An Open Letter to Carnegie Hall
Commemorating genocide by denying a genocide?
To the management of Carnegie Hall:
Last Wednesday, January 29, I was in the audience for a performance that you described on your website as follows:
Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, experience a poignant and timely rendering of Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish.” Setting the text “A Dialogue with God” by the late Samuel Pisar—himself a survivor of Auschwitz—this performance is narrated by Pisar’s wife, Judith Pisar, and daughter Leah Pisar, with Orchestra of St. Luke’s under the baton of James Conlon.
I was shocked when, unannounced, the performance was introduced by Pisar’s stepson, former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who has been complicit in what virtually all major human rights groups consider to be Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza.
This is the same Tony Blinken who received a 17-page memo from USAID that described:
Instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.
The USAID officials recommended that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country.
The head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel.
Yet, in answer to queries from Congress about implementation of the law, Blinken overrode the findings of his own department: “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”
Blocking humanitarian assistance is one of the grounds on which the International Criminal Court, has issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The warrants charge them with “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
According to the International Court of Justice, these inhumane acts by Israel make it “impossible to rule out the existence of a plausible intent to commit genocide.” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have endorsed the charge of genocide, as has the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 and Aryeh Neier, a refugee from Nazi Germany who headed the ACLU and founded Human Rights Watch. Omer Bartov, the Israeli-American scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies, and a veteran of the Israeli armed forces, has concluded that “Israel [is] engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.” He continued:
As the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, Israel [is] acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction.”
Blinken personally approved the sale of $20 billion worth of weapons used by Israel to carry out these “systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.”
Unfortunately, in addition to Blinken’s appearance, parts of the text you presented reinforce a message of Israeli impunity. The text condemns “ethnic cleansings against Gypsies, Cambodians, Bosnians, Rwandans, Yazidis, and others.” This catalogue is not found in Pisar’s 2008 text. I don’t know if he added it later himself — the Yazidi genocide by ISIS began only a year before Pisar’s death in 2015 — or if someone else updated it. But you presented this text in 2025, when the omission from the program of any mention of even the controversy over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians reinforces the message of impunity sent by Blinken’s appearance.
The text distorts history to reinforce the message of Israeli impunity. Claiming to speak on behalf of Jews it laments:
Guilty, in the Diaspora when, peace-loving and unarmed,
We were Slaughtered like lambs.
Guilty in the Promised Land, when we took up arms
So we will never be slaughtered again.
This repeats the propaganda that Israel has waged wars against the Palestinians only in self-defense against genocide, a lie repeatedly exposed by Israeli historians, that is being used today to justify the genocide in Gaza.
This constitutes misuse of the Holocaust, as described by Omer Bartov:
Eventually, the clarifying catastrophe of the Holocaust became a vast and ugly fig leaf, whose combined effect was a lamentable combination of self-victimization and self-pity with self-righteousness, hubris, and euphoria of power, whereby one side of the equation justified the other. Ethical concerns and moral qualms were brushed aside as either marginal or distracting in the face of the ultimate cataclysm that is the genocide of the Jews. What had been for long the “never again” syndrome, thus became its exact opposite, the “again and again” syndrome—an internalized, irrational, and misleading terror of another Holocaust, always lurking behind the corner, from which one can liberate oneself only by lashing out, pressing down, breaking in, and blowing up, both one’s own doubts and unease, and any real or perceived external threat.
Carnegie Hall chose to commemorate one genocide by implicitly endorsing another.
I urge you to reflect publicly on this serious mistake and ensure you never make it again.