Charles Krauthammer, Pro Musica Hebraica’s chairman, responds to Edward Rothstein’s essay on Pro Musica Hebraica and the meaning of Jewish music:
This is the seventeenth concert presented by Pro Musica Hebraica. We have presented music ranging from the baroque Jewish music of 17th-century Italy and Amsterdam to Osvaldo Golijov’s 1994 The Dreams & Prayers of Isaac the Blind. These compositions are imbued with themes—liturgical, folkloric, biblical, historical—that make them Jewish not in the ghettoized sense of appealing only to one ethnicity or history, but Jewish in the same way that Béla Bartók’s music is Hungarian: universal, but with a sensibility and rootedness that give it a distinctive identity.
Read the rest of Krauthammer’s response, including Rothstein’s rejoinder, on Mosaic‘s website.