Recalling how, as a youth, both he and his father mourned what they saw as the imminent loss of traditional cantorial singing, Allan Nadler documents its unexpected revival, thanks in no small part to Montreal’s Gideon Zelermyer and his protégés. This rebirth, writes Nadler, has implications for synagogue music in general and Israeli culture in particular. (Links to several recordings included.)

Before I introduce Zelermyer’s five stellar young colleagues (none of them over age forty), it is only fair to begin with the progenitor of this renaissance, and Zelermyer’s mentor, Ḥazan [Cantor] Naftali Hershtik, who trained a full two generations of cantors at the Tel Aviv Cantorial Institute. Here then is Ḥazan Hershtik’s rendition of the great Yossele Rosenblatt’s “T’kah b’Shofar.”

This concert was a landmark event, a cultural coup staged in the very heart of secular Israel’s inner sanctum, its “Palace of Culture,” the Heikhal ha-Tarbut in Tel Aviv. Like Yiddish language and culture, cantorial music had grated on the ears of the vast majority of Israelis both religious and secular since the heady days of the Second Aliyah [1904-1914]. This began to change when the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra accompanied Hershtik and a group of young, mostly Israeli-born ḥazanim in this shofar-centered prayer whose words are all about shivat Tsiyon, the return to Zion. The old and tired musical dichotomy between the galuti (diasporic) minor-key prayers from shuls in Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary, and the proud major-key ballads about soldiers and young girls in the Yishuv, or dance music for the hora, was shown up for what it was: silly ideology. And, forgive my snobbishness, but this piece—like the entire rich oeuvre of cantorial music—is surely more musically interesting, demanding, and moving than “Hava Nagilah.”

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.