We all walked down the sidewalk, shoulders tucked and hurriedly leaning forward to avoid being touched and spit on by the angry racists jeering at people on their way to the doors. Parading effigies and leaning into the faces of Jews passing by while shouting in favor of their guilt, punishment, and ultimate destruction, these voices echoed in unison the coward with the megaphone marching back and forth. He demanded repetition, amplified through hundreds of other like-minded rule-followers that have been convinced their convictions are right.
As the crowd yells genocide the concert-goers are forced to walk single file to avoid the menacing, coursing mobs. Jews are shoved, body checked, threatened and insulted as they try to reach the entrance of the concert hall, rushing in as if from a sudden torrential downpour. Teams of security and police officers were standing by, outside the fray and away from the mass of protesters.
Being body checked, yelled at and threatened was unpleasant and disturbing, as it was obviously meant to be, but seeing it done to the elderly man hunched over behind me who almost lost his footing, knocking into his elderly wife, that somehow changed the experience. This righteous bully with a loud speaker ramming into Jews on the sidewalk, his sentiments reverberating and emboldened through throngs of supporters, watching them vehemently back up his actions while pumping their fists in the air and using signs, flags, and effigies as weapons to intimidate Jews, that was something else.
I've worked as an orchestra conductor and music educator for the past 30 years. I was the first person in my family to be born in the U.S., the first to get a doctoral degree, and, I hope, the first person in my family to be shoved on the sidewalk for being a Jew, at least in America. I'm glad my refugee father isn't alive to know this, may his memory be a blessing.
I keep thinking about the two kind Japanese women sitting next to me in the concert hall who simply wanted to attend an excellent concert, as did most of us. The orchestra’s performance from beginning to end was thoughtful, emotional, and expertly done. The need for people to feel like they were doing something important by disrupting, no matter how misguided and misinformed, was a pock. How embarrassing to see these people, college-aged and, even more embarrassingly adults, writhing to the literal beating of their own drums, screaming like toddlers and just as informed on both terminology and definition of what constitutes a genocide.
I would much rather write a review of the concert, which was beautiful in many ways. The choice of repertoire was meaningful, the soloists, both of whom are principles in the orchestra, were astounding. The cellist and the flutist played exquisitely, their sounds were warm and present, their sensitivity and spatial and harmonic awareness in the music was moving and made both pieces feel personal, and the conductor gave the orchestra so much freedom to play as a group while beaming expressive and thoughtfully interpreted music. This was intellectual, emotional, challenging music. The Israel Philharmonic is made up of musicians of the highest caliber, experts in what they do, products of a lifelong pursuit of dedication to a craft at the highest level. The very ethos of an orchestra is about collaboration and communion to create a transcendent experience every single time they perform. It is live, it is intense, it is hard work, it is time travel, and it is sacred. It requires an enormous background of knowledge, skill, athleticism, aestheticism, discipline, talent, and grit to become a professional musician. Bravo to the orchestra et al.
During Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony a person rushed to the edge of one of the boxes overlooking the violins. They unfurled a long keffiyeh-patterned banner and started screaming bloody murder about the musicians murdering babies, “…their blood is on your hands!” etc. My respect to the security in the wings, or wherever they were, but this went on for too long. I watched, along with the rest of a full concert hall (over 2,700 people), the 1st violins trying to play a Tchaikovsky symphony while being screamed at by a lunatic stranger from 20 feet away, as two elderly men in the audience attempted to physically subdue this histrionic “protester,” all-the-while concert-goers across the hall yelling “Shut up!” and “Get out of here!” for what seemed like an eternity, but lasted about three minutes. My partner and I eventually got out of our seats halfway across the hall to go down and help those men, but were stopped by ushers with earpieces who informed us they were “on it, please go back to the hall”.
We all sat and watched two elderly men literally fight to protect others, both the audience and the orchestra, physically subduing a person intent on changing the world by screaming at classical musicians and sitting on strangers’ laps during a Tchaikovsky symphony. It was upsetting and seemed extreme in a way that doesn’t really effect change.
I couldn’t help but think about the moldy growth of sanctimonious extremists who buy gift shop keffiyehs made by Muslims in concentration camps in order to support bullhorn thugs smugly chanting casual genocidal slogans as if they hold power. They do not. They do not have my sympathy. They do not elicit much aside from a defensive posture and vitriolic disdain. If change is the clarion call, this performative activism was antithetical to creating that change.
What exactly were these protests supposed to achieve? What is the efficacy of child-minded bullies behaving badly? The strong sense of solidarity within the audience and the orchestra was reinvigorated, and anyone mildly sympathetic to whatever the message may have been was most assuredly turned off by the total and obnoxious ignorance on display, entering a sacred space and turning it into “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who are the morally superior of us all?”
After the concert we were met with whimsical, child-like rainbow-colored sidewalk chalk lining the block leading up to the front doors of San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall. They espoused things like “Israel=U.S.=genocide,” and “Zionists Die!”, etc. This is not the usual kind of feces-laden SF street to which I've become accustomed. It reeked of a different kind of human waste, stained with possibly good intentions but too easily influenced by bad actors.This was a foreshadowing, a new kind of filth on our streets, less 1969 “Down with the man!” and more 2025 “Zionist rapists you can’t hide!” I sincerely hope the next phase of this street trash does not see a resurgence of a swastika flag because “it was originally a Hindu symbol of…” or “Hms changed the wording of their charter, so…”
What can be done from this point forward? Do I hope something terrible befalls these protesters? Only to the man that was shoving Jews. To the others, I hope once they see their Jewish neighbors being dragged and stomped upon on the streets while others celebrate, they realize they were complicit. Claiming indigenous peoples who have been colonized over and over, ostracized, tortured and murdered again and again, who have attempted to regain their ancestral homeland and live side-by-side with its occupiers again and again, who are constantly hanged in the court of public opinion and violently, “by any means necessary” denied their right to self-determination without consequence, or simply to attend a symphony concert in 2025 in San Francisco, claiming that these peoples do not or should not be allowed these things and further deserve to be physically, verbally, and emotionally assaulted as they go to the symphony, which for me and many other Jews, is my job and my temple, that is a clarion call all its own.
(Phillip Lenberg is the conductor of the Ukiah Symphony, as well as a professor of music at Mendocino College.)
It would be proper if members of the Israeli Philharmonic refused to play under the name of Israel until Israel ends the ongoing genocide in Gaza and evicts the settlers from the West Bank. One hopes Netanyahu and those who have collaborated with him will one day be put on trial. A two state solution, repentant on both sides, remains the only solution.. a divided Jerusalem in peace underlying the age old connections between the people of the region.
I agree with this comment. I’ll add more: While protests may be upsetting, even profoundly unsettling, to the participants witnessing protesters take measures beyond normal bounds, it’s important not to let this distract from the real issue–that of the brutal destruction of Gaza and its people by Israel, with the ongoing assistance of the United States, under the leadership of both parties. There is clearly a plan to distract, cover, hide, and pretend that this basic fact is not true, not real. Shame on Israel, shame on us.
Those folks of culture and grace and entitlement–attendees at this concert, like Mr. Lenberg, or others not present)– who were so offended can use many fine and fancy words to glibly express their “victimization,” saying that protesters went too far, were out of order, behaved atrociously. But take away their grace and their gift of safety and plenty–put them in Gaza to watch and see it all come-down on so many innocent, so many women and children. Let them see the horror of it all. Then lets all focus on the real issues of life and death and peace and justice and the sharing of this disputed land…
Well spoken. Each day more horrific.
Poor offended Phillip Lenberg has no problem with those he disagrees with being treated exactly like this.
And far far worse.
Blatant genocide is obviously OK, in fact it’s not even genocide — just take Phillip’s word for it.
US Senator Chuck Schumer—a rabid zionist Jew who rakes in millions of dollars in bribes each year from the Israel lobby—explained in a speech to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in 2018 that he had discovered the true underlying cause of the violence in Palestine: The Palestinians don’t believe in the Torah. Schumer explained:
“Of course, we say it’s our land, the Torah says it, but they don’t believe in the Torah. So that’s the reason there is not peace. They invent other reasons, but they do not believe in a Jewish state…”
— https://www.unz.com/kbarrett/whats-behind-zionist-terrorism-in-the-west-bank
Nope.
There are only two activities which are reasonable for “Israelis.” 1) Overthrowing the Nazi government of “Israel” and replacing it with a government which is 100% anti-Zionist. 2) Permanently leaving “Israel” and returning to Russia, Poland, Germany, Brooklyn, etc.
Two state solution? The Arabs, including Hamas, have accepted that for years. It is the “Israelis” who have overwhelmingly rejected it explicitly in their own laws. https://www.timesofisrael.com/knesset-votes-overwhelmingly-against-palestinian-statehood-days-before-pms-us-trip/
There will be ONE state. It will be called PALESTINE. It will have a CONSTITUTION (“Israel” doesn’t have one) which protects minority rights and makes Zionism illegal – just like Nazism is illegal in Germany.. All stolen property will be returned to the rightful owners. The Zionist genocidists will be held accountable – either spending the rest of their pathetic lives in jail in The Hague or dealt with the way we dealt with the Nazi leadership.
Mr. Lenburg can trot out his tired accusations of racism all he wants. The record is clear. “Israelis” routinely chant “death to the arabs.” Their leadership refers to Palestinians as “animals” and “Amalek.” It is Mr. Lenburg and his ilk of Zionist filth that are the racists. They conflate Jewishness with Zionism, as if each individual Jewish person does not have a mind or their own of the freedom to choose their own ideology. There are thousands if not millions of Jewish people who are opposed to Zionism. Saying that all Jewish people are Zionists is the epitome of anti-semitism.
Rereading the opening paragraph of Philip Lenberg’s passionate account of an experience he perceived as harrowing while attending a performance of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in San Francisco, I sensed that he was trying to make AVA readers believe that, under a barrage of shouting and alleged spitting from opponents of Israel’s unprecedented genocidal war on the Palestinians of Gaza, now, it seems, on the verge of completion, that he, as a Jew, was reliving the experience of Jews in Europe in the late 30s as they were herded on to trains by the Nazi SS, destined for concentration camps from which the majority would never emerge. But it won’t work as this time around, the Israelis are the Nazis and the Palestinian, as well as truth, their victims.
But who is this Lenberg of Ukiah about whom I had never heard? For openers, he is very accomplished and well regarded in the music world well beyond Ukiah’s reaches but that he also is one of the pool of speakers provided by the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center in San Francisco, none of whom, including Lenberg, judging from their photos, were even remotely around at the time that catastrophe happened, as I, born the year after Hitler assumed power, Consequently, what he and the others know about the Holocaust, I suspect, is the filtered history, from the Zionist perspective, that completely covers up the ugly but successful efforts of the mainstream Zionist movement under David Ben-Gurion, to sabotage not only efforts to inform the American public and the world about what was happening to the Jews of Europe, but undermine efforts to rescue them in the US and Europe since the higher the Jewish death count at Hitler’s hands, the better chance the Zionists would have, following an anticipated victory by the US and its allies, including the USSR , to be awarded Palestine in its aftermath.
It wasn’t then the secret that it has since become over the years, as the Zionist Establishment has excluded from every list of books required for “Holocaust Studies” that I have seen, two of the most important exposes of what was nothing less than Zionist collaboration with the Nazis and the general cooperation of Jewish ghetto leaders with Adolph Eichmann and his underlings in providing Jews on demand for their concentration camps. Had that not occurred, wrote Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” the coverage of his trial first serialized in the New Yorker, the number of Jewish dead would have been closer to two million dead than six million.
Making such a statement and providing an indisputable argument in its defense resulted in this world famed expert on totalitarianism to be excommunicated by certain sectors of the Jewish community, and even she had yet to see the shocking footage of Jewish men, in their ghettos, standing tall in their Nazi greatcoats and peaked hats, though weaponless, herding their fellow Jews to their almost certain deaths with Nazi-like efficiency. Arendt’s argument was quite clear. In the countries where Jewish leaders and the governments did not cooperate with the Nazis, the latter simply did not have the expertise and or organization to round up the Jews by themselves.
The book that first opened my eyes to the Zionist betrayal of the Jews and which would, for years be suppressed, was “Perfidy,” by the well-known Jewish playwright and screen writer, Ben Hecht, who, ironically was an ardent supporter of the Irgun which would be denounced by the likes of Albert Einstein and other well-known Jews as fascist and terrorist both of which its leader and future Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, proudly acknowledged. But in the United States, its followers composed the only Zionist organization that put saving Jewish lives over establishing a Jewish state in Palestine “cleansed” of its indigenous Arab majority. ((That the very pale Lenberg advances the nonsense that the Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated to Palestine from Europe and elsewhere were the true indigenous people of that land has a much truth to it as claiming that the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock or their successors who slaughtered the Indians they and their successors found here are the true indigenous of this country. That the Zionists contend that the Arabs came to Palestine after learning of the” successes” of the Jewish immigrants from the late 19th and early 20th century and wished to take advantage of it is such a disgusting piece of propaganda that even Goebbels would reject it.)
“Perfidy” centers around the trial of an 86 year old Hungarian Jewish survivor in Israel who, not long after the war and foundation of the state, in a small self-published newsletter, denounced the former head of the Zionist Organization in Hungary during the Nazi occupation, Rezo Kastner, for having testified on behalf of former Nazi SS General Kurt Bucher at the Nuremberg Trials, for having assisted members of Kastner’s family, among 1200 Jewish “notables” to travel to Palestine at the end of the war when Jews by the carload were being shipped by train to Auschwitz and certain death while the Red Army was sweeping away the fleeing Nazis before them and within whose lines they would have found safety.
The deal was apparently approved by Eichmann, with whom Kastner was on the best of terms, upon the latter’s agreement not to tell the Hungarians boarding the trains what fate awaited them but also to pass out postcards to family and friends praising their “trip” that the Nazis forced the Jews to write before their execution.
Kastner, on arriving in what would become Israel after the war, had been welcomed into the Ben-Gurion government, despite or because of his record. Whatever the case, Ben-Gurion elected to prosecute the old man for slandering Kastner, and the trial record, which makes up an important segment of Hecht’s book, exposes the hypocrisy of the Zionist movement for all the world so see. But apparently, they would not be allowed to as, in the US, the book magically disappeared from bookstores and I was fortunate to find, by accident, a copy in San Francisco’s Mechanic’s Library. It would be years before a book finder friend in Seattle found me one for my own library. In more recent years, far too late, it has been available in paperback on Amazon. I have not checked to see if it has been “edited.”
As for the old man’s trial, the Irgun provided him with an excellent lawyer from their ranks and after days of riveting testimony, he was acquitted which clearly and correctly, meant the accusation against Kastner was valid. Ben-Gurion appealed the decision. The old survivor who told the truth would have to be punished. And so Ben-Gurion found the judges that would follow his orders and the decision was reversed. The day before it was announced, Kastner was assassinated. Whether it was by the Mossad on the basis of the belief that “dead men tell no tales,” which we saw more recently in the case of Noam Chomsky and former Israei PM, Eyad Barak, consorts of Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, Noam Chomsky, but that’s another story.
It has occurred to me that since at the moment, Lenberg and I are both residents of Mendocino County, where many readers of the AVA and others in the area have been aghast at Washington’s (and our Congressman Jared Huffman’s) enabling of Israel’s extermination and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank, a public exchange, not necessarily a formal debate between the two of us, at Mendo College or the Saturday Afternoon Club in which each of us would have a half hour to state our respective positions on the overall subject and then, for another half hour to answer questions from one another and then from the audience. If I promise not to spit of shove, Mr. Enberg, are you up for it?
Jeffrey Blankfort
Ukiah
Thank you for taking the time to write this.
Zionism and Nazism have always gone hand in hand. They shared the same goal – the removal of Jewish people from Europe. Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, was a rabid anti-semite – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herzl%27s_Mauschel_and_Zionist_antisemitism
The Zionist Mr. Lenberg will not debate you. Zionism also goes hand in hand with mendacity, and their lies must scatter when exposed to the light.
The muscians of the Ukiah Symphony must organize to remove Mr. Lenberg, and it should be subject to boycott until such removal is final.
Boycott. Divest. Sanction. These are not just words, but actions to be taken. At this very moment, the current Führer, Donald “Project 1933” Trump is planning to seize Gaza and bomb Iran. In the face of this sickening violence, the least we can do is to isolate and remove the Zionist criminals in our midst.
This all raises the question of: How responsible are citizens of the state for the actions of the state and its military? This is risky for citizens of the United States since our government has been killing people all over the world since the end of WWII. We killed more than a million in Southeast Asia more than 7,000 miles away from our borders. Similarly in Afganistan.’ Then there is Chile, Central America, and other areas of Latin America. The fact of the matter is that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza might not be happening if we were not providing the logistics and weapons. The Central Intelligence Agency is killing people all over the world on a regular basis. I used to pick up a paper at Down Home Foods called “The War Crimes Tribunal” that detailed all of this. The motivating force behind it all is that some people are making money off of war.
The reality is that no one in this country has the right to point fingers at private citizens of other countries unless they are willing to fully accept responsibility for our government’s actions. Our influence is very limited but we can visibly protest and write letters. Then I would suggest taking time for good music and appreciate those who provide it. Hopefully, it will appease our guilt.
Uhm, in the last several elections, over 150 million Americans voluntarily voted for war and genocide by voting for Democrats and Republicans.