The Protest at the Israel Philharmonic Concert

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.)