What we are witnessing isn’t a debate about just one concert, but about the collapse of guardianship itself.
The moment the Royal Concert Hall in Amsterdam (Concertgebouw) decided to cancel a Chanukah concert, something inside me broke (again) with audible precision only music could produce. How’s that for a metaphysical sentence? The Concertgebouw terminated its agreement with the Chanukah concert because the IDF Chief Cantor was deemed a visible representative of the Israeli Defence Forces engaged in controversy. With a different cantor, they could have gone ahead, but the Jewish organisation insisted on this performer, so the contract was ended.
Now, the Chanukah Concert has been rescheduled as a compromise. There will be a public, daytime concert without Cantor Shai Abramson, and two evening concerts for guests with Abramson performing. The earnings from the evening concerts will go to social cohesion initiatives.
The Concertgebouw emphasised that their decision wasn’t based on nationality or religion, but on Abramson’s role as a member of the Israeli Defence Forces. Legal actions previously considered have been abandoned, and the organisers and hall have agreed to this solution, allowing the celebration to continue.
Let’s start at the beginning. For ten years, I have sent thousands of clients, friends, and partners into that hall. One of the few places where I believed the human spirit was still treated as something sacred. I live opposite the Concertgebouw. From my balcony, its façade with the golden harp on top of the monumental building has always felt like an emblem of civic decency through the arts. A monument to what the highest rank of art and culture is supposed to protect.
Now I can still see it, but it no longer sees me. That view has become a moral burden, not a privilege. It no longer feels like one of the two psychological anchors I’ve had since my youth. See, I was born here, and I’ve always stayed near the Concertgebouw and Museumplein, the second psychological anchor, where the city's leading museums are located. Now, I’m done sending a single euro, person, and trace of goodwill across the street.
I trusted the Concertgebouw not simply because of its acoustics and architectural beauty, but because of its integrity and class. I was in touch with employers who came and went. Its moral frequency and elegance, so I thought, was part of my own. Until it wasn’t.
I wrote about culture and conscience in the Dutch newspaper Nederlands Dagblad when the Concertgebouw was promoting darkness instead of light, only to reverse its stance after major protests from society, just as it is doing now. In any case, I believed that art, in the Dutch, classical, and high society tradition, was meant to resist moral cowardice.
But the hall’s decision to cancel the Chanukah concert under the pretext of neutrality did not represent neutrality at all. It was the managerial face of betrayal that Jews have experienced over and over again. It was the triumph of fear over fidelity, and of optics over truth.
Their (Dutch) statements read like a bureaucratic sonata: carefully modulated words followed by a compromise: Bla, bla, bla, mode crisis communications and reputational damage. In substance, it achieves what every cowardly institution now practices, namely, the art of exclusion through the language of empathy. Now that there’s a compromise, should we forget everything, including the broader question of whether Jews should beg for the mercy to be seen and to connect in current society?
Initially, they amputated the event and pretended it was surgery for peace, impacting the local Jews who have nothing to do with Israeli politics and need more joy, light, and support. The result: a Jewish celebration removed from a European stage, under the banner of protecting inclusivity.
Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty provides the exact scalpel we need to dissect this pathology. Hirschman argued that when institutions face decline or moral decay, members can respond in three ways: by raising their voice, by exiting, or by remaining loyal despite disagreement.
The Concertgebouw’s decisions expose what happens when an institution suppresses all three options simultaneously. It muted the voice by branding disagreement as ‘politicisation’. It sabotaged loyalty by betraying its principles. And it forced those of us who believed in its mission into the only response still available, namely to exit, boycott, and protest. While I rarely (or never actually) join public crowds or protests, I stood in front of that building and protested with a crowd…
Exit is often dismissed as abandonment. But Hirschman understood it as a moral instrument; a last resort for citizens, in my case, a lifelong neighbour, friend, and ambassador, whose loyalty has been exploited. My exit from the Concertgebouw is an act of moral clarity. To remain loyal to a hall that disowns artistic courage would make me complicit in its cowardice.
Loyalty, once admirable, becomes self-humiliation when the institution it protects no longer reciprocates it. All of this is, in fact, a symptom of a deeper disease: the managerialization of moral life, combined with personal antipathy that can escalate to hate. Institutions now treat ethics as public relations, but the personal falseness shines through.
Now, the progressive establishment that is behind all of this and that claims to defend diversity has become the most efficient curator of ideological uniformity, excluding Jews. In this case, the left’s ritual of moral purity, its obsession with optics, produced an act of cultural exclusion.
The Concertgebouw’s cancellation wasn’t demanded by law or public safety, but by the self-imposed fear of reputational damage. The institution has learned to read mass psychosis as public will. This isn’t progressivism but a ritualised purity test, in which Jews, again, become the acceptable collateral for demonstrating one’s virtue.
The hall claimed it faced a ‘dilemma’, as though the choice were between endorsing a war or cancelling a concert. That is an intellectual fraud. An institution devoted to music can and must hold complexity. It could have reframed the event as a space for coexistence, contextualised the cantor’s presence, or provided balance through dialogue. Sort of what they ended up compromising on in the end… The dilemma wasn’t moral but managerial. The only actual conflict was between courage and convenience, and convenience won.
The Concertgebouw exposed that the principle of artistic freedom was never unconditional. Freedom that evaporates under pressure isn’t true freedom. It’s branding. The role of a creative institution isn’t to mirror the crowd’s comfort but to extend it. To teach society to live with contradiction.
When the most famous hall in Europe chooses personal preference over expression, it signals to other venues to do the same. Thus, a single cowardly act multiplies across continents. Before we know it, we lose all boundaries, leading to the worst kind of exclusion that exists. This is how global cultural decline begins; one cowardly decision at a time.
Across Europe and North America, cultural elites are converting artistic spaces into zones of ideological quarantine. The Amsterdam episode is a miniature of a global trend. Institutions abandon their civic duty to defend free expression and instead imitate each other’s fear.
When the guardians of art become curators of personal preferences, civilisation loses one of its last defences against propaganda. Exit, therefore, becomes not just an individual act but a civic necessity. To withdraw is to declare that inevitable betrayals cannot be normalised. It’s the grammar of conscience made visible.
What we are witnessing isn’t a debate about just one concert, but about the collapse of guardianship itself. The Concertgebouw had a duty to protect artistic freedom, especially when it was inconvenient. Its administrators chose to protect themselves instead. This is how civilisations corrode with polite omissions justified by bureaucracy.
The Concertgebouw has become a hollow cathedral of self-regard. I see a building that gathers people in the name of music and now segregates them in the name of morality. My personal view has become a metaphor for a wider Western malaise: proximity without intimacy, beauty without courage, and culture without conviction. Or in short, no backbone.
I write this as a freethinker, not a partisan. Free thought is not an indulgence; it’s a survival mechanism. I have never been afraid to criticise power, left, right, or otherwise. But what I see now is a new kind of velvet authoritarianism disguised as sensitivity. It excludes not by decree, but by administrative euphemism. It silences not by censorship, but by cancellation framed as compassion. Paradoxically, its cowardice has produced clarity.
