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Broadway stars to perform songs written during the Holocaust at Carnegie Hall
(New York Jewish Week) — More than a dozen songs written by Jews imprisoned in concentration camps and ghettos during the Holocaust will be brought to life at Carnegie Hall next week as part of a commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Featuring Broadway bigwigs and performers such as Harvey Fierstein, Chita Rivera, Mikhl Yashinsky and Joel Grey, the one-night-only “We Are Here: Songs from the Holocaust” performance will take place on Thurs., January 26 at 7:30 p.m.
“I know a lot about music — I’ve spent my whole life doing it — and I never knew there were songs that came out of the camps and the ghettos,” said music producer and composer Ira Antelis, who conceived of the concert several years ago. “I knew there was classical music in Theresienstadt, but I was not familiar with what I call the ‘Bruce Springsteen’ or ‘Pete Seeger’ music of the camps.”
As it turns out, however, hundreds of what might be called folk and popular songs were written — mostly in Yiddish — by Jews in concentration camps and ghettos. In the decades following the war, many were published in newspapers, songbook collections and memoirs in Europe, Israel and the United States.
The “We Are Here” concert draws its name from one such songbook, titled ““We Are Here: Songs of the Holocaust,” which was compiled in 1983 by Eleanor Mlotek and Malke Gottlieb, with a foreword by Elie Wiesel. Antelis discovered the book while doing research on Wiesel after his death in 2016.
Shortly after he read the songbook, Antelis, who lives in Chicago, was visiting family in New York when he ran into an old friend, Rabbi Charlie Savenor. A former educational director at Park Avenue Synagogue, Savenor was teaching a class on Holocaust memoirs there at the time.
“Keeping a memoir, hiding it, and making sure that whether or not you live and die your experience would be remembered was an act of deep resistance,” said Savenor, who is now the executive director of Civic Spirit, an organization that advocates for civic education. “Writing this music and these songs was doing the same exact thing.”
It felt like fate that the two had reconnected after 15 years, and they decided to collaborate on the project.
Initially, the pair planned to mount a concert just using songs from the “We Are Here” anthology. But when the pandemic put everything on hold, Antelis used the time to do additional research — which led him to discover a 2014 doctoral dissertation that had compiled research about 14 additional songbooks published between 1945-1949. Each of these volumes was filled with dozens of songs from a particular camp or ghetto — songs from Bialystok, Vilna, Munich and others.
“This is our concert,” Antelis thought.
Newly reinvigorated, the concert he was conceiving would feature one song from each songbook.
“What better way to say ‘We Are Here’ than to carry on somebody’s voice from 1940, who was murdered?” Savenor said. “We have the opportunity to do that.”
The first-ever concert of these songs was produced last year at Chicago’s Temple Sholom. That program was on Yom HaShoah, so it included a yahrzeit candlelighting and several speeches. This year, by contrast, the concert will focus almost entirely on the music and the performers, many of whom are no strangers to drawing crowds.
Though many of the songs featured in “We Are Here” have been translated into English, several will be sung in their original Yiddish, including “Minuten Fon Bitahon” (“Minutes of Faith”) by Mordechai Gebirtig. Sung by Steven Skybell, who is coming off of a seven-week off-Broadway run as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish,” the song will open the concert.
“One of the most heartbreaking and amazing things about Yiddish songs, in general, is that they don’t shy away from putting into song every aspect of the Jewish life,” said Skybell, who began seriously learning Yiddish during the pandemic. “It’s really unlike any other type of music I’ve ever seen, in that it does not shy away from ugly reality and sometimes hopeless situations.”
At the same time, however, Savenor said he is surprised at how uplifting many of the songs are, considering the horrible circumstances their writers were enduring. “This is not the Mourner’s Kaddish for an hour and forty five minutes,” he said. “It’s just people talking about love and relationships, and dreams and aspirations. It’s a lot more about life than it is about mourning.”
Each song will be introduced by a presenter who will share a brief personal anecdote relating to the Holocaust. Along with hosts Antelis and Savenor, these presenters include Jack Kliger, the president and CEO of the Museum of Jewish Heritage; Scott Richman, director of the New York and New Jersey branch of the Anti-Defamation League and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York.
The diversity of the presenters and performers is intentional, said Antelis and Savenor, emphasizing that part of the purpose of the concert is to showcase a coming together across races, religions and ethnicities. The aim, they said, is to show unity and entrench the message of “never again.”
That’s also why the concert is being presented at historic Carnegie Hall, rather than a synagogue. “To have the sounds of Yiddish reverberating in Carnegie Hall gives me special delight,” said Skybell. “The fact that Yiddish is alive and well and we hear it at Carnegie Hall — it’s just to say that we are here, we’re not going away and we won’t be silenced.”
Proceeds from the performance will be donated to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan. Though it will not be recorded for the public or live streamed, Antelis and Savenor said they hope to bring the production around the country and even to Europe to perform the songs at the sites of the ghettos and camps where they were originally composed.
“With everything that’s going on, we cannot be silent — people need to step up. If we don’t stand against antisemitism and hate in every facet, then who are we?” Antelis said. “I think this is the most important concert in many, many years, especially in our culture.”
“We are Here: Songs From the Holocaust” is a one-night event on the Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall (881 7th Ave.) on Jan. 26 at 7:30 pm. Buy tickets here.
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The post UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
The post Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’ appeared first on The Forward.