Degrees of choice

The Weimar era in Germany (1918–33) witnessed unprecedented innovation in the arts, propelled by prominent musicians with varying degrees of Jewish connection and self-identification. Arguably the greatest pianist and cellist of the early twentieth century, Artur Schnabel (1882–1951) and Emanuel Feuermann (1902–42), respectively, taught in Berlin during the late 1920s. Bruno Walter (1876–1962), who was famous across Europe, conducted the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Otto Klemperer (1885–1973) championed new music at Berlin's Kroll Opera. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and Kurt Weill (1900–50) composed in accordance with their distinct thinking about music and its purposes.

Berlin was the epicenter of much of this musical activity. Indeed, “Weimar was Berlin. Berlin Weimar.”⁵ But in Berlin, German Jews could also choose to contribute to Jewish-only endeavors – part of what some have termed a Jewish Renaissance.⁶ During the 1920s, Jewish leaders in Berlin established the United Synagogue Choirs, the Society of the Friends of Jewish Music, and the Juwal Publishing Company for Jewish Music.⁷ And there were also those individuals who worked to bridge these two porous circles, entangling Jewish with more mainstream trends, through the reform of synagogue music and reevaluation of the Jewish prayer service.⁸ To this end, Heinrich Schalit (1886–1976), who took the position of music director and organist at the Munich synagogue in 1927, produced music both modern and anti-modern, building on tradition while responding to the groundbreaking compositional ideas of the time. Arno Nadel (1878–1943), composer, writer, and choir director of the Kottbusser Ufer Synagogue, saw Schoenberg's atonality as the perfect model in this respect. In 1923, he wrote, the “new music (especially Schoenberg!) attempts to free itself from the harmonic basis and to proceed in new contexts in ways similar to what we assumed of the ancient.”⁹ Weill and Weimar-era Zeitoper – opera that incorporated contemporary themes, popular music, and technology – served as similar inspiration for Hugo Adler (1894–1955), the chief cantor in Mannheim, in the composition of his Instructional Cantatas.¹⁰

But this musical invention was not without opposition. Anti-Semitism grew alongside Jewish involvement in cultural as well as commercial spheres. This hate was not of a single variety. For some, socioeconomic concerns inspired anti-Jewish attitudes.¹¹ For others, anti-Semitism was a cultural code. Jews were seen as a threat to social status, prestige, and cultural hegemony.¹² Even amid increasing anti-Semitism, though, German Jews enjoyed success and freedom, a freedom of choice. German Jews could participate in the era's general cultural creativity, embrace Jewish undertakings, or both, depending on their ideals.

German Jews enjoyed this tenuous freedom for slightly longer than Jews in Russia. James Loeffler, in this volume, has highlighted the contribution of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, founded in St. Petersburg in 1908 (see Chapter 11). Government support of Jewish national culture, however, began to fade in the late 1920s. By 1931, the state exercised total control of Soviet cultural life. At this time, private organizations, such as the Society's Moscow branch, were officially dissolved.¹³ Individual artists were then subject to accusations of political crimes. Mikhail Gnesin (1883–1957), an original member of the Society, eventually lost close colleagues and even his own brother to arrest and execution. Gnesin himself sought a certain protection in composition centered on the folk music of other Soviet minorities, for a time shifting his musical agenda away from Jewish music.¹⁴

In the United States, on the other hand, attitudes toward Jewish identity in music were less overt. During the 1920s, a substantial block from within New York's International Composers’ Guild (ICG, 1921), which supported modern American composition, left to join the newly formed League of Composers (1923), including Louis Gruenberg (1884–1964), who grew up in America though he was Russian-born, and Lazare Saminsky (1882–1959), another former member of the Society in St. Petersburg. Though historical explanations of the split have focused on the first American performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, musicologist Rachel Mundy has recently brought to light the role of Jewishness in this rupture. She cites Virgil Thomson's reference to the new organization as “the League of Jewish Composers,” given the prominence of Jewish composers among the founding group.¹⁵ She ties this perception to a general xenophobia at the time. Though the US was heralded as the so-called land of immigrants, its government had actually sought to legislate against immigration in the early 1920s, particularly with the Immigration Act of 1924. Discourses surrounding anti-immigration in conjunction with a latent rhetoric of anti-Semitism played an implicit, if not explicit, role in American musical life during the 1920s and early 1930s. Aaron Copland (1900–90), who aligned with the League, was often depicted then as a “shrewd” commercial composer, recycling stereotypes of Jewish music making from the past.¹⁶ For many during and after the Nazi era, the United States would seem a haven from such discrimination. The reality was far more complex.

Negotiation in segregation

In 1933, the Weimar era's promise of choice ended for those termed Jewish. On January 30, Adolf Hitler was officially appointed chancellor. His party, the National Socialist German Worker's Party, or NSDAP, continued to grow in power during the early months of 1933. With the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, Hitler had the state of emergency he needed to demolish parliamentary government. One of the earliest results was the Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service of April 7, 1933, passed six days after a boycott of Jewish businesses. By means of the Law's Aryan paragraph, “civil servants who are not of Aryan ancestry” were to be dismissed. This measure effectively prevented so-called non-Aryans – defined at that time as any person descended from a Jewish parent or grandparent – from holding positions in the public sphere, at state-run music conservatories, opera houses, concert halls, and theaters.

Even before this legislation, there were high-profile acts to exclude “non-Aryan” musicians. On March 16, Bruno Walter arrived for rehearsal at the Gewandhaus only to find himself locked out. Fearing he might have similar problems at an upcoming concert in Berlin with the Philharmonic Orchestra, Walter requested police protection for the event. His request was denied and it was made clear that his safety was in jeopardy. Walter Funk, the secretary in the Propaganda Ministry, explained that the concert could only take place with an Aryan conductor. And it did, with Richard Strauss in Walter's place.¹⁷ Walter canceled his German engagements and eventually emigrated from Austria to the United States.

At this time, Schoenberg was similarly forced to resign from his position in Berlin at the Prussian Academy and leave Germany. Many composers, including Schoenberg, ended up in the United States, mostly in New York or Southern California: Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), Ernst Toch (1887–1964), Ernst Křenek (1900–91), Paul Dessau (1894–1979), and Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871–1942), among others. Some, like Korngold and Weill, in many ways prospered there.¹⁸ Korngold enjoyed success composing for films in Hollywood while Weill thrived with work on Broadway. (Both have, however, paid a price in reception, with condemnations of their participation in “mass culture” and accusations of “selling out.”)¹⁹ Others, such as Schoenberg, who earned a formidable reputation as a teacher if not a composer, endured a notoriously contentious professional relationship with the University of California, Los Angeles, and the city of Los Angeles in general.²⁰ Landau recalls visiting him during those years: “No kindness or any form of hospita[lity] expected me at Schoenberg's house. I felt like an intruder into the sanctuary of an embittered man.”²¹ Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), a former student of Schoenberg, struggled for different reasons in the United States. He emigrated only to fall victim to a comparable climate of intolerance, encouraged by Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch-hunts. In 1948, he decided to return to the newly formed German Democratic Republic.²²

Though I stress the United States, displaced Jews were hardly confined to a single destination; they found themselves exiled in and out of Germany, far and wide, including, in one example, Shanghai, as the ethnomusicologist Tang Yating has recorded. After Kristallnacht in 1938, Jewish refugees arrived as a third wave to the Chinese city and brought with them musical traditions from the Reform service that would prove influential.²³ Ethnomusicologist Philip V. Bohlman identifies the publication of books of Jewish repertory in the 1930s as an essential means for emigrants from Germany to reestablish and reconstruct cultural activities. He specifically notes their importance in Israel as well as North and South America.²⁴

The Nazi regime generally banned the music left behind by composers termed Jewish as well as music by those deceased, such as Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), and Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). With some degree of error, given a certain measure of disorganization and competition within Nazi offices, anything that could be called Jewish music disappeared from “Aryan” concert venues. Accepted Germans were only allowed a glimpse into the rich world of forbidden music in 1938, at the propaganda exhibition “Entartete Musik” (Degenerate Music), presented in conjunction with the first “Reichsmusiktage” (Reich Music Days) in Düsseldorf by Hans Severus Ziegler, the director of the German National Theatre at Weimar. Modeled after Munich's “Degenerate Art” exhibit, the music exhibition reused the German term “Entartung,” which blends in definition a Darwinian sense of the decline of the species with an immoral quality of degeneration or pollution.²⁵ Emblematic of the event was its booklet cover, emblazoned with what Michael H. Kater has described as “a monkeylike Negro,” wearing the Star of David and playing the saxophone.²⁶ This image hinted, not so subtly, at Ernst Křenek's opera Jonny spielt auf! (Johnny Strikes Up), a 1927 hit that incorporated the composer's understanding of jazz. Nationalistic writers at the time despised jazz for its link with Africans or African-Americans and the United States, its sexual power, and the unsuitability of jazz rhythms for marching. When Nazi scientists concluded that Jews had large proportions of “negroid blood,” enemies of jazz also had enough justification to link jazz with the Jews, connecting in some ways the non-Jewish Křenek with Jewish music.²⁷

Much of the music featured in Düsseldorf did have one other platform in Germany, beyond the exhibition: the Jewish Culture League. This organization, in which Landau worked until her emigration, was the musical and theatrical home for Jewish musicians, actors, and audience members that had remained for a variety of reasons. Michael Haas compares the League to four Austrian musical groups: the Hakoah Orchestra, Jewish Song Society, Symphony Orchestra of the League of Jewish Austrian Front Soldiers, and Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music, which eventually led the repertoire programming of the other three ensembles, though it was established last, in 1927. These groups were created before the League in Germany, with ties to the goals of the St. Petersburg Society. As Haas notes, however, all five organizations performed a restricted repertoire. Until its dissolution in 1939, a year after Austria's Annexation, the Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music also met in protected circles in private homes, which were likewise venues of choice and necessity in Germany.²⁸ But the League in Germany, given its direct cooperation from the start with the Nazi government – on matters large and small, from repertoire to venue and promotion – offers a unique lens onto notions of Jewish music at the time, as well as an extreme example of the mediation surrounding Jewish music during this time of tremendous stress.

Kurt Baumann (1907–83), a former director's assistant in Berlin, and Kurt Singer (1885–1944), a physician, musicologist, and the director of the Doctors’ Chorus in Berlin, developed the initial plan for the League, to be set in Berlin, in the early months of 1933.²⁹ The Nazi administrator Hans Hinkel supported the plan for several reasons: the League operated within the Nazi propaganda machine;³⁰ the League functioned as a mechanism of local social control; and, with the requirement that the League perform Jewish works – backed by the censorship of so-called Aryan composers – the League represented a means for the regime to end Jewish cultural appropriation and perceived degradation of the German masterworks.

The assimilated League leaders, however, hoped simply to offer unemployed Jewish musicians a means of income and a place of solace. They thus did not initially focus on a Jewish repertoire. To some, such a repertoire was, in fact, at odds with their sense of Germanness and threatened to turn their Jewish organization into a ghetto. From the very start, German Zionist writers demanded that the League confront the changing situation of Jews in Germany and the need for a repertoire connected to Jewishness. The conflict here, which the heterogeneous Jewish public only compounded, in part, explains why League leaders did not follow the example of other organizations dedicated to Jewish music, such as the St. Petersburg Society. The League lacked support for similar work but also the time. In September 1936, after three years of debate about their repertoire and Jewish music, Singer convened, at the Nazi regime's insistence, the Jewish Culture League Conference. Though League branches had been established in most major cities in Germany by this time, the conference took place in Berlin, given the centrality of the original branch in repertoire programming.

In his presentation at the conference on Jewish liturgical music and Jewish folk song, Arno Nadel insisted that “authentic Jewish music” (echte jüdische Musik) was Jewish folk song, but especially music for the synagogue.³¹ Synagogue music was privileged above Jewish folk song, in part, because the authenticity of Jewish folk music, in the absence of a common Jewish nation, was questionable. Karl Adler (1890–1973), a leader in the artistic community in Stuttgart,³² in his speech on Jewish choral music, also confronted this absence when he argued that the only logical criteria for Jewish choral music were “the religious [tradition], the language, the land” (das Religiöse, die Sprache, das Land).³³ In so doing, he further indexed a Zionist position that Jewish music could not exist outside Palestine, a position that could have effectively rendered impossible the League's immediate performance needs. But Joachim Prinz (1902–88), a Zionist rabbi, in his speech at the conference on Jewish theater, had offered a solution: he contended that without a common land, the League could only have a “national-pedagogical” function – building “a bridge from a denationalized Jewry, living remote from Jewish prime sources, to Jewish life.”³⁴ In other words, the League could not perform authentic Jewish art, but could encourage Jewish awareness, which could foster future Jewish cultural activities in Palestine. In his presentation, Adler did not advance the same conclusion. Though he restated Prinz's basis for such a conviction, he also explained that he could “feel something” in the creations of Jews³⁵ – an insinuation that implies a sweeping definition of Jewish music as the composition of Jewish composers.

Anneliese Landau's speech on Jewish art song reiterated this Zionist position that Jewish music did not yet exist. But she also offered a practical course of action by accepting all art songs created by composers with Jewish roots as Jewish music. She then betrayed both of these positions by suggesting a sliding scale of Jewishness, as she discussed the songs of Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80). She explained, “These songs have nothing to do with the Jewishness of their composers. They grow from the atmosphere of the country in which they were written.”³⁶ In contrast she listed composers such as Joel Engel (1868–1927), Heinrich Schalit, Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), and Ernest Bloch (1880–1959), and explained that, within the twentieth-century art song tradition, these composers created Jewish Lieder “in complete consciousness by Jews for Jews” (im völligen Bewusstsein von Juden für Juden).³⁷

Hans Nathan (1910–89), a professor of musicology and music critic,³⁸ in his speech, similarly distinguished between the music of various Jewish composers through the organization of his speech in two parts: “Jewish orchestra and chamber music” and “General literature.” Under the category of “Jewish orchestra and chamber music,” he again recognized Bloch and Schalit. Under “general literature,” he discussed composers of Jewish origin such as Mendelssohn and Offenbach, who he did not believe displayed Jewish musical inclinations.³⁹ Of Mendelssohn, he stated simply that the composer was the “purest German classicist” (reinster deutscher Klassicist).⁴⁰

Neither Landau nor Nathan explained the grounds for their separate categorization of Jewish composers – why for example the music of Mendelssohn, the grandson of the great Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), was not seen as Jewish art at the time – and the Jewish Culture League Conference ended with no definitive criteria of Jewish music. What the League ultimately performed then was the result of compromise. And in practice, the League actually performed and adopted certain works by non-Jewish composers as though they were Jewish, including, for example, several Handelian oratorios based on Old Testament texts and Schubert's setting of Psalm 92 to the Hebrew text.⁴¹

As conditions worsened for Jews in Germany, League leaders shifted their attention from notions of a national repertoire to a repertoire of entertainment and diversion. The debate on Jewish music would have to continue or begin anew elsewhere – as the German Jewish composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), for one, would ensure with his lecture “What is Jewish Music?” on February 29, 1940, at the invitation of the Jewish Music Forum of the Society for the Advancement of Jewish Musical Culture in New York. In March 1939, Wolpe had given a talk to the same organization, which was then called the MAILAMM (an acronym for the Hebrew for America-Palestine Institute of Musical Sciences). The MAILAMM was founded in 1931 by Joseph Achron (1886–1943), Lazare Saminsky, Solomon Rosowsky (1878–1962), Jacob Weinberg (1879–1956), and Joseph Yasser (1893–1981), and had some ties to the World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine, which existed between 1936–40.⁴² The group was reorganized and renamed the Jewish Music Forum in November 1939. In “What is Jewish Music?” Wolpe challenged those who even asked the title's question, accusing them of attempting to justify their status as Jewish composers. He then explored a tension between spontaneous and formulaic approaches to the development of national music, based in part on his experience in Palestine after his emigration from Germany.⁴³ The debate on Jewish music had thereby shifted in an evolving context. But, within the League, this debate represents a unique look at ideas of Jewish music under pressure. This pressure worked in unique ways on the level of the individual as well.

Shifting focus

Just as repertoire negotiations changed during the early years of the Third Reich, so too did the compositional program of individual composers. During the Holocaust, we see evidence of this evolution in internment and exile. The composer Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944), for example, turned inward by composing according to a more personal musical aesthetic during the early 1940s, while imprisoned in Terezín, along with the composers Pavel Haas (1899–1944), Gideon Klein (1919–45), and Hans Krása (1899–1944), the latter of whom composed the children's opera Brundibár in 1938, performed forty-four times in internment. Showcasing its artistic activities, among other techniques, the Nazi regime used Terezín, renamed Theresienstadt, as a “show camp,” to deceive foreign visitors, including the Red Cross, by artificially staging a better life for prisoners. The Nazis took this strategy to the next level in the propaganda film centered in Terezín, Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City, 1944).⁴⁴

Born in the Czech Republic in 1898, Ullmann studied law at Vienna University. During his student days, however, he also enrolled in Schoenberg's composition seminar. After ending his career as a law student, he worked with Zemlinsky at the Neues Deutsches Theater in Prague. He went on to excel as a conductor and composer, incorporating into his compositions a multitude of styles and ideas – the atonality of Schoenberg and exploration of the fringes of functional tonal harmony. After he arrived in Terezín on September 8, 1942, however, he became increasingly aware of his Jewish identity and arranged Hebrew and Yiddish songs. He also wrote the one-act opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Composed to a libretto by the poet and fellow inmate Peter Kien, the work presents the evil Emperor Überall (a stand-in for Hitler) and his manipulation of Death. Ullmann made the connections between life and music explicit with the inclusion of various musical quotations, including the Nazi anthem “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”⁴⁵ Complementing, in some ways, the strangely positive American reception of Terezín,⁴⁶ Death ultimately ends the rule of Überall himself – a triumph for all in art, if not life.

For our purposes, Ullmann's seven piano sonatas are perhaps the most instructive. Ullmann wrote the first four before his imprisonment. The composer described the first, of 1936, as follows: “The principal subjects in three tonalities…[but] what apparently is happening is the linking of the twelve tonalities and their related minor keys. It seems that I was always striving for a 12-tone system on a tonal basis, similar to the merging of major and minor keys.”⁴⁷ The following three sonatas, which were similarly complex, were dedicated, respectively, to Hans Büchenbucher, the president of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany at the time; the Hungarian pianist Juliette Arányi; and Alice Herz-Sommer, an active pianist in Czechoslovakia and Germany before the war. The fifth sonata was composed in Terezín. This work, dedicated to Ullmann's wife, is joyful and, unlike the earlier sonatas, achieves a new tonal clarity. Ullmann completed the final sonata, dated August 22, 1944, just a few weeks before he was sent to Auschwitz on October 16 and murdered. The piece, dedicated to his children, has an uncharacteristic amount of autobiographical allusions, including references to Czech and Slovak national songs, Ullmann's earlier work, and arguably the composer's Jewish heritage with a Hebrew folk song.⁴⁸

Another composer who seemed to respond to a new, radically altered existence was Rosebery d'Arguto (1890–1943). This Polish Jewish composer and choir director, born Martin Rosenberg, had changed his name professionally, effectively distancing himself from his Jewish roots. In 1939, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which supported diverse musical activities, including an orchestra (most of the larger camps did – Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Auschwitz).⁴⁹ Though musicians in Terezín performed works by Jewish composers openly, Aleksander Kulisiewicz (1918–82), an invaluable collector of music from Sachsenhausen, maintained that works by Jewish and Polish composers were smuggled into the orchestra's repertoire in Sachsenhausen.⁵⁰ While it seems unlikely that the authorities would have been unaware of this effort, Kulisiewicz's recollection points to differences between the musical activities in the various concentration camps and ghettos as well as the different functions of music therein – positive and negative.⁵¹ After all, there was no uniform Nazi organization of music during the final years of the Third Reich.

Before his transport to Auschwitz at the end of 1942, D'Arguto acted as a choir director in Sachsenhausen, continuing in some ways his previous work. For his group, he composed “Juedischer Todessang” (Jewish Death Song), based on an old Yiddish song “Tsen brider” (Ten Brothers), which recounts the death of all the brothers but one. Though d'Arguto died in Auschwitz, Kulisiewicz survived and later made d'Arguto's song central to his performance career.⁵² Musicologist Shirli Gilbert notes the significance of the song within d'Arguto's ouevre: “It is interesting that the experience of incarceration led someone like d'Arguto – a non-practicing Jew who had gone so far as to de-Judaize his name – to write an explicitly Jewish lament.”⁵³

An even more complicated example of personal response is Gnesin's Piano Trio, op. 63, “In Memory of Our Murdered Children” of 1943. Loeffler calls the piece, which was composed in Russia, the “earliest and certainly the most significant Soviet wartime composition about the Holocaust.”⁵⁴ But the Jewishness of “our murdered children” remains enigmatic. Gnesin may have been aware of the Nazi mass murder of Soviet Jews in the Ukraine, which was at the time entering the collective consciousness of Soviet society.⁵⁵ The titular children, however, must have also included Gnesin's own son, Fabi, who had recently died. Musically, Gnesin did not incorporate elements stereotypically associated with Jewishness, remaining true in some ways to his earlier move away from Jewish music. But he did quote a well-known Yiddish folk song “Amol iz geven a yidele” (There Once Was a Little Jew). Loeffler ultimately insists, in this work, “Gnesin encoded his Jewish suffering inside the Soviet war experience.”⁵⁶

Other composers in the 1930s and 1940s, in varying states of exile in the United States, confronted Jewishness and/or their Jewish roots, or reached for music as some form of personal response or constructed comment. In Chapter 16, Amy Lynn Wlodarski discusses Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), which, along with his Kol Nidre (1938), could be explored along these lines. Kurt Weill offers another case in point. America had always figured in Weill's compositional imagination. Though he could probably have remained in Paris, where he moved in 1933, he eventually relocated to the United States in 1935. Weill had considered himself German and was generally secular, and had even been critical of the Jewish diaspora in central Europe, and Germany especially.⁵⁷ Though Nazi persecution forced Weill to reflect upon his Jewish ancestry, he did not return to his family's religion, as Schoenberg did in 1933. He did, however, begin work on The Eternal Road, along with the dramatist Franz Werfel (1890–1945), the producer Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), and the American impresario Meyer Weisgal (1894–1977). All four men agreed in May 1934 that the work was to be “a musical biblical morality play to express the spiritual origin, the earliest mythical history and the eternal destiny of the Jewish people to whom they belong.”⁵⁸ The piece also in some ways mirrored the Jews’ situation during the early years of the Third Reich: at the start of the play, a rabbi warns his congregation that they are about to be expelled from the country they had long since called home. In the music, Weill was true to traditions of Hebrew cantillation in instructions for the rabbi's scriptural recitation, a compositional strategy absent from his previous work in Germany. The piece premiered in January 1937 at the Manhattan Opera House and lasted, according to the perhaps unreliable New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, until three o'clock in the morning.⁵⁹

Toward the end of his life, Weill also contributed to commemorations of the Holocaust.⁶⁰ A famous result, We Will Never Die, was a memorial to Hitler's Jewish victims, with music by Weill, staged in Madison Square Garden in March 1943. The climax was a recitation of the Mourner's Kaddish, in memory of the departed.⁶¹

The intention of composers with works pointing to the Holocaust or their own Jewish roots is rarely clear, complicated by an insurmountable distance between a composer's biography and his music. But composers at this time did respond in various ways to a rapidly changing context. This response was hardly passive or inevitable, but often an active choice. I will not recycle here clichés of resistance, which often pepper discussions of music during the Holocaust. Notions of resistance, after all, often serve contemporary agendas rather than accurate historical reconstruction.⁶² But the compositional decisions I have featured, at the same time, cannot support simplistic accounts of victimization. Like the debate on Jewish music in the League, composers’ compositional shifts at this time underscore variety, change, and contestation in music connected to Jewishness. Jewish art music, 1925–45, bears the burden of its horrific historical context while undermining the essential thinking on which so much of it was based.