“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
-Mark Twain

Just a few of our favorite cranks, kooks, crackpots, and other zeitgeist-nonconforming outliers who disavowed the gods, defied the priests, challenged orthodoxies, spurned myth, revised the word, reconfigured space, taught the world to see, and changed everything.

Dear President Shafik:

“In Lumine Tuo Videbimus Lumen”—In Thy light shall we see light. As an arriving Columbia College freshman in 1972, I read these words on the Seal of the University not really understanding what they meant. During the ensuing four years, however, I came to appreciate their meaning—that the pursuit of knowledge illuminates our path to truth and understanding and that Columbia would shine that light. Some fifty years later, I am heartbroken to see that the lights have gone out at my alma mater.

Immediately following the horrifying terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023, and before Israel had even responded, Columbia erupted in pro-Hamas demonstrations that stunned the campus Jewish community. The worst attack upon Jews since the Holocaust was literally being celebrated by significant numbers of students and faculty. Your response was to take the easy way out, i.e., to denounce the terrorist attacks while affirming the demonstrators’ free speech rights and paying lip service to your concern for the safety of all students on campus. What you failed to understand last October was that university presidents have free speech rights as well. You could and should have unequivocally condemned both the terrorist attacks and those who were celebrating it on campus. Not doing so was a failure of leadership.

Two fundamental lessons of history and parenting are that the absence of leadership is always perceived as weakness and the refusal to correct bad behavior inevitably results in more. You apparently have never learned either lesson.

Thanks in no small part to your weak response in October, the climate of antisemitism at Columbia has only worsened on your watch during the intervening six months. Over the past several days, including at the very moment when you were testifying on this issue before a House committee, the campus has turned into something resembling a full-throated antisemitic pogrom or a Nuremberg rally. Hundreds of individuals, many masked to conceal their identities, have been permitted to verbally and physically assault Jewish students based solely on their religion. Calls for further violence and terrorism against Jews in general and Israel in particular are screamed across campus, including throughout an impermissible encampment on South Lawn, and just outside the gates on Broadway. The situation has become so dire that just yesterday a rabbi at Columbia advised Jewish students to flee the campus and complete their studies online due to “extreme antisemitism.”

I am a First Amendment attorney in California. I devote a significant portion of my law practice to protecting the free speech rights of university students and faculty. Your insistence upon couching what is happening as a “complicated” tension between the free speech rights of pro-Palestinian protesters and the feelings of Jewish students is both incorrect and merely an excuse for inaction. Indeed, much of what we are seeing at Columbia constitutes incitement and true threats and is not protected speech. The conduct is severe and pervasive and so objectively offensive that it has denied its targets—Jewish students and their supporters—access to their educational opportunities at Columbia. Therefore, it constitutes unlawful harassment under both the university’s code of student conduct and the applicable law. The university’s attorneys have surely said as much to you; yet the crisis steadily worsens with no meaningful action on your part.

The university has the right to take steps to expel any student and to fire any employee engaging in harassment or violent conduct directed at members of the Columbia community based on their protected class, in this case toward Jewish students. Furthermore, the university has the duty to protect its students from outsiders who come to campus to prey upon them. 

There isn’t the slightest doubt that if this revolting and intimidating conduct were being directed at any other group of students based on their religion, race, or gender, Columbia would have put a stop to it on day one. It is only because the victims are Jews that Columbia has abandoned its moral compass. Shame on you for that, and shame on your entire administration. I am calling upon you to resign your office. You have had over six months to steer the university on the right course; instead, you are taking it and the brand over a cliff.

Finally, I am not some billionaire donor who can make headlines by turning off the donation spigot. I am simply one of thousands of alums disgusted with what the campus has become in recent months. Perhaps more importantly, this climate of antisemitism clearly could not have begun overnight in October but was years in the making yet was unnoticed or deliberately ignored by Columbia. Therefore, I am returning my diploma to you. After nearly fifty years, it is no longer a source of pride for me. I realize it is probably a meaningless gesture to you; but it is of tremendous symbolic importance to me.

Sincerely,
Arthur I. Willner (’76)

Nine years later, I found the spring. Without any maps. Without any one-to-fifty-thousand scale. It was my nose that guided me there: the road signs exuded their smells, and I followed them. I’ve always been hooked on signs.

The spring doesn’t appear on any maps; I had to scrape up its name from the depths of my memory. All kinds of names went through my head: Ein Eshkaf. Ein Sapir. Ein Shalosh. Ein Kubi. Ein Tamar. Einot Uzi. Einot Telem.

It’s hard to find, you told me, but I found it. Me. Not a tour guide or geologist, not some random hiker, but me, a lab rat who finds markers and traces in ammonia, ether, gray field-mice, who can do a dissection with her eyes closed, who carves things up and studies them. Me.

When you left—it was after the High Holidays, and life had returned to normal. Tasks that had been postponed lined themselves up in front of me, waiting to be completed. The days were marked by routine and uniformity.

When you took the car that night, I didn’t sense anything. And it is this void that reboots my acrimony every night, that coats my tongue with bitterness.

And this land, which knows all about leaving signs, could have made a little more effort on my behalf, could have sent a light breeze or a strangely shaped cloud. A colorful butterfly, maybe, or a mouse that refused to die on the sacrificial lab bench. It had happened before. But now, it wasn’t making an effort, it didn’t show me any signs. Not even when you took the car. So many times, when my hands reached out to give you the keys, my mind would reach out as well: to images and visions, hallucinations and fears. But this time? Not even the tiniest spark of electricity. No extra heart beats. My breathing was neither deep nor shallow, it was just normal: air going in, inflating my lungs, then escaping in a reflexive exhale of carbon dioxide. A process that was all drabness and dreariness.

* * *

There are so many words, my son, to describe what you did to me. You slipped away. You were called up to the heavens. You died. You were killed. You passed. You went. You ended. You were taken. You were cut short.

And it wasn’t a stray bullet that stole you away, my son, but the driver’s villainous sleep. A murderer, a master of her craft, she loaded a bullet, and there, between four and five in the morning, led you to your execution.

* * *

The signs came later. Too late.

But first came the announcement. The knock on the door. Who goes to visit someone at this hour? A short argument between me and Ya’akov over who would get the door. It must be someone looking for a neighbor who hadn’t bothered to hang a name plate. Ya’akov gets up and lets them in. A frigid silence fills the room, and Ya’akov’s baritone voice disappears. I stay on the couch, flipping through the newspaper.

Ya’akov comes in. They stay outside. His face isn’t closed, it’s open, and me? Not yet. He tells me, straight out. And all I can think is, I am bereaved. A bereaved mother in Israel. An angry mother bear.

What does a newly bereaved mother feel?

Nothing. Nothingness bloomed inside me. A field of nothingness took hold of my heart.

And then, only then, did small signs start cropping up. A little rain here, a little rain there. A rainbow arched over the village like an evil omen. The store ran out of bread and milk. A stopped-up sink unclogged on its own. Those kinds of signs, which we, in all our wisdom, associate with some kind of disaster.

* * *

Then, much later, millions of hours after the identification, it occurred to me that you were killed the week we read the story of Noah in synagogue. Words from high school, from the army, from my youth movement, floated around in my head and tried to activate my still-tied tongue: All flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. The end of all flesh has come. The earth is filled with violence. I will bring floodwaters upon the earth to destroy all life under the heavens.

But God didn’t come to me. He didn’t equivocate and he didn’t offer alternatives. And I didn’t build an ark to rescue your body.

Case closed. Casket sealed.

* * *

I wasn’t trying to cancel the evil decree. 

A lab woman is all too familiar with that moment when a living thing becomes inert. The laxness signaling the end. The loosening of the taut threads that had been connecting the now-limp limbs.

What I wanted was a deferral. If God had come to me, or sent one of his angels, I would have postponed everything. I would have turned the world’s activation dial, the one that illuminates the sun and turns the stalks green, and extinguished the light. I would have mixed the sugar into the water before putting in the coffee, like you did when you were in the army. One lethargic stir, then another. The coffee, my son, would cool down very slowly. The air would separate into tiny molecules, clouds of air would drift through space, and you—who always complained of being too hot—would ask for a sweater. With lazy, languid patience I would choose the big sweater with all those dozens of buttons, and I would button you up, one button after another. The words would come out smoothly and deftly, as if an invisible pen was writing it all down, so that if I ever wanted to find the spring, I would remember your precise instructions. Slowly, slowly, we would wrap ourselves in this interval of prolonged, and prolonging, time.

And then, only then, would I make the identification.

But the identification came quickly. Instantly. The people around me were saying something about hysteria. They were holding up Ya’akov. My daughters converged around me like a chorus of cicadas. I wanted to make sure. To feel your mole—the concave crater the size of a nutmeg seed—that had been left intact. To check your birthmarks. To see for myself that you were indeed released from your body, while the whole time my heart is waiting for the moment, that wild, benevolent moment that would prove that it wasn’t really you, that it was a case of mistaken identity, that you’d simply disappeared once again, losing yourself in some godforsaken spring.

* * *

Even before I found the mouth of the spring, I knew I was in the right place. I could hear tiny echoes resonating in my head. A rustle. A murmur. The original name of Eilat, Umm Rashrash.  The Hebrew word for poor, rushash. A weak heart. Tree roots. But the syllables didn’t fuse into a single, solid word that could illuminate the dark corners of my memory. Well-meaning branches spread their arms out to me, and, unencumbered by fear, I cleared out a spot and planted myself there.

* * *

In my bereavement support group, they said it was important to “let it out.” Let out the pain. Let out the agony. Let out the thoughts. As if it were actually possible to clear away the anthills of thoughts that had piled up over the years.

They warned me not to keep it in my belly, and I was reminded of a myth from my childhood: if you kept something inside, a film of white fuzz would grow on your tongue.

But in my case, my son, there is nothing to let out.

The patch of grass in my heart gets caught on the rough edges of my soul, and a terrible, silent nothingness takes over. Even my eyes aren’t working properly. My eyes used to generate tears on command. They would get me excused from boring classes. They would release tears when I was waiting my turn at the doctor’s office, when I found the book I wanted at the library, when I didn’t find the book I wanted at the library. Torrents of tears, at every opportunity. “If you’re going to cry, you could at least do it next to the Kinneret watershed,” you used to tell me whenever my eyes would swell up.

Now, even artificial tears don’t help. I am dry as dust.

We meet once every few months; Ya’akov drags me with him. I can’t interpret words anymore. Mumbled syllables move through my ears, and only later can I decipher “My heart told me” and “I had a feeling.” I study the faces around me; we have nothing in common but the thin, purplish bereavement circles around our eyes.

Once I nodded, unintentionally, and when the facilitator gave me an encouraging smile, there was no turning back. Grass and shrubs flew off my tongue, and everyone at the meeting stared at me with a look I recognized from the lab, a scientific look. They analyzed me; I was a synthetic sample. After that I never went back.

* * *

I’m here, my son, it’s me—your tall, fastidious mother who would never leave the house without make-up—stretched out on a barren patch of earth, curled up in your oversized sweater.

I didn’t pack any cosmetics; make-up is nothing more than an attempt to obliterate time. Among the dense, aging trees, wrinkles are a valuable asset.

* * *

Infinity is incomprehensible. And this year, the ninth, when the days started sliding and spinning around me, nameless and timeless, I decided it was time to take action.

The memorial service is uninspiring: one cliché chasing another over the grave. That teacher of yours repeats the eulogy he gave last year, word for word. The soldier who had been your girlfriend—the one who always reminded me of a deer in headlights—is chuckling with her boyfriend, sporting him like a bracelet on her wrist. I examine them with a new fondness, as if I were a photographer, floating above them while at the same time monitoring their every motion.

And suddenly, among the words and the eulogies, lovely sounds start playing through my head. A small, delicate bell resonates in my brain, lucid and pure. And between the “destroy the earth” and “the end of all flesh,” the sound of water flows through my body. And the earth filled with water.

Now I know that I am going.

A person who knows something is a different person altogether. Decisiveness floods the bones. The legs that drag me to the lab, day in and day out, are filled with tiny pulses of life. Instead of greeting my colleagues with a non-committal tilt of the head, I hold my head still. The nose that used to recoil from the smell of ammonia takes in deep breaths, and the hands that pour the borax are no longer trembling.

Decisiveness rushes into me, and that evening, Ya’akov asks what’s up with me.

* * *

Feverish from the unexpected joy, from the actions that would, at long last, latch onto my stagnating body, I packed a small suitcase. I didn’t tell Ya’akov what was up with me, I just hugged him happily; he didn’t ask questions or press me. Maybe he was so pleased with this new wife of his, he didn’t want to spoil anything.

Actually, I didn’t say anything to anyone. I wasn’t going to return to my boss’s kind eyes. For years now, he’s been afraid to fire me. After all, his gaze says, she lost her only son. I will do his dirty work for him. Surely my son’s death is not his fault. 

Nor, son, did I say anything to your chirping sisters, the quintet that used to huddle around you so adoringly. I worked quickly and quietly, like a lab-rat.

* * *

When I discovered traces of a campfire, I was filled with a joy I hadn’t felt in a long time. I gathered up the twigs that were piled on the ground; they seemed to be the remnants of birds’ nests. With expansive movements, I threw them into the fire, adding one small branch, then another, just like you taught me. Resisting the temptation to toss in the whole forest. Feeding a fire requires patience.

* * *

Once, when I was young, we—your grandfather and I—came upon a chilling sight. We were driving, and at one of the intersections, we saw a car go up in flames. People had gathered around, calling out to each other. I stared, enrapt, at the circle of fire, red tongues shooting out of it haphazardly, ruining the symmetry. 

Your grandfather tried to help. He got out of the car, a long iron rod in his hand, but he, too, was unable to break through the circle of fire. He returned to the car flustered and defeated.

The next day, the front page of the morning paper featured the circle of fire. And the family—there were two babies—that had burned to death. And the VW Beetle’s rear engine. And the time that was wasted before help arrived.

When you died, there was no circle of fire. The papers didn’t report it. Death, banal, in a tie and jacket, just came and took you.

* * *

I am sitting here, trying to count the days, but I can’t. Days have been broken, cut in half. Some hours go roaming through space, others hurry off like they can’t get away from me fast enough. I am enveloped in ambiguity, and it is suddenly imperative that I find the name of the spring. My damned memory, however, covers it up artfully, seducing me instead with false associations that only intensify the forgetfulness.

The food is gone. I do have money, and I could run over to the main street and buy myself something to eat, but the fasting has filled my bones with a dizzying heaviness, and I stay where I am, close to the ground.

These days, I am utterly fearless. Like you, who never experienced fear, who shook his head scornfully at the depth of the water in the Yehudea River and jumped. Who hiked through every village. Out there, in the world, they call this irresponsibility, but now that I’m here, only now, do I recognize that it was simply a lack of knowledge.

Fragments of time pass, and the heaviness in my body gives way to lightness. My stomach grumbles softly with an agreeable emptiness, and my tongue is coated with a thick, white film. There are many, many things inside, and I…  I don’t know how to let them out.

* * *

From the spring whose name I’ve forgotten, I drink until I’m sated. Sometimes I think about the outside world. About the note I left for Ya’akov. About his neck tensing up as he tries to understand, about his whole body clenching. I think about the warmth of his voice when he told the girls. Whenever I feel the urge to stand up, I distract myself with images of policemen, sniffing dogs, signs with my picture on them posted across the country. There is something wild and exciting about these thoughts, and my bereavement assumes a different demeanor.

* * *

I wasn’t alone for long; you had talked to me about this, too. I remember the image you used: “This land is a well full of people. If you throw a stone, you’re bound to hit someone.”

I knew someone was coming. A new wind was blowing in my direction, and fine dust was rising up from the earth.

The man arrived during one of the fragments of time. A man whose legs were very familiar to him, always ready to move, to walk, muscles and tendons bursting out, eager to help.

I didn’t light a fire; I just sat there, shivering, clutching my food to my chest. That was how he found me. He looked alarmed, but quickly erased the shock from his face, and, just as quickly, turned away, as if he had caught sight of something forbidden.

My body was weak but my mind was clear. I looked at the slender branches protruding from the trees, at the small animals scampering around my feet, sights that I normally couldn’t have seen without my glasses. The moon looked close. Distant sounds were getting closer.

The man appeared again, his arms full of branches. Mumbling to himself, he added them to the fire and lit the kindling, just like you used to do, my son. He moved slowly, patiently, until the fire was finally ignited and I could see a cotton beard, with a nose and two eyes swallowed up inside it.

In a soft voice, he asked if he could sit with me. He looked like a ventriloquist, the way his lips moved, hidden inside his beard.

* * *

The fragments of time came together, and words floated in space. Soft, soft words. He was sixty. Traveling through the country. Incapable of staying in his house: he’d always had a hard time inside walls.

And he didn’t ask, “And you?” He didn’t ask for anything in return. Every now and then he’d toss a couple of twigs into the fire and shift his position. He’d smoke a cigarette. Back when things were normal, I couldn’t abide smoke; even the smell of a wick in the lab would make me cough. But now I was breathing it in. Expanding my lungs to get them used to it.

Even as I sat there in my shabby clothes, I saw him looking at the gold bracelet on my wrist. I’m fifty-three, I told him. And he didn’t wrinkle his brow in horror, and he didn’t say, “You look great for your age.” He just sat there quietly, letting the information sink in. We didn’t bother each other. Sometimes he’d get up and go wherever it was that he went. I didn’t even crane my neck to see where he was sleeping.

I wasn’t afraid.

I didn’t ask him about his life, or where he was going. In the evenings I fell asleep curled up in your big sweater, empty with hunger, and a sudden flame would shatter the darkness in front of my closed eyes.

What did I do for all those days? I don’t have an answer. Time slipped away. Sometimes I would exercise. I’d go down to the nameless spring and immerse myself in the water, fully clothed. Sometimes I’d drift through the small forest and look for signs. Maybe you’d left a letter or a short note. Maybe you’d sat down to eat, right here, next to the tree.  It’s been nine years, but, my son, some people survive for thousands of years. Such are the foolish thoughts of bereavement.

The wanderer disappeared. Between the trees, the sun and the moon changed shifts, promptly, without wasting any time on friendly banter. And I didn’t care that he’d gone. The same way I didn’t care about how my skin was wallowing in layers of dust.

* * *

Then one evening, he came back. I was barely conscious, but somehow my mind managed to soak up the last sunbeams that burst through the leaves. My blurry vision doubled and tripled the man into a multitude of silhouettes. Cotton beards, soft and thick, came at me from every angle.

He bent down to me, looked deep into my eyes, and said, “You have to eat something.” His look wasn’t soft and consoling, but something in him looked familiar. There were purplish rings around his eyes, and I recognized him, and I identified him.

* * *

Then came the tears. Long years of drought had come to an end. Big round tears fell, and in my mind I could see them filling up the small spring.

He didn’t say a word, and he didn’t offer me a shoulder to cry on. And I remembered a phrase from the long-ago days, back when I liked to read: “A comforting indifference.” I couldn’t remember who said it, and I didn’t care.

The wanderer made me campfire soup, with a big potato floating on top of it. I chugged it down in big gulps, replenishing my reservoir of tears.

He knew I had identified him. Someone who has lost a child has a particular mark, and without introduction he said: “Twins.” They left me in Lebanon. And the words “left me” sounded so right, I almost laughed.

He smoked, and the combination of smoke and soup made me nauseated. Later, I fell into an intense, heavy sleep, the kind I haven’t had since you left.

When I woke up, I was ready to rejoin the world, which had already come to an end; perhaps it would never be destroyed again. My only worry was that I wouldn’t be able to find my Ya’akov in this new land.

* * *

He disappeared. Like a kind, old uncle with excellent manners and good taste, with a hollow voice like that of a withered tree in the desert. I thought of Elijah the prophet rising up to heaven in a whirlwind.

And all at once, the name of the spring came back to me: Ein Rashosh. The Spring of Hardship. A reckless, jagged name.

* * *

I emerged from the spring shabby and dirty. I could feel my body bounding with a new elasticity and lightness. The world looked different. Softer. Less angular.

And I knew that nothing had changed.

I didn’t know if it was the beginning of the week or the end, but either way, they would report more car accidents. In a dry voice, the announcer would tell us about the scandalous life of the driver responsible. I was familiar with all the predictable components: the rollovers, the sharp turns, the DWIs. All the factors that led to this one outcome, which resulted in so many purplish bereavement rings.

I knew. But I missed the girls. The way they gathered around me.

I missed Ya’akov. His warm baritone. His playful voices. Our Saturday night squabbles over the crossword puzzle. His large, kind hands. His longings.

I’m not alone, I repeated to myself, making sure my vocal cords still worked after so many hours of idleness. I’m not alone. There is a sun that is completely shining, and a gentle breeze escorting me out of Ein Rashosh. There are grandchildren who will, someday, gambol through the country, in springs, on hikes. There is a time for everything. Everything. And He will never again smite every living thing as He had done. And it is not yet the end of all flesh.

I am not alone, I thought, and I tried to unthink it.

Translation by Shira Atik

This cultural export—the Hollywood Western—framed a perception about the people who lived on the opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean. It was an image of frontiersmen of quiet dignity, a people who could think for themselves and possessed the self-sufficiency to go it alone. Rugged nonconformists.

In 2005, I was publicly mocked as the Jewish Cassandra by a Jewish-American organization official.

“Sir,” I said, “No one listened to her, Troy fell, and she became Agamemnon’s sex slave. If this is really how you see me, why not heed me and my colleague’s warnings about the importance of the cognitive war against the Jews before it’s too late? Why not consider an Iron Dome against the propaganda?”

He walked away in a huff. It’s now 2024, and I’m ready to own my prescience.

I have always been an independent thinker, a pioneer, and a leader. I have rarely been a follower. I lack the knack of group or “correct” thinking. I’ve lived recklessly, unaware of how sharing my thoughts might endanger me, set me apart. I did not choose to be this way. I was “chosen,” so to speak.

When I was a child, I suffered my status as an outlier. I fit in nowhere; I was not like the other girls even though I wanted to be. I was not like my mother, and she punished me for it; no doubt, she felt I was proof of her failure to tame me, to bind my mind.

When I was about eight or nine years old, my mother brought a rabbi home to excoriate me for having joined Hashomer Ha’tzair (“A Godless, communist group.”). I then went and joined Ain-Harod, an even more left-wing Zionist group.

I was the “smartest boy” in my Hebrew school class, but it was 1952, and there would be no Bat Mitzvah for me. I took it very hard and ate a slice of non-kosher pizza for the first time—and did not die.

I was far too gifted and intellectually curious for my family. They feared me—and feared for me. And I ran wild with the boys, not understanding that I would always be judged by a double standard.

Against their wishes, I left home in Borough Park on a full scholarship to an out of town college. I never thought I’d return but, in a small way, I’ve done just that. Wait for it.

While I was long considered an uber-trendy radical feminist thinker, once I published The New Antisemitism in 2003, all of that changed. In it, I held the left-wing Western intelligentsia as responsible for Jew hatred, as I did the Islamic world. It was the first book of mine that was not reviewed—and reviewed positively—in the mass media. What I wrote led to countless dis-invitations, turned backs, and a purging.

To my amazement, I made some new friends. One poor soul, a conservative man, wrote a rather endearing review of this book. He was genuinely puzzled. But since he loved my support for Western civilization, he wrote: “I guess if it comes down to it, and a radical feminist is fighting in the trenches with me, on my side, then so be it. She is my ally.”

Despite all my 20th century pioneering feminist work, few feminists cut me any slack for my support of Israel and Judaism as well as for my writing about Islamic gender and religious apartheid.

I was actually purged from a feminist listserv group because I was a Zionist and had begun publishing my genuinely feminist pieces at conservative sites. (What could I do? The New York Times would no longer publish my work). For telling the truth about Islam’s treatment of women, infidels, dissidents, and homosexuals, I was accused of being a racist-Islamophobe and a right-winger. I lost friends and colleagues—and continued to do so, all throughout the 21st century. This happened before 10/7, and it prepared me very well for the profound and odious feminist silence that followed. Although women have always been raped in war-zones, (think Bagladesh, Bosnia, Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sudan), 10/7 was the first time that so many routinely indifferent people cheered the rapists and blamed the victims.

The fact that I was conducting studies about honor killing that tribal women of color relied upon did not matter. The fact that I worked with Muslims and ex-Muslims mattered less. Even the fact that I co-led a grassroots team that rescued 398 women from Afghanistan did not count. My Thought Crimes can never be forgiven.

I was cancelled long before the phenomenon gathered traction. However, in the long historical arc of free thinkers who’ve been jailed, tortured, burned at the stake, and sent to die in the Gulag, my punishments, while still real and painful, are different. True, like many others, I now write samizdat. More important, my feminist work has largely been written out of the feminist canon. However, these are relatively minor injuries.

My God! Think of what the political correctniks did to Socrates in 399 B.C.; Giordano Bruno in 1600; Anna Ahmatova’s husband and sons whom Stalin murdered or exiled for her Thought Crimes in the 1920s; remember Vladimir Bukovsky, Andre Sahkarov, Natan Sharansky—oh the list is long in Soviet Russia, Hitler’s Germany, but also in pre-communist and post-communist China and Cuba. I am not even getting into Iran or Afghanistan. That would require another very long piece.

Dissent is intolerable to tyrants. Yet, such regimes have been romanticized by too many: Western leftists, including Jews, feminists, academics, gays, and government officials–the whole bleeding lot of them.

In what way have I come full circle, at least a wee bit? In 1988, when I davened with the women for the first time at the Kotel in 1988 the experience wedded me fatefully to the struggle that would come, one that is still underway. Our vision involved group prayer with a Torah by women-only; we, the Original Women of the Wall, had not fought for the rights of Reform and Conservative prayer styles.

I immediately understood that what I wanted was to study Torah, and so I began to do just that, beginning in 1989. I had the best chevruta in the world, the late, great Rivka Haut (z”l) and whose idea it was to hold our prayer service at the Kotel instead of at the LaRomme Hotel. Eventually, we began to publish devrai Torah together and by and by, I began to write my own.

Here’s the full circle. My mother (z”l), who rarely approved of what I did or wrote, went to Eichlers on Thirteenth Avenue in Borough Park and bought a Chumash with Rashi’s commentaries; she inscribed each of the five volumes to me “with love,” and in the belief that “I would do great things in the world.”

Who would ever have believed this possible?

But there is also this. I recently reviewed an extraordinary book by Rabbi Hillel Zaltzman, titled The Jewish Underground in Samarkand. How Faith Defied Soviet Rule. Of course, these Chabad heroes perpetuated Judaism by teaching Torah to little Jewish boys, not girls. And yet, and yet, the piety of the women equaled that of the men. They did all that they could to preserve the sanctity of Torah learning and the dignity of their revered rabbis. 

The women viewed their separate roles as sacred and their domestic duties as prayers. I, personally, could not have lived their lives. I would have wanted to be in one of the secret yeshivot learning—but would that have necessarily kept a community intact and Judaism flourishing?

Imagine me having such a thought! I even surprised myself.

It is not uncommon for Jihadis to create an international outrage, debate, and narrative around human rights, brotherhood, right to religion, etc. They get people engaged in loud debates around these while they silently indulge in their favorite hobbies of severing heads and blasting bombs.

A poem by Darren Glick

I am back in the times where you couldn’t turn on the radio or open a newspaper (and you had to open a newspaper to get your “political information” school credit) without hearing (or reading) “we, proud Soviet citizens of Jewish Ethnicity, thoroughly condemn the militarism and barbarity of the Zionist State.”

Today, we are living through a time when, even in a democracy, conformity of the artist or composer’s role in society to a “social justice” agenda is becoming the paramount qualification for acceptance. The corollary, shared with all dictatorial societies of both Communist and Fascist persuasions, is to subordinate the artist’s individuality to the collectivity. In today’s increasingly anti-democratic, anti-individualistic environment, artistic autonomy and freedom are being undermined by tendentious ideology. When art serves it, the result is often bombastic kitsch combined with misappropriation of the great artistic achievements of the past. Here is a lesson from history.

In my 1999 Cambridge Handbook on Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, I cited Goebbels’ claim that, “The artist undeniably has the right to call himself non-political in a period when politics consists of nothing but shouting matches between parliamentary parties. But at this moment when politics is writing a national drama, when a world is being overthrown—in such a moment the artist cannot say: ‘That doesn’t concern me.’ It concerns him a great deal.”

With this quote, I introduced a discussion of how the Nazis instrumentalized masterpieces of classical music—in this case (the Slavic) Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique—to promote its ideology when its “own music” proved unequal to the task. In his diary entry for April 11, 1933, Goebbels noted the important role music would play for the new regime: “the agitation of the Jewish press still has an impact today. People think we are good politicians but bad art lovers. The future will show how deeply wrong they were.” In the October–November 1934 issue of Musik und Volk, reprinted excerpts from Hitler’s November 5 “cultural speech” at the Nuremberg Rally announcing that the artistic production of “God-gifted” geniuses would be stimulated by commissions from the state, enabling them to express their gratitude by singing praises to the “greatness of the epoch.” 

Otto zur Nedden’s program accompanying Hans Severus Ziegler’s June 1938 exhibition of “Degenerate Music” attempted to unpack the implications of Hitler’s statement. Under the headline, “A Nazi Campaign Against ‘Musical Microbes.’ More ‘Degenerates’ in the Pillory,” the Manchester Guardian reported on the planning of this exhibition published in Goebbels’ newspaper Der Angriff:

An “exhibition of degenerate music” is to be opened…. It will be recalled that an exhibition of degenerate art was opened at the same time as the German House of Art revealed the treasures of orthodoxy in Munich last year. Since then this exhibition in various forms has been on tour in Germany…. The purpose of the degenerate music exhibition is, as the “Angriff” declares tonight, to put into the pillory musical composers who are alien in spirit to the people, to reveal their supporters, and to divest many of them of the preposterously assumed title of master. The exhibition is also directed against slogans and catchwords of musical degeneracy, such as atonality and jazz, against the crowding of opera repertories with the works of foreign composers and against the irresponsible praise or condemnation by silence of musical criticism.

On June 8, shortly after the exhibition opened, The Guardian described in detail how Ziegler and zur Nedden’s “sound examples” were projected to create a cacophony of sound, corresponding to the visual chaos of the cluttered and haphazard hanging of paintings and presentation of sculptures in the companion exhibition in the visual arts. Their aim was to contrast Sibelius’ racially sound, “healthy” strains in Finlandia with Stravinsky’s degenerate cacophony in the “sick” music of Sacre:

War is being waged against atonal music as a phase of “Jewish cultural Bolshevism” with great vigour at the exhibition of “degenerate music” at Düsseldorf. The object of the exhibition is to teach the German public to appreciate the beauty of what is accepted by National Socialism as orthodox music. The public is given an opportunity of hearing both “orthodox” and “unorthodox” music, much as it was given the opportunity at Munich last year of seeing “orthodox” art and the “degeneracy” of expressionism, Cubism, and Dadaism…. Visitors to the exhibition enter the doorless cubicles and press white buttons in each of them, whereupon a gramophone plays atonal selections from Stravinsky, Arnold Schönberg, Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, and other composers whose works are either frowned upon or fully prohibited here. The result is a tremendous clash of muddled atonal sound when several cubicles are in use at once. 

Richard Strauss participated in the “Reich Music Days” by conducting his opera Arabella (1930–1932) just three days after the opening of the “Degenerate Music” exhibition. The message was clear: Arabella was exactly the kind of “healthy” music that the Third Reich would promote as opposed to that of the “degenerate” Modernists. Strauss then graciously provided the musical backdrop for Goebbels’ speech at the same event by conducting a version of his Festliches Präludium with expanded orchestration, after which the Reichsminister hectored his audience of German performers and composers that no longer would the regime tolerate “the bare constructivism of Jewish experiment displacing clear lines and melody from the heart.” A year later, at the next Reich Music Days (in 1939), Goebbels summarized state policy to “cancel” all non-conformist music, insisting that “it is a particular responsibility of the state, her various bodies, and of the trade organizations of musicians in Germany, to remove the encroachments by alien elements which endanger our musical creativity. Here the nation and her responsible bodies act as the gardener who must pull out the weeds in order to let the real fruit grow, ripen, and flourish.” 

But what happens when you “cancel”—persecute and exile—the majority of the individualistic geniuses active in Germany and Central Europe—for example Schönberg, Berg, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Bartók, Křenek, and a whole host of Jewish composers—who do not fit your conformist mold? Who will replace them?

The answer is to lionize the two remaining internationally recognized “German-friendly”—Nazi-supportive—composers, Richard Strauss and the Finn Jean Sibelius, and underwrite a whole cadre of ideologically compliant mediocrities like Gottfried Müller (1914–1993). Today, Müller is virtually unknown—not even meriting an entry in either the Revised New Grove or the new MGG—but during the Third Reich he was regarded as a poster-boy genius. In 1934, at the tender age of 19, he attained prominence for his Deutsches Heldenrequiem (German Heroes Requiem), op. 4, dedicated to Hitler. In December 1934, a German newspaper boasted that “already a generation of composers arises in Germany that creates entirely in the spirit of National Socialist Germany. There is the young Gottfried Müller who, among various things, has created the German Heroes Requiem, a work of vivid greatness and meaningful beauty.” Goebbels had high hopes for Müller; in his diary entry for November 17, 1936, he remarked, “Evening in Berlin. Rehearsals for the yearly meeting of the Chamber of Culture. A number of modern works, …especially Variationen über Morgenrot by Gottfried Müller—a memorable evening. The Berlin Philharmonic plays wonderfully. I give them good praise.” On December 2, 1936, Goebbels noted happily in his diary concerning Müller that he was “a great national hope,” who, in order to compose, had been exempted from his second year of military service by the Führer. In April 1937, Goebbels and Hitler attended a rehearsal of the Requiem sung by the Bruno Kittel Choir; Goebbels noted: “he [Müller] wrote it when he was 19. [He is] one that is still immature, but volcanic, skillful, bold, modern, but musical. Maybe a really great talent for the future. The Führer is very impressed by it. Furtwängler, who is there, is also very positive. Müller is still young, he still seems completely unconscious and not at all experienced. But that is also his strength.” In November 1941, the conductor Elmendorff wrote to Gerda Troost, widow of the architect of the House of German Art in Munich, who belonged to Hitler’s private circle. Proposing to play Müller’s setting of “Five Führer Words” for the dictator, he described the piece as “the greatest musical glorification of the Führer’s genius for this century. Tietjen is planning the premiere of the work under my direction in Bayreuth after the war in the presence of the Führer. Müller and I would like to know the Führer’s point of view. Should we wait or should we present this brilliant piece based on five sayings of the Führer to the German people as soon as possible?”

While Strauss, Sibelius, and Furtwängler, as the regime’s musical superstars, were awarded huge sums for their cooperation, the lesser lights were not forgotten. Even during the increasingly desperate war years, state largesse continued unabated. In the 1942 financial year, for example, the amount of 100,000 RM from the state budget was devoted to subsidizing composers of “serious” music. Two committees awarded 6,000 RM each to Paul Graener, Hans Pfitzner, and Strauss; 4,000 RM each to Theodor Berger, Johann Nepomuk David, Werner Egk, Ottmar Gerster, Kurt Hessenberg, Karl Höffer, Karl Höller, Joseph Marx, Ernst Pepping, Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, Max Trapp, Julius Weismann, and Hermann Zilcher; 2,000 RM each to Cesar Bresgen, Hugo Distler, Wolfgang Fortner, Harald Genzmer, Hermann Grabner, Armin Knab, Gottfried Müller, Carl Orff, Kurt Rasch, Friedrich Reidinger, Georg Schumann, Heinz Tiessen and Richard Trunk; and 1,000 RM each to Edmund von Borck, Hans Chemin-Petit, Gerhard Frommel and Egon Kornauth. This extravagance is compounded by the fact that 6,000 RM was the average upper-middle-class yearly salary during the Nazi period.

But what do you do if your favored composers are only able to deliver third-rate ideologically-conformist music bordering on kitsch? To fill in the lacuna, your only remaining option is to recontextualize and repurpose the great music of the past to glorify your ideology. I shall show that is exactly what was done with, for example, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, and Liszt’s Les Preludes.  

During the Third Reich, Sibelius was lionized as the quintessential “Nordic” composer. Lucien Price (1883–1964), an American Harvard graduate who interviewed Sibelius in the late summer of 1935, sheds significant light on the ideological parallelism between the “Nordic Concept” promulgated by the Nazis and their allies, including in America, and Sibelius’ own thinking at that time. It is noteworthy that Price’s account, “Portrait of Sibelius at Järvenpää,” with its clear white-racist overtones, was published in the Winter 1935 edition of The Yale Review and reprinted at the end of his book We Northmen, published in 1936. 

Price’s book, as its title suggests, espouses a hypothesis strikingly similar to that of Alfred Rosenberg, namely that all real culture traveled from north to south. According to this view, the upsurge of Judeo-Christianity from the ancient Mediterranean world that accompanied the decline of the Roman Empire had a negative effect on “true” pagan Nordic culture, and, hence, on civilization itself. For Price, this problem was compounded for WASPs transplanted from Europe to America: “What had we North Americans lost of our ancient cultural heritage, more recently by transplantation overseas, more remotely through the stifling of our indigenous thought by Oriental religions [i.e. Judaism and Christianity]? …[T]he music of Sibelius seemed to me to say the same: ‘This is what we Northmen would have been if allowed to develop in our own way. This is what at heart we remain. Listen, and know thyself.’” Here, Price evokes Wagner’s notorious essay of February 1881, in which he urges Germans to “know themselves” and thereby understand the nature of what is German so they can better resist Bismarck’s emancipation of the Jews in 1871—an essay that enjoyed wide currency in Nazi circles. 

By suggesting “that the true religious expression of us Northern Europeans, as distinct from our borrowed Hebraic cults, is and always has been in the form of artistic creation,” Price implies that Christianity is not deeply rooted in Europe and America, and remains essentially foreign to “Nordic” peoples. Like Rosenberg, Price seeks to peel away a veneer of a thousand years or more of Christian history in Northern Europe and “return” to a new paganism. The term “Hebraic cult” in this context is obviously pejorative: Jews are to blame for a bad Christian superstition imposed upon a previously healthy Nordic stock. Then, perhaps most significant for any investigation of Sibelius’ own ideology at the time, Price reports: “I was startled to find this territory of thought by no means unfamiliar to Sibelius. It was discussed repeatedly and with more frankness than I feel justified in reporting fully [my emphasis]; not only by him but by Madame Sibelius, a most remarkable woman, and so in harmony with him intellectually that one finds himself involuntarily speaking to and thinking of them as one.” Price remains somewhat coy regarding his “repeated” and “frank” discussions of race, religion, and culture at Ainola (Sibelius’ house) probably because he fears that, in reporting them, he might offend Anglo-American sensibilities. 

There can be little doubt that the neo-heathenistic white-Nordic rhetoric emanating from Ainola at the end of 1935 is closely related to that being promulgated by Rosenberg and his myriad followers in Nazi circles, and also in American ivies at the time. It is unsurprising, then, that these same ideas are embodied in the speech Rosenberg delivered preceding the performance of Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony under Furtwängler at the “Nordic Festival” held in Lübeck on June 8, 1935 (Plates 1–2). Published photos show a large contingent of troops forming a square-within-the-square of the marketplace, lending the entire proceedings a martial character (Plates 3–4).

Another photo shows SS men playing lurs (Bronze Age horns) to initiate the ceremony and Rosenberg’s speech precisely at noon, with Hitler Youth, who perform trumpet fanfares thereafter, standing behind them. It is noteworthy that lurs were used by Otto zur Nedden—the same man who three years later would organize the “Degenerate Music” exhibition—to illustrate his lecture entitled “Tonal and Atonal Music in their Historical and Racial Fundamentals,” to prove the natural connection of the (ancient) Germans to the triad and the Jews to atonality.

Rosenberg began his speech referring to the “elemental force” of Germany’s internal embrace of Nazism, which he hopes the Nordic nations will come to understand. A “healing metaphor” is evoked with reference to “recovery from a serious illness,” a rejuvenation dependent not only upon the rejection of its fundamental cause, i.e. the Weimar Republic, but the affirmation of “a continually radiating power emanating from the peoples of the North.” Thus, for Rosenberg, like Price, the driving force of civilization migrated not from the Middle East to Europe as the religion and culture of the Jews, transformed by Christianity, moved northwest, but the inverse, as waves of Nordics colonized the ancient civilizations of India, Iran, Greece, and Rome (a false and ahistorical claim). The same “Nordic energy” that led to the flowering of these Mediterranean civilizations would now regenerate Germany and the other Nordic countries, leading to the triumphant “rebirth of all of the form-creative peoples of Europe.”

The music critic for the Lübecker Volksbote, one Dr. Paul Bülow, described the concert conducted by Furtwängler as linked with the Rosenberg speech:

The external picture at the beginning of the Festival Concert already pointed to the special significance of this evening. …When Furtwängler appeared, the public rose from its seat—only brief applause, stilled by the raised hand of the conductor as he began. The order of the programmed performances in the opening concert of a Nordic Music Festival was clear and unequivocal, and avoided any experimentation… the Finnish Sibelius, bound to Nature in a Nordic manner; Beethoven as the warlike-heroic type of Nordic man. What the three preceding sessions of the Reich Festival offered in terms of the content of their lectures regarding the Nordic type, found here in the tones of the Master their artistic glorification [my emphasis].

Surely, it cannot be coincidental that the second half of the program presented two symphonies, Beethoven’s Fifth and Sibelius’ Seventh, with the same key-scheme, C minor resolving to C major, both following the per aspera ad astra narrative. The “triumph of light over darkness” paradigm in both symphonies in the same key was now revalued to represent the triumphant epiphany of the National Socialist revolution and the “Nordic” within the overall “healing metaphor” of the body politic, exactly as articulated in Rosenberg’s speech. In the realm of music, then, the turgid openings of both symphonies would parallel the heroic struggle of the nascent movement to the “seizure of power.” The C minor openings were the grim determination of the “old fighters,” the C major conclusions the final victory of the “New Germany” and “Nordic man.” If there was any equivocation in the ending of Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, this would be completely dispelled by the triumphant Finale of Beethoven’s Fifth. Writing also in the Zeitschrift für Musik, Bülow again foregrounds the parallelism between Rosenberg’s narrative of “Nordic Rebirth” and the sequence of the Sibelius symphony culminating in the Beethoven to represent the rebirth of “the warlike-heroic type of the Nordic man”: 

Alfred Rosenberg gave this important festive cycle its cultural-political direction in his speech on the Lübeck marketplace. The Reich Leader called attention to the manifestation of art drawing the peoples together in this Festival, “that should become a symbol of these Nordic fundamental powers that everywhere had once found their victorious echoes in the peoples of this Nordic sphere.” He also wished that in the realm of music, “the Nordic rebirth would not be [just] a slogan but a great experience with formative power.” …Over the individual days of performances, this rousing indication and proclamation of the significance of this music festival achieved a striking cultural and political fulfillment totally in the spirit of the binding words of the Führer: “the cultural monuments of humanity were always the altars of consciousness of their better purpose and higher worth.”

To summarize, this revaluation is created by these performances within the context of a ritualized event, whereby the choice and sequence of the Sibelius and Beethoven symphonies plays out, musically, the Nazis’ “Nordic rebirth” concept.

Let us now turn to our second example of the repurposing of classical music, namely Goebbels’ use of the opening fanfare from Liszt’s tone poem Les Preludes for propagandistic purposes. Liszt prefaced the score with a quotation from Lamartine’s Méditations Poetiques:

What is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown Hymn, the first and solemn note of which is intoned by Death?—Love is the glowing dawn of all existence; but what is the fate where the first delights of happiness are not interrupted by some storm, the mortal blast of which dissipates its fine illusions, the fatal lightning of which consumes its altar; and where is the cruelly wounded soul which, on issuing from one of these tempests, does not endeavor to rest his recollection in the calm serenity of life in the fields? Nevertheless man hardly gives himself up for long to the enjoyment of the beneficent stillness which at first he has shared in Nature’s bosom, and when ‘the trumpet sounds the alarm,’ hastens, to the dangerous post, whatever the war may be, which calls him to its ranks, in order at last to recover in the combat full consciousness of himself and the entire possession of his energy [my emphasis].

For Lamartine and Liszt, these martial references have a figurative significance representing the necessity for the jilted lover to rouse his “cruelly wounded soul” from its melancholy lethargy to rejoin life’s battle. For Goebbels, however, Liszt’s musical alarm is reinterpreted to become a literal call to arms against the Soviet Union. It is noteworthy that on April 20, 1941, roughly two months prior to the attack on Russia, Hans Knappersbusch conducted a special performance of Les Preludes to introduce the premiere of Goebbels’ anti-British propaganda film Ohm Krueger. Perhaps, this performance inspired Goebbels to leverage the opening of the Liszt as a musical metaphor to “sell” Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia; in any event, Goebbels lit upon the initial fanfare of Liszt’s Les Preludes as his “Russia Fanfare.” He decided that when the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched, all news bulletins related to it would be preceded by the Lisztian “fanfare.”

For once, the Nazi penchant for hyperbole seemed justified. On June 22, 1941, about four million Axis soldiers invaded the Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mile) front—the largest invasion force in the history of warfare. In addition to troops, the Germans employed some 600,000 motor vehicles and between 600–700,000 horses. However, Goebbels was unsatisfied with simply repurposing the Liszt fanfare; rather he would “update” it by splicing it to a newly composed “hit” song to provide a soundtrack for the attack. Therefore, he commissioned three librettists—Heinrich Anacker, Hans Wilhelm Kulenkampff, and Hans Tieszler—to produce a suitable text, entitled Von Finnland bis zum Schwarzen Meer (“From Finland to the Black Sea”), which he himself revised, and then two composers, Herms Niel (1888–1954) and Norbert Schultze (1911–2002), set it. Niel, well-known for his marches and martial songs, including Sieg heil Viktoria (1941) composed for the Waffen SS, was a true “Piefke” in Viennese slang, named after Johann Gottfried Piefke (1817–1884), a rigid Prussian band leader and composer of military music.

Schultze was a more versatile composer, who had already achieved fame for his “pop” song Lili Marleen (1938), which became popular in both Axis and Allied camps. More notoriously, however, his 1939 song Bomben auf Engeland was deployed in 1940 to glorify the “Blitz”—a composition which, post-war, would, poetically, land him a sojourn in an English prison.

The final text for the new song reads as follows:

We stood for Germany at our posts
and kept the long watch.
Now the sun rises in the east
And calls millions to the battle.

Refrain:
From Finland to the Black Sea:
Forward, forward!
Forward to the east, you storming army!
Freedom the goal, victory the banner!
Führer, command! We follow you!

What started with the March of Horst Wessel
In the brown uniforms of the SA
Is fulfilled in the gray columns:
The big moment is here!

Now surge eastward, armies,
Into the Russian homeland.
Comrades, now to the guns!
The victory will be ours!

In his diary entry for June 30, 1941, Goebbels noted, “The new Russia song is here. Norbert’s setting is better than Niel’s. So we take the former…. It airs for the first time… and arouses great enthusiasm throughout the country.… Our new song is liked everywhere. It will be a big hit.”

It is important to note that the invasion had begun already on June 22, but Goebbels decreed no official announcement until the song, which he dubbed the Schicksalslied des deutschen Volkes (“Song of Destiny of the German People”), was ready for broadcast on June 30. By calling it a Schicksalslied, Goebbels again reached back to nineteenth-century music, this time to Brahms’ setting of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem. But, whereas, for Hölderlin and Brahms, the Schicksalslied concerns the fate of all humanity, Goebbels twists it to signify that it is “the destiny” of the German people to attack Communist Russia, its “natural” enemy. That Goebbels delayed announcing the largest invasion in history a full eight days until he had succeeded in producing what he considered its optimal anthem testifies to the importance of music for his propaganda campaign.

Nor was an important composer like Richard Strauss above contributing to Goebbels’ soundtrack. But one looks in vain under the entry for Strauss’s piece Feierlicher Einzug der Ritter des Johanniter-Ordens, op. 103 (“Ceremonial Entry of the Knights of the Order of St. John”) in Franz Trenner’s Richard Strauss Werkverzeichnis (“Richard Strauss’s Worklist”)—published in 1985—for any mention of its 1937 reworking. This version is as a piece for men’s chorus and large orchestra, renamed Feierlich Anruf (“Solemn Appell”) with a text by Rudolf G. Binding (1867–1938) and dedicated to Hitler: Grossen Volkes heiligen Rach—tief im Schlafe dumpf in Fron (“The Holy Revenge of a Great People, in Deep Sleep, Lumbering in Drudgery”). This arrangement, which, for copyright reasons, could never have been made without Strauss’s express permission, was premiered on April 18, 1934, in Berlin at an SS concert with Hitler and Goebbels in attendance. The poem includes this sycophantic stanza: 

To one was the word granted
To one only was the call and the seeding.
Through strength he bestows peace.
And he gives more than that:
To unify his people, that was his most beautiful deed.

Surely, the existence of this version should not be concealed—but Trenner obviously felt it just too embarrassing to include in the list of works. Strauss went on to contribute pieces such as his Japanische Festmusik (1940), Festmusik der Stadt Wien (1943), settings of regime poet Josef Weinheber (1942), and Der Donau (a large-scale tone poem left unfinished with the fall of the regime) to provide music for official Nazi celebrations. 1942 was the highpoint of public honors for Weinheber. His fiftieth birthday was the occasion for important festivities; he was awarded the honorary ring of the City of Vienna, and two song settings by Strauss were premiered. He received a wallet containing 5,000 RM from Goebbels and an honorary award of 3,000 RM from the Reich Post Minister Wilhelm Ohnesorge, who, incidentally, was also connected with German efforts to build a nuclear bomb. In 1942, when Koichi Ehara, the Japanese power behind the throne at the Manchurian Embassy in Berlin, wanted yet another ceremonial piece from Strauss to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the “Manchurian Empire,” Strauss demurred, observing that he had already produced his Japanische Festmusik. Nevertheless, he helpfully proposed that their mutual friend, Eakte Ahn (Korean-born Japanese collaborator and composer of South Korea’s national anthem), compose something new. Then he, Strauss, as Ahn’s mentor, would be happy to look through anything Ahn might write and make suggestions (Plate 5). Thus was born Ahn’s Symphonische Fantasie “Manchukuo.” 

After the war, Ahn destroyed the score of the Manchukuo Fantasie and deleted it from his works’ list; while he boasted about his relationship with Strauss, he never breathed a single word concerning his collaboration with Ehara under Strauss’s tutelage, and even falsified his account of the Berlin concert at which he conducted Manchukuo, their joint project, pretending that he had performed Beethoven’s Ninth instead! Fortunately for researchers interested in historical truth, the program of the performance of Manchukuo in Vienna on February 11, 1943 (Plate 6), has survived, as has film of the Berlin concert on August 18, the triumphant conclusion of which is preserved in Goebbels’ weekly newsreel.

Indeed, on November 8, 2009, after eight years of intensive historical investigation, the Korean Institute for Research into Collaborationist Activities published an Encyclopedia of Korean Collaborators with Japan (친일인명사전), which included Ahn on its list of “cultural traitors.” At a press conference held on April 29, 2008, at the Seoul Press Center, the committee discussed Ahn’s activities in Europe between 1937 and 1944, stating that, “Although Ahn did not collaborate with Japan within Korean territory, abroad he continually and repeatedly praised Japanese imperialism, and it is clear that he collaborated with Nazi power. Therefore, there was no hesitation in including him on the list.”

Strauss enjoyed excellent relations with SS-Brigadeführer Hanns Blaschke (1896–1971) who, immediately after the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, was appointed the assistant mayor of Vienna, the head of its Cultural Office, and the editor of the culture journal Die Pause. On June 10, 1943, Strauss conducted the premiere of his Festmusik der Stadt Wien after a speech by the Mayor of Vienna Philipp Jung (1885–1965) celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Anschluss. That day, the Viennese press, acclaiming the event, crowed that

The fifth return of that memorable historic hour—in which Adolf Hitler in 1938, buffeted by the cheers of the people of Vienna when entering the Vienna City Hall, accepted the pledge of loyalty from the city, and proclaimed in the great festival hall “the Day of the Greater German Reich”—was celebrated by the city of Vienna with an uplifting ceremony, at the heart of which was a speech by Mayor Jung. The memorial celebration received a special consecration from an artistic event of the highest order: the world premiere of the most recent work by the composer Dr. Richard Strauss, through a Festive Music for the City of Vienna under the personal direction of the Master [my emphasis]…. Mayor Jung spoke and called to mind once more the historic utterances…..of the Führer Adolf Hitler, and continued, “With this deed the dream of all good Germans was fulfilled, namely of one Reich under one strong leadership.”… The special greeting of Mayor [Jung] was then extended to Dr. Richard Strauss, “who wished to ornament this memorial day through a new work of his high art [my emphasis].” The speech closed with the words:… “We wish to recall that day as the most important milestone in German history, to give fresh impetus to the great event, and to renew our vow to follow the banner of the Führer in good and bad times, and to be loyal unto death.”

After conducting the premiere, Strauss symbolically handed the manuscript of the new Nazi ceremonial piece to Blaschke, a moment captured by the photographer (Plate 7). There are several performances posted on YouTube which discretely fail to mention the work’s Nazi historical context and semantics. Neither is there a word about it in the program booklet for the 2021 Chandos recording.

In Plate 8, Strauss’s son Franz appears with raised hand behind his father, while Rudolf Querner’s right hand partially obscures a bust of Hitler. Blaschke, responsible for artistic affairs, is proudly holding in his left hand the autograph score of Strauss’s new work, the Festmusik der Stadt Wien, just premiered under the composer’s baton; indeed, Blaschke liaised with Strauss regarding the organization of the composer’s contribution. Both Blaschke and Querner appear in the uniforms of senior SS officers. Of course, many contemporaries, who should know better, will always capitulate to the ruling orthodoxy that Strauss did such things for a host of different reasons including fear, cowardice, desire for advancement and power, greed, opportunism, fame, etc. Still, a brave and stubborn few will invariably resist. The great music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) and his friend, composer Reinhard Oppel (1878–1941), expressed their disdain for musical conformity to Nazi ideology. At the end of 1933, Oppel, who taught at the once world-famous Mendelssohn Conservatory in Leipzig (founded in April 1843 by Mendelssohn himself when Germany was still something of a meritocracy), wrote to Schenker in Vienna that “Hitler is enthusiastic about Richard Trunk (one of the state-supported mediocrities mentioned earlier), the conductor of the Cologne Men’s Choir, who now… of course produces mass choirs.” On February 19, 1934, he further reported that

many things that I see and experience do not please me at all. In music much hasn’t changed; the Gewandhaus [Orchestra, also made famous by Mendelssohn] just produced, under [Günther] Ramin [as conductor], [Johann Georg] Reutter’s The Great Calendar, a terrible piece, unmusical; it is criminal that so much money, time, and energy must be sacrificed for such unproductive stuff. Fashionable folly and progressive blather!

Approximately four months later, on June 17, he wrote to Schenker:

…[C]oincidentally, during the days I spent on the Rhine, the Cologne men’s choir sang in Kreuznach under Trunk, who is persona grata with Hitler. It was terrible what the man did as a choir director and as a composer, and as an accompanist to his singing wife. Still worse that such a donkey of a male-choir [leader] should be co-director of the Cologne Conservatory. But these people are “successful.” For art they remain ephemera [my emphasis].

Oppel’s dim view of such conformists was shared by Schenker. When the Nazis initially banned both “white and Negro Jazz” on German radio, Schenker quipped to his student Anthony van Hoboken (the famous cataloguer of Haydn’s works) that “the recently repudiated dynamic of jazz was almost more fun than that of today’s folkish art [lustiger als die der völkischen Kunst].” 

A striking example of yet another intelligent musician who should have known better yet disgracefully sought to ingratiate himself with the Nazis is provided by the ethnically half-Jewish Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–1969). Adorno was a student of Alban Berg, one of the few non-Jewish Modernists smeared as “degenerate”—though, ironically, Berg tried unsuccessfully to opportunistically curry favor with the Berlin authorities in order to replace his teacher Schönberg. On September 11, 1933, Adorno learned that, as a half-Jew, he had been deprived of his venia legendi and was unable to continue teaching in Germany. 

In Oxford, in 1934, surrounded by a flood of refugee scholars, mostly Jewish, who were in the same awkward if not desperate circumstances as himself, Adorno nevertheless—in hopes of facilitating his permanent return—still attempted to ingratiate himself with the Nazi authorities by praising Nazi choral music in the anti-Semitic, anti-Modernist Nazi journal Die Musik. In his shamefully laudatory review of Nazi composer Herbert Müntzel’s choral settings of Hitler Youth chief Baldur von Schirach’s poetry dedicated to Hitler, which was published in the June 1934 issue, Adorno enthused: 

Herbert Müntzel’s cycle stands out in the most recent choral publications by the Merseburger Verlag, mostly celebratory choirs for German [nationalist] occasions. Not only because it [the cycle] is characterized as deliberately National Socialist through the choice of [von] Schirach’s poems, but also because of its quality: [evidence of] an unusual creative will. It is not about patriotic mood and vague enthusiasm, but the question of the possibility of new folk music itself that is seriously projected through the composition…  [The aesthetics of] the fighter’s club and Neoclassical are both repudiated, and the image of a new romanticism is evoked, perhaps of the kind that Goebbels has defined as “romantic realism.”

Later, in 1963, when finally confronted with published proof of his collaboration, Adorno admitted in an interview that he deeply regretted celebrating von Schirach, and also that he should never have adopted Goebbels’ idea of “romantic realism.” Most tellingly, however, he lamely attempted to excuse his behavior by suggesting that he had tried to return to rescue German culture: “The real mistake lay in my misjudgment of the situation: if you will, in the folly of a man who found it infinitely difficult to decide to emigrate. I believed that the Third Reich couldn’t last long, that one had to stay and save what was possible.”

Müntzel’s music—for which Adorno sacrificed his personal and professional integrity—was, in fact, so ephemeral, so inconsequential, even by Nazi standards, that its print run must have been relatively small, and, as a result, it has proven impossible (in spite of this author’s sustained search) to locate even a single surviving copy of the score. To be sure, Gottfried Müller—the poster boy of Nazi music—has been largely forgotten, and the full extent of the collaboration of real talents like Strauss and Sibelius suppressed.

Myriad bombastic, ideologically conformist pieces, whether composed by mediocrities or geniuses, have been almost completely erased—whether deliberately or not is ultimately immaterial. If history may serve as a guide, one suspects that, three quarters of a century from now, all or most of today’s voluminous ideologically tendentious art and music will be similarly either forgotten or deliberately deleted.

If today’s ascendent Islamic supremacism is more openly anti-Jewish than Nazism, more misogynist than the “patriarchal West” at its worst, sexually repressive beyond any church or cult, and imperialistic in its very self-definition, it has counted on the complicity of what philosophy superstar Judith Butler proudly identifies as the anti-racist, anti-sexist, pro-queer, anti-imperialist “progressive global left.”

Israel’s embrace of non-conforming national pride and religious tradition has not only enabled the Jewish state to survive but to thrive despite facing 75 years of continuous aggression from various enemies bent on its destruction.

In director Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 Il conformista (“The Conformist”), based on Alberto Moravia’s 1947 novel of the same name, we follow the life of Marcello, an ordinary if psychologically damaged man in Italy in the 1930s.

It is profoundly uninspiring to realize that in the United States we have willfully, yes willfully, jettisoned our individualism in favor of group identity. The notion that marginalized groups must think alike is detrimental to the very groups.

The essence of activism and advocacy isn’t a fundraising and marketing game. It isn’t staying up to date on the latest social media trends. It isn’t avoiding certain truths as to not lose donor dollars, and it isn’t a popularity contest. It is knocking on G-d’s door.

Right now, your adolescent is fed that their hair color, their nose and lip shapes, their body shape, the way they look, the way they dance, the way they dress is more important than their character, than how they treat people and how they treat themselves.

Being a nonconformist is not about fighting for the sake of fighting. Nonconformists do not seek to burn things down and watch the smoke settle. They desire to create transformation and positive change.

C / ALAN: What? No. Jews, we’re loud, but we don’t, we’re not violent [sic]. We don’t engage in violence.

A / DAHNA: Oh no?

—Jason Grote, 1001 (2007)

Against hindsight’s superior judgment, in the summer of 2011 I enrolled in a five-week acting class at Emerson College in Boston. It lasted from 9:00 in the morning to 8:30 at night, and then for several hours more each Saturday. It was exhausting, humiliating, and revealed permanently that my dramatic talents lay elsewhere. That such a grueling, ultimately fruitless self-incurred adventure should have occurred at 17, and not later, is a blessing for which I am grateful.

The night of July 27, our class was slated to see a play at the Plaza Theatre on Tremont Street in the South End. It was called 1001 by Jason Grote, a playwright whose work, in retrospect, I am surprised that my lunatic high school drama teacher never inflicted upon me along with Jean Genet and myriad other Marxist luminaries unknown to people with normal educations.

“1001 is a remarkable play that is hilarious, seductive, and alarmingly relevant,” Company One’s artistic director Shawn LaCount wrote in the program. “At times dizzying in its approach, Grote has a style of storytelling that we think you’ll find surprising and enticing. You’ll want to buckle up for this magic carpet ride.” Fair enough.

Little did 17-year-old me know, however, that standard acting curriculum in first-rate art colleges included lewd, anti-Semitic screeds against the country in which they stood, received with all the solemnity of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). This was normal fair, apparently, as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached—and the most unorthodox people in society, as subsequent events would illustrate, brooked no unorthodox observations. The previous decade was apparent proof that the West needed a restorative herbal bath of jihad to warm its icy heart, and the inhabitants of the land between the Nile and Fertile Crescent had far too much of it for there to be peace on Earth. K–12 education wasn’t indoctrinating children against civilization quickly enough, so it needed some sophisticated collegiate cavalry. “Woke” had awoken long before everybody knew that men were really barren women, and, as I learned, anybody under 30 daring to opine otherwise was not to be trusted.

I was to endure a ride indeed that evening, but with no means of buckling up, and even less magic than allowed in the Dursley household. And, in the space of about 100 minutes, I would be privy to more reasons than the title’s zeroes represented why Jews should never go to the theater.

A tale of noble Arabs, a Jewish putz + fat crusaders

The convoluted, deliberately confusing play concerns two main intersecting stories: the first of The Thousand and One Nights, in which clever Sheherazad cheats death by enchanting the Persian king Shahriyar with 1,001 stories, the second of the incompatible lovers Alan, a Jewish hipster, and Dahna, a Palestinian-born Kuwaiti, set in New York City in 2001. Six actors play all of the many parts, but actors “A” and “C,” as the (typo-ridden) script calls them, exclusively play both Sheherazad-Dahna and Shahriyar-Alan respectively.

The first scene opens with an ensemble comprised of actors “B,” “D,” “E,” and “F” describing Sheherazad, dressed as a modern-day Arab businesswoman, walking through Times Square, mocked deliberately as the “center of the world.” “This is it? The land of milk and honey?” Sheherazad thinks through the ensemble’s narration, while she tip-toes “through the throngs of fat crusaders.” The narration continues, driving any meandering points home:

Here [in New York City] all is ifrits [demons] and djinns, flitting to and fro, illuminating an infinity of idols.

She has been told of them, these djinns and ifrits, conjured by the infidels.

This is why she bears the story that weighs so heavily on her back and her hips. It moves inside her. Feel it? Feel it move. It is the story of a final jihad against the infidel (insh’Allah)[.]

Or it is the story of a monstrous carriage crashing into one of these great fortresses…[?]

The scene eventually shifts to the story of Sheherazad and Shahriyar. King Shahriyar discovers that his unnamed queen has committed adultery “with a filthy blackamoor slave… for debauched women prefer the Moors on account of the size of their parts,” a “One-Eyed Arab” informs the audience. While Shahriyar sits seething in front of a television on which video of his wife’s exploits is imagined to play, he, now believing that all women shall similarly betray him, resolves to procure, marry, and ravage a new virgin every night only to behead her in the morning. When the thousand-and-first such bride (“a young girl of 13 or 14,” the script notes, “who trembles, crying”) has been so surgically altered, Wazir, the king’s chief minister, tells him that the kingdom is now nearly denuded of virgins to sacrifice to his royal neurosis. Though the king may, perhaps, have achieved his goal of forever eradicating adultery from his realm, the resentful commoners—no doubt wishing to dispose of their daughters less wastefully—slide toward revolt. Sheherazad, Wazir’s daughter, then tells her father that she has a plan to save the king, the kingdom, and its virgins, from the wrath their lord’s madness will surely heap upon them. She herself shall marry the king and rescue him from himself.

Face-to-face with the gynophobic monarch, a fearless Sheherazad playfully licks the dried blood off her fiancé’s fingers and admires the manly “sinew in your arms” on account of “lifting a heavy sword” with such regularity. A dazed Shahriyar responds that “You totally remind me of my girlfriend.” Upon their marriage, Sheherazad conducts him to bed, and, with her sister Dunyazad’s help, convinces the king to hear a story before she receives the same fate as the fifty-score-and-one who have gone before her. Sheherazad proceeds to tell him a gawdy story of an Arab prince who lusted for his lisping sister, then, before the end is reached, she insists that she is exhausted, “And we have business to attend to this night, do we not?” Haltingly and still confused, he begs to hear the end of the story; she assents, but informs the king that this story “then may only be understood if one first hears another story.”

Alan the Jewish hipster (his regal robes shed for a rumpled plaid shirt and jeans) then appears. He wanders the labyrinth of his own unconscious, sporting a conspicuously bandaged head wound. He is inarticulate, shabby, and makes little sense. He then stumbles upon the same “One-Eyed Arab” who introduced the character of Shahriyar. After the man shows Alan an incomprehensible TV program featuring Usamah bin Laden reciting lyrics from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Alan is transported to his apartment with his Palestinian girlfriend Dahna.

The scene shifts back to the king and his wily she-bard. She tells the story, smeared with unsubtle anti-colonial admonitions, of French novelist Gustave Flaubert and the Egyptian prostitute Kuchuk Hanem. After simultaneously enjoying her while writing a letter to his mother, a “Horrible Monster” creeps into the brothel to accost Flaubert in his sleep. He tells Flaubert that he regards this woman of the East as “an experience to be purchased” (something apparently unique to Western johns). “You think the world is a restaurant,” the “Monster” says. “That every word is a word in a menu. Listen to my tale for it will tell you what you really are.” The “Monster” then tells Flaubert Dahna and Alan’s awkward meeting story: “The Tale of Dahna and Alan Dershowitz.”

In a lecture hall at Columbia, Dahna, a graduate student, appears at a microphone during the Q&A session after a panel discussing academic boycotts of Israel. Alan Dershowitz—“a learned and powerful Jew, advisor to the Christian kings of America,” the “Horrible Monster” narrates—begins babbling empty, patronizing evasions over a brave, undaunted Dahna. She attempts to ask a polite question about why he does not support “a campaign for justice” modeled after the “successful campaign against Apartheid in South Africa.” Dershowitz will not let her speak, wheedles that she is an “extremist,” and talks over her until the moderator says that “we’ll have to move on to the next question.” After Dahna storms out, Alan, also a graduate student, follows her and tells her how much he admired her courage: “So that was uh great in there,” the slow-witted admirer blithers. “In that uh in the lecture you uh/ really held your own [sic].” He tries to make clear that “we [Jews] weren’t all like that. You know.” Their tedious dialogue is interrupted by the appearance of a livid Orthodox student, his tzitzit waving. He shouts at Dahna and accuses her—without reason, of course—of supporting “murderers and cancer,” since boycotting Israel will deprive sick people of life-saving Israeli medical technology. Alan shouts back at the crazed Chasid, who, now exposed in public as a coward who harasses women, retreats, defeated. Alan apologizes to Dahna on the man’s behalf; “I’m used to it,” she says stoically, adding that “It sounded like you were going to get violent.” Alan is rattled: “What? No. Jews, we’re loud, but we don’t, we’re not violent [sic]. We don’t engage in violence.” “Oh no?” the less than convinced yet ironically charmed Palestinian responds.

After calming down, Alan and Dahna embark on a flirtation. They find a building on the Chelsea pier where they watch the sun set, and Dahna tells Alan about her oil-rich Kuwaiti-Palestinian family with siblings spread across three continents. They then go dancing at an illegal rave. The rave becomes Shahriyar and Sheherazad’s bedroom, in which she and Dunyazad argue over whether to kill the king in his sleep, Sheherazad arguing in his favor. When he wakes up, Sheherazad distracts him with the story of Sinbad the Sailor and the blind Jorge Luis Borges. Borges tells the lost Sinbad that “You are not who you think you are,” for the text of The Thousand and One Nights is actually the work of a Frenchman who compiled a collection of famous Islamic stories, which was then translated back into Arabic, and then into English. Sinbad is as much a Western colonial invention as he is an authentic Arab folk hero. Borges then tells the tale of “Alan and Dahna in Palestine,” bringing the audience to the play’s defining location: Gaza.

Gunfire rocks and deafens the stage as Dahna ducks for cover holding a baby. The Israelis bombard Rafah while Dahna and Alan endeavor to aid the Strip’s besieged, destitute Muslims. Alan insisted that he and Dahna go there, seemingly out of moral obligation to prove that “We’re not all” like his namesake Dershowitz. Bullets careen left and right as Dahna narrates the hellish scene:

This is a bad night. We’re walking home after curfew with Mostafa, our translator, who has just taken his little girl to the Doctors Without Borders doctor. Something bad must have gone down today because soldiers start firing on us, that or they’re just bored maybe, or scared, but we hear, pok [sic]! Pok! Pok! Little chunks fly out of stone walls over our heads, small clouds of dust appear at our feet.

Dahna and Mostafa then see Alan the Jew standing frozen in front of the unseen Jewish soldiers. Ignoring their screams for him to run, Alan stands there, refusing to move, as the bullets fly over his head, slowly and purposely descending in height toward his skull. Finally, Mostafa runs and tackles him; he (the “One-Eyed Arab”) is shot in the eye. Though he lives, Alan is racked with guilt:

C / ALAN: I couldn’t move.

A / DAHNA: You were scared. It happens.

C / ALAN: It wasn’t that. I wanted to draw his fire. I felt like he knew, the soldier, somehow, that you and Mostafa were Arabs and I was a Jew, that if I stood there he wouldn’t kill me and you guys would. Get to safety [sic]. But then it was a game of chicken, like I was calling his bluff. I had this whole fantasy where he kills me, it makes the news, a Jew kills another Jew, they argue about it in the Knesset [sic].

Mostafa might die because of me.

Alan and Dahna move in together after they come home. But they are not happy. Alan is boring, immature, and immersed in not working on his dissertation, supposedly “about postcolonialism and internet porn.” Dahna’s sister Lubna has heard that she is living in sin with a Jew—however “exciting”—and she desires better for her. Lubna sets her up via the wonder of instant messaging with Asser, a rich Palestinian currency trader living in England. The two flirt half-heartedly; Dahna is tempted by his appearance and wealth in contrast to Alan’s nerdy, nose-picking idealism, but admits to herself that Alan was unlike other Jews enough to be “ready to die for me” in Gaza. She decides, however, to tell an oblivious Alan that she is interested in somebody else, and insinuates that she can’t stay with him anymore. When Alan finally figures out that she wants to leave him, he begs her to stay. She points out that he, of the two, is the one far more obsessed with post-colonial studies and anti-Israel politics; “Sometimes I wonder if I’m just some kind of Orientalist project for you,” she sighs. “I can’t be who you want me to be.”

At that moment, the first plane roars into the North Tower. A deafening blast rocks the entire world. The Lower Manhattan apartment nearly disintegrates. The scene melts away to medieval Persia, with Dahna and Alan transformed back into Sheherazad and Shahriyar. The crusaders are coming. They are savages who “know little of civilization, for theirs stopped evolving centuries ago and they remain as in ancient times,” Wazir warns his lord. Shahriyar’s realm is too weak to fight the onrushing murderers, but he refuses to flee, as he must hear just one more story before the barbarians “cut us all and fornicate with our bleeding wounds.” Sheherazad tells of “Alaeddin and His Magic Lamp.” The famous jin finds a dirty, lovesick Alan desperately looking for Dahna as the sirens blare and the city crumbles into wasteland. Alan says that his only wish is to find Dahna; the jin says that he can and will see her again, but it will come at a terrible price. Alan agrees, and then rushes to a bus stop where Dahna is getting off the M106 from the Bronx, wearing a blue silk scarf as a mask (or a veil). She is civil but not pleased to see him. The Orthodox student from Columbia then bursts from the shadows. As before, he starts shouting at Dahna, but now he tears the scarf off her face. He shrieks that she—“Arab scum”—is a “terrorist c—t.” He pulls out a brick to kill Dahna. Alan tries to stop him. The man smashes Alan in the head, who falls down bleeding and senseless. He then raises the brick against Dahna, the witness. She opens her duffle bag and pulls out Shahriyar’s sword, hacking off the bloodthirsty Jew’s arm. He scuttles away, groaning, into the smoke of 9/11. The final scene sees Dahna reading to Alan from The Thousand and One Nights, he lying comatose in a hospital bed with his head wrapped in bandages. She leaves the room and then returns as Sheherazad, Alan emerging from the bed as Shahriyar. They dance together as an eternal couple—united forever as schmuck and heroine.

Why do Jews find magic carpet rides so offensive?

The next morning, I arrived at the Paramount Center hoping—perhaps assuming—that the teachers and my fellow students would share my shock and disgust. We sat, as always, in a close circle on the filthy gray dance mats to say what we each thought of the play. I have no specific memory of what anybody else said, but such a blank is indicative of their obedient, fascinated approval. Then my turn came.

I recall my heart sinking and doubling in temperature, somehow sensing what was coming. Yet, I had to tell the truth: with a sheepish smile on my face, trying to stay calm and keep my language temperate, I launched into how “offended” I had been (a word I know I used), that the play was anti-Israel propaganda (if anybody knew what that meant), and that it was filled with bizarre anti-Semitic fantasies and self-satisfied anti-American nonsense. Then I remember awkward, surprised silence. Nobody said anything for a few eternal seconds. Maybe one girl, who was also Jewish, perhaps agreed with me faintly, or did so with sufficient brevity or moderation that my memory never preserved her opinion. One of the teachers, who had served as part of the play’s production staff—an otherwise decent woman who, before and after, was always kind to me—smiled and said something diplomatic. Then we moved on to the next kid. Or maybe I was last.

I do not remember the rest of that specific day, but I will never forget my “friends”’ polite, belittling reaction. My “five-week family,” as one of the girls had christened the group, looked at me as if I had eaten of the insane root that takes the revolution prisoner. If one were to dislike a play, I was learning quickly, the only acceptable reasons were technical: bad actors, ineffective directing, unwise lighting choices, a script which failed to build tension. My reason—that the play presented delusional lies about Jews and Israel dressed up in arch, high-brow avant-garde—was not on the list. A greater faux pas was that I displayed a lack of zeal for what almost every accredited acting teacher will tell you is theater’s highest purpose: to disturb bourgeois sensibilities—distaste for PLO misinformation apparently among them. If actors were going to make the world a better place someday, lippy Jews like me shouldn’t be so self-righteous. Israel, as everybody knows, is a tiny SS outpost only quadruple-chinned long-ago-decomposed Republican Klansmen support. “Artists” and people with brains and feelings—unlike quadruple-chinned long-ago-decomposed Republican Klansmen—value “Palestine over profits,” so to speak, so they understand that Dahna pulling an Obi-Wan Kenobi on the Wandering Jew is the only way to end a rollicking good magic carpet ride.

Said said so

Jason Grote describes himself as “a white, secular Jew” of a “Marxian” persuasion. Not surprisingly, too, as his Facebook page shows, he is a supporter of Ilhan Omar, prone to wearing a terrorist kufiyah scarf, and promised once that “I will find a way to urinate on you” if anybody accuses Bernie Sanders of advancing anti-Semitism—which, the socialist Forward says, he has. Yet, he, the crass literary snob who holds the most chic ideas in the wind, according to academia, is a non-conformist. Only people mad enough to see a commercial for the Hamas-supporting International Solidarity Movement—whom Grote’s own activism indicates he supports—and bother to complain are the stiffs.

And a pompous justification for jihad against Israelis is the only way to describe 1001. Since the same actor plays both Shahriyar and Alan, it cannot be irrelevant to Alan’s character that Shahriyar is a mass serial (child) rapist and serial killer, whose motivation is based purely upon petty sexual humiliation. Shahriyar is not only among the most pathetic characters imaginable, he is the ultimate coward. Due to tawdry penile envy and terror of female rejection, the tiny, weak, spineless king can only sooth his ego by massacring the most innocent and defenseless of his subjects. Israel, to Grote, appears to be the same: an evil, deranged tyranny so despicable and cowardly that it can only feed its thirst for power and security with the blood of Arab children. Alan the wimpy Jew is a righteous character only because he explicitly rejects his Jewishness and allegiance to his people’s nation-state. Further, Alan’s “fantasy” that a Jew killing another Jew would “make the news”—meaning that a Jew killing an Arab supposedly would not—lends fake evidence to the immortal anti-Semitic hallucination that the media are pro-Israel. He thus finds courage only when confronting Jews who do not reject their Jewishness, namely the unhinged Orthodox student and the murderous Israeli soldiers—who, like Amon Göth in Schindler’s List, kill when “bored.” As Jew-hating Columbia professor Joseph Massad once described Israel’s greatest achievement, 1001 can be summed up as “the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite and the Palestinian into the Jew.”

An even greater insult to human decency concerns the fact that, as some writers have mused in recent years, there are slight parallels between The Thousand and One Nights and the Book of Esther. Both depict beautiful, fearless heroines who hatch cunning schemes to rid the Persian Empire of an all-consuming evil. Both women marry dim, vain, thuggish potentates who believe they can preserve their rule only through mass slaughter. Both women successfully trick their degenerate emperors into giving might a rest and right a chance. The twisted irony of 1001, though, is that it seems to invert the holy story of Purim back on itself: Sheherazad as Esther (combined with Dahna the Arab) seduces the king (in place of wicked Israel) in order to free Muslims from the yoke of Jewish genocide. Considering that a comfortable majority of Muslims in both the U.S. and “Palestine” think that genocide against Jews is the most effective solution to Middle Eastern unrest, this fevered moral indulgence is as obscene as it sounds.

The script’s extensive “Selected Bibliography” section also memorializes Grote’s debt to anti-Israel propagandist Edward Said, whose infamous 1978 tirade Orientalism appears second down. Said, a staple of Columbia University for 40 years (and certified fake Palestinian), was arguably the founder of “anti-colonial studies” and the great-grandfather of American academic anti-Zionism. His professorial progeny includes shameless Columbian anti-Semites like Joseph Massad, Hamid Dabashi, Rashid Khalidi, and George Saliba, some of whom are known to have bullied their Jewish students.

The stories Sheherazad tells throughout the play preach Said’s well-debunked but academically beloved thesis that Western people, by definition, cannot interact with Islamic civilization in a way that is not distorted by racism. As the Borges character points out, The Thousand and One Nights was originally compiled by a European writer—meaning that the story itself is really an imposition of the imperialist Western imagination upon Arab culture. This slyly tempts the audience into wondering if Shahriyar’s brutality is nothing more than a projection of the perverse Western mind onto innocent, beautiful Islam. That Muslim violence is really all America’s fault, and Israel (a “creation” of Western imperialism) is far more Shahriyar than he is himself.

The play’s use of language, too—hokey and dull though it may be—suggests another layer of propaganda. Shahriyar and Alan, in contrast to Sheherazad and Dahna, are deliberately idiotic. The script gives actor “C” the word “uh” 29 times throughout the play. Alan especially can barely speak in complete sentences, whereas Dahna speaks clearly, eloquently, and intelligently. Because Alan is an echo of Shahriyar, he cannot truly understand words, so his Sheherazad, goddess and mistress of verbal inspiration, must educate him. Also (with two exceptions), only the Muslim characters consistently speak well or mellifluously. Only people from the culture of the Qur’an—poetry so sweet, Muhammad argues (absurdly, as it turns out), that its beauty must be proof of Islam—grasp the value and power of words. Where Western characters transplanted into Sheherazad’s stories like Gustave Flaubert are informed that they think “every word is [but] a word in a menu,” the Muslim characters’ lines are drenched in rich silks, crisp pastel colors, beguiling perfumes, fruits unknown to the primitive wilderness of Europe, and all the passion and pleasure of an Allah-fearing world without capitalism. The word “crusaders,” too, is equally telling, for it is an undisguised euphemism for Americans—the mocked victims of 9/11 included. And it is always used in contexts which imply that jihad directed against the United States is all the American people can expect after the events of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. What’s more, just after the first plane hits, “crusaders” invade Shahriyar’s kingdom. The historical inaccuracy intimates Grote’s intentions: the crusaders never came anywhere near Persia, therefore, their appearance is a crude caricature of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Invoking the once-fashionable slogan of George Bush the “crusader,” Grote makes it very clear who he blames for an Islamic terrorist attack: “It’s Bush’s fault,” Alan fumes, “the f—ing idiot.” Grote even reverses basic, obvious reality to demean a wounded West yet further: the Americans “know little of civilization, for theirs stopped evolving centuries ago and they remain as in ancient times”—a common, objective observation many have made of Islamic civilization. No shock, then, that the introduction declares the play itself to be no less than the “story of a final jihad against the infidel (insh’Allah).”

For such a slime as this

Since 2011, every one of the lies contained within 1001 have become sacred writ within American academia, and “educated” youth culture. It is taken for granted that Israel’s entire existence has been the longest “holocaust” in human history, Islam is simultaneously both peaceful and should destroy America, and Jews can only be allowed to exist if they burn the Israeli flag. Even bin Laden’s abhorrent rationalization for massacring innocent Americans has gained wet-eyed worship all over TikTok.

Though it appears 1001 has mercifully fallen into obscurity since the production I saw that far-off Arabian night, in its younger years, it enjoyed great popularity, being produced across the country and receiving praise from The Boston Globe, L.A. Weekly, New York Times, Village Voice, and Washington Post. So, too, as my program further revealed, Company One could not have edified me so without generous support from the taxpayer-funded Massachusetts Cultural Council and Boston Center for the Arts. This can only mean that a sizeable chunk of the American theater-going public—including patrons affiliated with city and state governments—thought anti-Semitic, pro-jihad plays a welcome night’s entertainment years before the Iraq War ended (though there is no evidence that the ear-splitting 2018 musical adaption took off). Only natural, then, that violent pro-Hamas protests should have paralyzed both Columbia and Emerson during the jihad-speckled 2024 spring semester. With polling now consistently showing support for Israel nearly gone amongst American leftists, that a full house would have clapped for such a play as this so long ago is less of a surprise.

Theater itself, my teachers told me endlessly in various ways, was about speaking truth to cowards, but this trauma planted the first seed in my mind that they, like all Marxists, were liars. Were the instructors who ran my class—people I had to trust—too stupid to notice that they had taken me to see a play which seemed to blame America and Jews for 9/11? The magic of the theater, as we all know, makes anything possible; but, at least, nobody with that many degrees has an excuse—especially to smile and tell me that my eyes need to buckle up for the “intifadah.” But, unlike Alan, I understand words, and I don’t need to become a dhimmi to learn their power.

Hamas, as a triumphalist idea of ridding the world of Israel and Jews, may never be defeated. But it’s at least possible that it can be roundly defeated as an armed entity aiming its Iran-supplied weapons at the heart of Israel. Hamas as an idea, like the Hydra, may grow more heads when its head is cut off. But those heads, without a body—a functional infrastructure of war—will be de-fanged.

The rabbis say that the gates of repentance always stand open. And I hope and pray that one day you will walk through them, and realize the error that drove you to moral depravity and useful idiocy.

In Conversation with Jyoti Hegde

There is a story about Panini, the legendary grammarian who formalized the grammar for Sanskrit language.

Panini, in a deep meditative state (Samadhi), had a vision of Lord Shiva. Shiva appeared before Panini and played 14 sounds on his hand-drum, Damroo.

Panini noted down the 14 sounds as sets of certain letters of the Sanskrit alphabet.

In effect, these 14 sounds provided a way to classify the whole of the Sanskrit alphabet in 14 sets of randomly selected letters. In retrospect, it turned out to be an iconic accomplishment.

Panini used these 14 sets of letters as the first ever “look-up table.”

This massively simplified his articulation of the rules of grammar. He could codify even complex grammar rules with a simple look-up table rule on the lines of—‘operation A performed on set X gives set Y’—which essentially means that the operation A executed on any member of set X transforms it to the corresponding member of set Y.

Till today, linguistics and computer scientists still wonder: how did Panini come up with this arrangement of 14 sets, which made hundreds of rules of Sanskrit grammar simple and lucid?

This narrative explains two important points.

The Mystique of Genius

Genius has always been a mysterious, almost mystical phenomenon. 

How could an individual compute, deduce, analyse, or create stuff instantaneously which others struggle to even make sense of? 

How could someone see in precise detail what others cannot even sense an existence of?

Indian thought has always perceived genius as an inspiration from the divine. 

Similar views are expressed in other ancient cultures as well. The movie Amadeus portrays the arch-rival of Mozart experiencing a melt-down when he sees the notes of Mozart’s composition. He describes it as an act of taking dictation from the divine.

Super-intelligence as a divine gift is what has kept Indian geniuses across all ages very grounded. They do not showcase their skills as an arrogant display of individual superiority, but express profound gratitude for the divine gift in the form of a genius skill. The flow of genius through a human mind is regarded as the flow of the divine consciousness and is treated with utmost sanctity.

The lore of Shiva appearing before Panini and playing those 14 sets of sounds on his drum could well be a metaphor for an intuitive flash of insight that Panini received during deep contemplation. For sure, it was, like all genius creations, a flash of brilliance that transcends all rational explanation.

The Fine Art of Abstraction

The other significant aspect of this narrative is India’s fascination with Abstraction. Sanskrit Grammar is one of the finest examples of abstraction. Millennia ago, Sanskrit grammarians had created a grammatical framework that baffles current day linguistics and computer scientists with its precision and unambiguity. 

This was only one of the reflections of the Indian sages’ compelling desire to find the common, generalized threads across all bodies of knowledge. They analysed and synthesized ad infinitum and were able to distil insights into structures and frameworks that could help bring excellence to every aspect of life.

Everything that most of the world would consider as a law, a rule, or a commandment was a framework in the Indian spiritual thought, which if pursued, would lead to an experience of brilliance. This held true even for subjective phenomena like art and entertainment. 

Most of these works of abstraction are instances of genius minds in action, and demonstrate insights beyond rational explanation. There is no wonder that most of these works are regarded as creations of divine inspiration and involve Shiva or other gods and goddesses in the process of their creation.

Welcome to Indian classical music – the fascinating universe of Ragas, the amazing world of genius, divine inspiration, and a scintillating example of abstraction.

The mystical world of Ragas

Raga is a concept unique to Indian classical music. Since it does not have parallels in any other form of music, it can at best be described as a framework for improvisation of music.

Raga is far more complex than ‘scales.’ Even the concept of ‘scales’ in Indian classical music, called ‘Thaats,’ is quite intricate. Indian classical music has 10 well-defined scales in an octave. The modern scholars put this number at 32.

On the other spectrum, a Raga, though far more than a scale, is far lesser than a tune. 

A raga is a set of 4, 5, or 6 notes and semi-notes, along with other structural nuances. These include identification of primary, secondary, tertiary, or prohibited notes of a Raga, the most commonly used ‘music phrases’ of the Raga, or the signature phrase that identifies the Raga, distinguishing it from other Ragas that use the same notes.

In essence, a raga is defined more by its ‘personality’ rather than the notes it is made up of.

It sets the boundaries of what a musician could and should do. A musician performing a certain raga has to stay within those limits.

As long as he remains within the confines of a Raga, he could do anything his creative impulses get him to do, and he would create a compelling melodic composition.

So, ragas serve two-fold purposes – 

1. they restrict the movement of a musical composition, but 
2. they ensure an unlimited flight of creativity.

There are thousands of ragas. A maestro at Indian classical music is conversant with at least a few hundreds of them. A raga could lend to thousands of tunes of different genre, tempo, rhythm, mood, and emotion.

This allows even a learner to be able to improvise, compose, and innovate even at the most primitive stages of learning.

Just as Indian spirituality emphasizes exploring and discovering your own path, Indian Classical Music, which is a complete spiritual path in itself, embodies the same spirit of encouraging the learner to find his own music and own voice, by providing Ragas as the guiding framework.

The Consciousness of Notes

The tradition of Indian Classical Musical considers each note as a conscious entity. 

Notes are considered to have a consciousness of their own and hence are dealt with utmost sacredness, sanctity, and devotion. Perfection of each note is the first requirement for a classical musician. Being out of tune is equivalent to betraying the divine consciousness embodied in each note.

A musician can find and express great depth and joy in prolonging just one single note. An adept can bring alive one note with immense life, variations, versatility, moods, and emotions.

An Indian classical musician does not treat notes as mere building blocks of a tune. Each note is regarded as having a persona its own. The artist isn’t in a rush to scrape through the notes to render a catchy tune. The artist proceeds note by note, giving each note its due regard, pause, and emphasis, one note giving way to the next one and the next. The audience can feel the impact of each note reverberating through his consciousness and making a lasting imprint. 

Every additional note builds upon the vibrations reminiscent of the previous note.

Thus, a composition in Indian classical music represents a whole without losing sight of the parts.

The deep treatment of every note creates a sense of stillness in the midst of all movement. While the focus is on the tune, you do not rush to it, but arrive at it by savouring the deliciousness of every bite.

That is what imbues Indian classical music with its mystical powers of alchemy and transformation.

The Fascinating World of Veena 

Veena is considered as one of the earliest musical instruments, and as the source of the creation of all other musical instruments in the tradition of Indian Classical Music. It has immense significance not only as a deep and intriguing musical instrument, but is recognizable as a prized possession of many gods, goddesses, and saints, and is symbolic of art, learning, intelligence, creativity, devotion, and a host of other sublime emotions.

The story of the origins of Veena is an ethereal one. It is said that Shiva created Veena, inspired by the form of his consort, Shakti, as a tribute to her curvaceous physique. Shiva mastered the art of playing the Veena, and then taught the art to the goddess of learning, Saraswati, who then taught it to Narada, the greatest devotee in the Indian tradition. 

Such narratives can be looked at as metaphorical illustrations. For example, this story about the origins of Veena represents the acknowledgement of vibrations in the form of music as a means to attune to the Divine Consciousness, and as an instrument of devotion.

Music has always been sacred in the Indian spiritual tradition, not just for religious content, but for the embodiment of Sound as a way to resonate with Pure Consciousness.

There are various types of Veena, the three primary ones being Saraswati Veena, Vichitra Veena, and Rudra Veena. They differ in their structure, sound, playing styles, etc. 

The Enchanting Resonance of Rudra Veena

Rudra Veena stands out with its distinct appearance and a deep bass resonance sound. 

The form of Rudra Veena is extremely elegant and aesthetic. Creating a Rudra Veena is a fine art in itself. The Rudra Veena flaunts its tubular body and the two imposing resonators that are made of catabalash gourds and hand-crafted by artisans into beautiful nearly spherical shapes attached to the tube. It does take a huge amount of artistry to turn a perishable vegetable into the soul of a soulful instrument.

The Rudra Veena has 21 to 24 movable frets made of brass plates. These are adjustable to match the microtones of a raga. 

The Rudra Veena has strings of various kinds and serve different purposes. Apart from the 4 main melodic strings, there are strings that allow the musician to play rhythm. Additionally, it has a drone string. The strings are pliable. By bending the strings, the veena player can create a sustained tone on a given note and even bend the microtones of the note to create a variation. This also allows the musician to stay on a note for a prolonged time without being monotonous, adding embellishments and adornments of a pulsating note.

It has a playing style that is very demanding on the body. It is held in an inclined position with one of the resonators at the top and another placed on the thigh of the Veena player.

The genius of Jyoti Hegde

In this write-up, we explore the world of Rudra Veena with one of its greatest contemporary exponents, Vidushi Jyoti Hegde. Vidushi is a honorific conferred to the greatest female icons of Indian Classical Music. Jyoti Hegde is the first female exponent of this grandiose instrument.

Jyoti Hegde had been learning the musical instrument Sitar for years. One day she watched her guru, Sri Bindu Madhav Pathak, play Rudra Veena in a college event. The profound resonance of the Rudra Veena stirred something deep within her, igniting a desire for its mastery in her heart. Hooked by the sound, she passionately persuaded her guru to teach her Rudra Veena.

She faced immense resistance from her loved ones, including her guru, regarding her decision to learn Rudra Veena. This gigantic instrument, because of its size and shape, and the style in which it is held, was physically demanding, and was considered unsuitable and harmful for a female body. 

She persisted in her decision to pursue Rudra Veena and after a sustained resistance, her guru gave in and her fascinating journey with this mystical instrument got started.

The artists who pursue any classical art form in India do so almost with the dedication and rigor of a reclusive monk following a spiritual discipline. This rigor, the years of dedicated learning and practice, and the spark of genius all show up phenomenally every time Jyoti performs.

Besides, like the true spirit of the tradition of Indian geniuses, she is extremely grounded. She takes great pleasure in working in her areca-nut farm, taking care of cattle, dogs, and cats and is involved in many activities that reflect her deep connection with the nature and the earth. 

Here is a performance video of hers that portrays the deep sound of Rudra Veena as well her immersive consciousness as she plays on her revered instrument. You can observe the deep resonant sound of Rudra Veena, the plucking style including the rhythm, the bending of strings to prolong a note, and many other finer aspects of Rudra Veena:

NS: The Veena has many connotations in Indian spirituality. Many goddesses and saintly figures carry Veena and are known to be stalwarts in the art of playing Veena.

What does Veena mean to you?

JH: Veena, in its technical sense, covers all chordophones native to the Indian subcontinent.

Among these instruments, Rudra Veena holds a profound significance. Regarded as the ancestor of all Indian chordophones, it carries a special title.

For me, my instrument isn’t merely a tool for showcasing my artistry; it represents my entire being. It speaks for me. 

My connection with the Rudra Veena began with a love at first sound. At the age of 18, its deep resonance resonated with my soul, even before I fully understood its spiritual essence.

I picked up the instrument because I just fell in love with it and decided to learn it regardless. My goal was never to carve out a niche in my field or to become the first female Rudra Veena master. At that time, I was too young to contemplate the future or aspire to excel. My focus was solely on my passion for the instrument, and it rewarded me abundantly.

The beauty of the Rudra Veena lies in its representation of both nature and human creativity. Its gourds, harvested from the farms, are transformed by human hands into resonators capable of producing heavenly melodies. Since the day I committed myself to the Rudra Veena, there has been no turning back. My life feels incomplete without it.

 It’s not just an instrument; it’s my partner in life. I firmly believe that when you wholeheartedly embrace your instrument, treating it as a companion, it responds in kind. If you confine your instrument to mere practice sessions, your music will likewise be confined. Embrace it fully, and it will open up endless avenues for creating music of your own. 

NS: There are many types of Veena. What is special about your instrument, Rudra Veena?

JH: Veena has many types, each with its own unique characteristics. Among them are Rudra Veena, Saraswati Veena, and Vichitra Veena. Each type of veena possesses distinct qualities, with Rudra Veena standing out for its exceptional tonal quality and profound resonance. Unlike other instruments, Rudra Veena is intimately connected to the player’s body, with its resonance traveling through the body in what I personally experience Naad-yog. Its sound captivates us, with each note cherished and revered.

The tonal character of the Rudra Veena closely resembles that of the human voice, showing a lively quality that feels more akin to vocal expression than typical instrumental sound.

Rudra Veena is a custom-made instrument, meticulously crafted to fit the measurements of the player’s body. So my Rudra Veena cannot be played by you or I cannot play yours.

Crafting a traditional Rudra Veena requires precise measurements and years of artisanal training to achieve the perfect tonal quality.

NS: What are the different playing styles in Rudra Veena? How would you describe your style?

JH: Presently, there exist two predominant playing styles of Rudra Veena: Dagarbani and Khandarbani. 

The Dagarbani style involves modifications to the traditional Rudra Veena, resulting in changes to posture, tonal quality, and an increase in weight. This style places a strong emphasis on intricate designs with Swar and Shruti, focusing on precise perfection in intonation and measured improvisation.

On the other hand, Khandarbani, the tradition to which I belong, prioritizes vigour, charm, and the subtle expressions of Raag. It encompasses both heroic presentations and meditative qualities. 

NS: What’s your state of consciousness when you practice or perform?

JH: When I hold my Rudraveena, the world around me fades away. Despite my human duties to society and family, I embrace them proudly. Yet, when my fingers touch the strings of my instrument, I surrender completely. It transports me to a realm of joy and meditation, where my Rudra Veena becomes my sole companion in a dialogue of harmony. 

As a musician, I try to transcend to a place of pure tranquillity, where my art is not merely a performance but a heartfelt conversation with my instrument.

NS: It is said that Rudra Veena is the musical instrument that comes closest to human vocal singing. It is also considered to have deep connections with our body. Could you give some insights and perspectives on this, based on your own personal experience?

JH: One lesser known aspect of playing the Rudra Veena is that you cannot set it down while tuning. If you place the instrument down, tune it, and then lift it, the tuning suddenly changes. It is intricately linked with the body. The tuning remains inconsistent until it is snugly against your body.

Besides, it is deeply intertwined with breathing. Any irregular breathing pattern while playing will continuously affect the veena’s tuning. This change is distinctly noticeable. Therefore, practitioners of the Rudra Veena must engage in regular Pranayama and Yoga.

As for my personal experiences with the Veena, they have been nothing short of profound. Each time I immerse myself in its melodic embrace, I feel a deep sense of connection with centuries of musical tradition and culture. The Veena has taught me patience, discipline, and a profound appreciation for the nuances of sound. Through countless hours of practice and performance, I have experienced moments of pure transcendence, where the boundaries between myself and the music dissolve, leaving only a sense of unity and harmony.

Moreover, the Veena has been a constant source of inspiration and solace, guiding me through life’s highs and lows with its soul-stirring melodies. Whether performing on stage or practicing in solitude, the Veena has been my lovely companion, encouraging me to explore the depths of my musicality and creativity. 

My journey with Rudra Veena is filled with countless moments of awe, wonder, and self-discovery.

NS: Your life appears to be one seamless Sadhana. With or without music, you are always serving the nature and the Divine in some way.

We would love to know the Jyoti Hegde beyond music and Rudra Veena.

What else are you passionate about? 

JH: Music is my entire world. Additionally, I am a cheerful person. Terms like ‘anxiety,’ ‘sorrow,’ or ‘tiredness’ are absent in my dictionary. I believe this mind-set has been involved in shaping my musical concepts. Music brings me joy, and my joyful outlook, in turn, enhances my musicality. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Beyond my musical pursuits, I find deep fulfilment in various sides of my life that have contributed to my personal growth.

Nestled within the serene beauty of our huge arecanut farm, my home and Gurukul for my students is situated near Sirsi, a quaint hamlet enveloped by lush forests teeming with diverse wildlife and rich biodiversity. Working alongside my husband, an agriculturist, on our farm is one of my hobbies. My culinary skills bring joy to my students, who eagerly appreciate the meals I cook, affirming my proficiency in the kitchen.

Painting is another passion of mine, a skill I cultivated from a young age and eventually improved as I learnt it from a professional artist. Though destiny initially led me down a different path, it ultimately put me into world of music! I practice Pranayam and Yog in regular basis. Our lives are enriched by the presence of our beloved cattle, dogs, and cats, whose companionship brings boundless joy. Together, my students and I lead a contented rural life, immersed in art, love, compassion, and the beauty of nature, all emphasised by the transformative power of music.

Living in harmony with nature is supreme to me, as I believe music finds its origins in the natural world itself. I instil these values in my students, encouraging them to perceive music in every aspect of life, not solely within the confines of an instrument. Viewing my students as my own children, we engage in rigorous practice, indulge in nourishing meals, and share moments of happiness! 

That’s what musical life is.