A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League. Lily E. Hirsch. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-4721-1710-9
Reviewed for Musica Judaica Online Reviews by Barbara Milewski
During the last two decades a formidable number of excellent studies have appeared in English and German that have given us an ever fuller picture of the compromised, politicized reality of Germany’s musical culture during the National Socialist period. Lily Hirsch’s book, A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League, is a valuable contribution to this body of knowledge.
Hirsch draws on previous scholarship published in Germany—notably Henryk Broder and Eike Geisel’s Premiere und Pogrom: der Jüdische Kulturbund 1933-1941, and Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933-1941 published in conjunction with a 1992 exhibit at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, which houses the Kulturbund archives—and significantly expands on this material through interviews with League members and subsequent archival investigations. In so doing, she makes available to Anglophone readers for the first time a comprehensive and nuanced telling of the origins and activities of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, or Jewish Culture League, the self-imagined, Nazi sanctioned, Jewish cultural organization that staged musical and theatrical performances for Jewish audiences in Nazi Germany between 1933 and its disbanding in 1941. As Hirsch’s study makes clear, the League’s history remains one of the more poignant examples of the complex, ever-narrowing field of choices Germany’s Jews were forced to navigate after the Nazis assumed power and enacted anti-Jewish exclusionary legislation (intended to protect the purity of Aryan culture) that restricted all aspects of their public and private lives.
In the annals of Jewish music, is any genre as fraught as opera? In nineteenth-century Europe, this most elaborate of western art forms seduced and dazzled Jewish admirers from Theodor Herzl (whose visions of Zionism were inspired by Tannhäuser) to Emma Goldman (transfixed by a performance of Il Trovatore in Königsberg). The lure of opera for cantors became the stuff of legends (the story of Yoel-Dovid Strashunsky’s fall from grace when he abandoned the synagogue in Vilna for the opera house in Warsaw inspired works of fiction, theater, and film). Jewish opera composers became celebrities (Meyerbeer, Offenbach), and their musicianship the target of anti-Semitic attack (most famously, Wagner’s Das J
When I was invited to review this book, I was under the impression that it was written by an ethnomusicologist, given that it was advertised by its publisher under the categories Judaica, Ethnomusicology, and Spanish Traditions, and by a bookseller under Ethnomusicology, Sephardic songs, and Jewish music. To my surprise, I learned that its Mexican-born author obtained her university degrees in the fields of Latin-American Literature (Licenciatura from the Universidad Iberoamericana)[1] and Comparative Literature (earning both her masters degree and doctorate from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). Even the title of her masters thesis, “Los símbolos de la naturaleza en los cantos judeo-españoles: una visión de la lírica popular hispánica [‘The symbols of nature in Judeo-Spanish song; a view of the Hispanic popular lyric’],” completed in 2003, and that of her doctoral dissertation, “Simbología poética y visión del mundo en los cantos judeo-españoles [‘Poetic symbolism and worldview in Judeo-Spanish song’],” submitted in 2006, clearly indicate that both deal solely with the lyrical/ poetic content of the songs she examined.[2] And, whereas both furnished the material for the monograph under review, one can only surmise that the confusion caused by referring to the book under review as an ethnomusicological work arose from commencing its title with Cantos Judeo-españoles. 
