had to find her own style and own voice and be comfortable in her own path as a professional woman. Some of the sacrifices of being a first were in the lack of work-life balance, such as the lack of time she had to spend with her children when they were young. Other families were “free” on weekends, while she was completely tied up with congregational activities; other working mothers might have afternoons and evenings with their children, whereas most of her teaching responsibilities and meetings were at those times. This characteristic of pulpit clergy life left very little room for time with her own family, and Barbara had to learn to set boundaries to enhance her personal life. 

In her following pulpits, Ostfeld realized there was room for her to be a part of the teaching core of the synagogue; to work with rabbinic colleagues toward adult education projects, women’s groups, book groups, and language study; and to engage in more communal responsibilities. From 1988 to 1990, she worked for B’rith Kodesh in Rochester, New York; in 1990, she went to Temple Beth Am in Buffalo, New York, where she felt she “came into my own.” Professionally, she had the time and space to try new things musically. She enjoyed the collegiality of two outstanding rabbis, Steve Mason and Michael Feshbach, and remained as cantor in Buffalo for twelve years, through 2002. 

During her career as a pulpit cantor, Ostfeld estimates that she taught about 1500 students for b’nai mitzvah, in addition to all her other duties. In 2000, she received an honorary Doctorate in Sacred Music. 

Ostfeld’s love of being a cantor is often expressed poetically as well as musically. She reflected, “Being a cantor is about loving words. I depend upon the constancy of a liturgical phrase. I expect it—need it—to stir me. Once that happens, if it happens, I can command my voice to lift the words from the page. If everything is working, the words go up. That is the whole thing” (Interview, 2006). 

In Buffalo, Ostfeld met her current husband Todd M. Joseph, a Harvard-educated lawyer; they married in June 1998. Ostfeld enjoyed settling down with her two daughters, Jordana and Aleza, and her husband. She played amateur harpsichord and occasionally participated in small classical vocal ensembles. 

Ostfeld is also a writer. She dabbles in poetry and has written several essays, published in Lilith Magazine, New Jewish Feminism, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her essay “The Ascent of the Woman Cantor” appeared as a book chapter in New Jewish Feminism (2012). Ostfeld appeared in a PBS documentary The Cantor: A Calling for Today (1994), created by Cantor Michael Shochet, that explored the contemporary life of Reform cantors. 

In her essays, Ostfeld has tackled difficult topics, including pay inequity, harassment in the workplace, sexism for female clergy, and other feminist and personal issues she experienced firsthand. She recalls hearing the exclamations at the beginning of her career: “Oh, my God, the cantor is a girl. They have a girl cantor, a girl! What do we call you? Cantarina, Cantarella.” Years later, she found this level of confusion with changing mores somewhat amusing. 

In 2019, Ostfeld published Catbird: The Ballad of Barbi Prim, in which she notably explored her own journey and many of the challenges she faced as a pulpit cantor, in her family life, and in her personal mental health struggles. She revealed that some of her own wrestlings are fallout from dysfunction in her family growing up, as well as from an aggravated assault she experienced when she was nineteen. She has strongly advocated for good mental health care and continues to work for others dealing with mental health issues. Throughout her retirement, Ostfeld has been a leader on issues of mental health for women clergy.

Over her career, Ostfeld’s talents were recognized by the American Conference of Cantors (ACC), the Reform cantors’ professional organization, which supports cantors in their work, in their ongoing education, in their outreach, and in their connection the Union of Reform Judaism (URJ). She served on board positions of the ACC, as Secretary (1978-1980), as Vice-President (1980-1982), as a Northeast regional representative (1994-1996), and several terms on the board of directors. 

In 2002, Ostfeld took a new job with the Joint Cantorial Placement Commission and accepted the Directorship of the Placement Commission of the ACC, a job she held for ten years and that allowed her a different lifestyle than as a pulpit cantor. She helped make “matches” between congregations and cantors. She worked with congregations to articulate their missions and community values and then helped them choose candidates who would mesh well with those values and the rabbinic team. She also advised cantors and graduating student cantors on appropriate placements and assisted congregations with job descriptions and applicants with applications. She helped over 200 North American congregations and became widely acknowledged as a cantorial leader of the Reform Movement. 

In 2012, Ostfeld became Placement Director emerita of the ACC and remained on its board of trustees. She also served on the ACC’s Task Force on Women in the Cantorate and edited the ACC newsletter, Shalshelet: The Chain, for two years. She became known for her involvement with youth choirs, Holocaust awareness and other roles in social justice, one of the earliest influencers of her entry into the cantorate. 

In 2019, she was awarded the Debbie Friedman Award, the Reform Movement’s highest musical honor. Ostfeld accepted this with her usual humor by quipping, “Worship will never again idle in bass clef!” 

Ostfeld downplays her own significance as the first woman ever invested as a cantor, emphasizing instead the impact of women broadly speaking entering the cantorate. She feels that women raised the standards of the profession musically, intellectually, and spiritually and brought out the best in the men. She believes synagogue music was “missing two octaves of the human voice and prayer is nothing but the creation of art from the human voice…. [A]ll those expressions happened in every key, and it was a very glaring shame that our sound had been behind bars for so long” (Interview, 2024).

Ostfeld sees the social changes brought by the entrance of women into the cantorate as coinciding with social changes in synagogue life overall. As “women entered the full-fledged Jewish life, the liturgy began to reflect that in very many ways, and the way Torah was taught changed…to include the silenced voices of women, and so therefore compositions had to be written for the female cantor” (Interview, 2024). As she sees it, in addition to the musical changes, women as cantors have added to the Jewish body of wisdom, aiding in a flowering of Jewish liturgy and Torah study, in the move away from the perception of Judaism as a man’s religion, in the relationship of the congregation to worship, and to life celebrations:  

The most important thing that I have to say…is that female cantors should realize that in every prayer they chant, in every prayer they sing there is an element of the celebration of enlightenment…and the thing I would say to young cantors is the big deal is connecting the dots. You connect your voice to the Jewish community, to Torah study, to social action, to mindfulness, to the greening of the earth. And our voices are tools, and we call attention by singing out with them” (Interview, 2024).

Ostfeld sees a noble Jewish social justice legacy extending from women being cantors: 

Women cantors are doing the proverbial singing of a new song. And on our coattails are all the other outcasts who’ve been marginalized, who now come with us into main roles in Jewish life. And we’ve added half of the human voice back into the liturgy, back into the study of Torah, back into the way the messages resonate. And the Eternal One always heard voices in our range and always heard the cries of the outcast. But the patriarchy didn’t. And so, this is a great vision of a Torah scroll that not only unrolls but stretches. And we’re in the beginning of the stretching, a new stretching of the Torah scroll (Interview, 2024).