PMH adviser and UVA professor James Loeffler writes a strong and important counterweight to the musical vogue that defines Jewish composers only by their status as Hitler’s victims:
Now, by labeling certain works of art as “Holocaust music,” we risk creating a genre that turns the details of history and the complex meanings of music into one saccharine lesson in universalist tolerance. It may sound like heresy to criticize a pious act of Holocaust remembrance. But the true heresy is to turn Jewish composers into shadow images defined only by their status as Hitler’s victims.
Read the rest of Loeffler’s excellent piece at Tablet Magazine.
For more on this topic, see Simon Wynberg’s Commentary essay about the hijacking of Terezín and Verdi’s Requiem.