By
– October 17, 2011
Historian and musicologist Shirli Gilbert has written a major new treatment of a small but revealing corner of Holocaust history: the role and meaning of music. Writing against the prevailing idea that music always and everywhere presented Jewish Holocaust victims with a means of spiritual resistance, Gilbert argues instead that the folk songs, theater performances, chamber music concerts and other kinds of music varied considerably in their cultural function and symbolic meaning for Jews. To prove this argument, she offers four highly detailed, eloquently written case studies of Jewish musical life in the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos and the Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz concentration camps. The book serves as an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the subject of Jewish culture and social conditions in the Holocaust as well as the larger philosophical question of the relationship between art and catastrophe in the modern Jewish experience.
James B. Loeffler is assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia. He received a BA from Harvard University and an MA and Ph.D. in Jewish history from Columbia University, where he was a Wexner Foundation Graduate Fellow. As a U.S. Fulbright Fellow, he lived and traveled in Russia and Ukraine in 2003 and 2004, conducting research for his doctoral dissertation, “ ‘The Most Musical Nation’: Jews, Culture and Nationalism in the Late Russian Empire.” His publications include several academic essays, the liner notes to the Grammy-nominated album, The Zmiros Project (Traditonal Crossroads, 2002), and articles in The New Republic, The Jerusalem Report, and Nextbook. He has taught Jewish history, literature, and music in a variety of academic and communal institutions including Columbia University, Baltimore Hebrew University, the 92nd Street Y, and the Jewish Theological Seminary.
