Turning to more serious musical fare, Steven Aschheim reviews Time’s Echo: The Second World War, The Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance, a new book by Jeremy Eichler:

It is through the particular stories of people and places that the perplexities, creative imperatives, elisions, and levels of remembrance come surprisingly alive. At its deepest level, Time’s Echo is about the painful but also potentially liberating interactions between culture and catastrophe.

Some of [the stories in the book] contain deliciously ironic, even semi-comic, elements. Few are likely to know . . . that the first 1948 performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw—perhaps the earliest high-modernist expression of post-war memorial music that daringly depicted the Holocaust in explicitly shocking terms—was performed in a gymnasium in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a participating chorus of cowboys! But, of course, Eichler’s music of remembrance is of the most serious kind, each example integrating horror and suffering and rejecting false consolation into the marrow of its music.

My admiration for this book is almost boundless. . . . But, at a time of war, the breakdown of Enlightenment values, and the disintegration of the liberal order, I would answer Eichler’s question, “Should genocide really be the stuff of a night out at Carnegie Hall?,’’ with only a very half-hearted affirmative. More than ever, we need the humanizing classical tradition. Consolation in dark times is not always a bad thing.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.