Gabriel Kahane (@gabrielkahane): "The story of my grandmother’s escape from Nazi Germany has long been a thread in my work as a composer and songwriter. But in the wake of Israel’s increasingly energetic attempts to exterminate the Palestinian people—justified by the cynical weaponization of Jewish trauma

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The story of my grandmother’s escape from Nazi Germany has long been a thread in my work as a composer and songwriter. But in the wake of Israel’s increasingly energetic attempts to exterminate the Palestinian people—justified by the cynical weaponization of Jewish trauma—I fear that much of that creative labor has fallen on deaf ears, or worse…

But 2018 is not 2026. And those words, it goes without saying, mean something different now than they did eight years ago. As Pankaj Mishra writes in The World After Gaza, “the memory of the Shoah has been perverted to enable mass murder, while obscuring a larger history of modern Western violence outside the West.” Since Hamas’ massacre of some 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli government’s subsequent campaign of collective punishment against the Palestinian people, I have wondered what purpose these pieces of mine serve.

Gabriel Kahane

May 9

3:31 PM

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