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.”

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.