Leonard Bernstein: An American Musician (Jewish Lives)

by Allen Shawn

On November 22, shortly after completing the final touches on the orchestration of the work, he was at a staff meeting in Philharmonic Hall, planning a Young People’s Concert, when he heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. That afternoon the Kaddish Symphony became a posthumous tribute to the slain president. That night was the first time that Jamie Bernstein ever saw her parents cry. An unusually somber Bernstein conducted the Philharmonic in a televised memorial concert on Sunday, November 24, bringing Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony once again into the center of American consciousness, at a time of collective shock and grief. Speaking the following night at a Madison Square Garden benefit for the United Jewish Appeal, Bernstein told an audience of eleven thousand people that he had chosen the Mahler work “for the resurrection of hope in all of us who mourn him.” He spoke of Kennedy’s “reverence for the life of the mind,” citing words from a speech Kennedy was to have delivered on the day of his death: “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason.” “Learning and reason,” Bernstein continued, “precisely the two elements that were necessarily missing from the mind of anyone who could have fired that impossible bullet. Learning and reason: the two basic precepts of all Judaistic tradition, the twin sources from which every Jewish mind from Abraham and Moses, to Freud and Einstein, has drawn its living power. Learning and reason: the mot...