The Trump-Kennedy Center is rolling out a series of shows to counter anti-Semitism during the week of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, with senior center leadership telling the Washington Reporter that it is a priority for the prestigious arts center to lend its credibility to “honor victims, confront hatred, and bring people together around our shared humanity,” especially “at a time of resurgent anti-Semitism.”
The first show is called Enduring Music: Compositions from the Holocaust, and its organizers told the Reporter that it is “a landmark concert of music…composed in ghettos and death camps, performed in defiance of resurgent anti-Semitism.”
The Counter Extremism Project’s Daniel Roth told the Reporter that the performance, which will take place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, “will bring classical, folk, and popular music nearly erased by atrocity back into public consciousness through the work of world-renowned composer, conductor, and musicologist Francesco Lotoro.”
“Written on scraps of paper or transcribed from memory, these works stand as a testament to the cultural brilliance almost extinguished by the Holocaust,” Roth added. “Featuring world and U.S. premieres from Maestro Lotoro’s archive, this concert honors a repertoire that defied evil and endured.”
But the Trump Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations noted to the Reporter that the arts center wants to combat historical and current anti-Semitism. Hours after the Counter Extremism Project’s Enduring Music closes its curtain, the Trump Kennedy Center will raise the curtain for a play that commemorates the horrors of the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Palestinian terrorists.
“In remembering the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7 through programs presented by these groups, we stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters, honor their past, and celebrate their resilience,” the Trump Kennedy Center’s Roma Daravi told the Reporter.
The OCTOBER 7 play was produced by veteran producers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, who noted ahead of its showing that it will likely be the first “controversial” show since President Donald Trump and Ambassador Richard Grenell took over the previously-named Kennedy Center last year. During its New York City premiere, it was the only play that required a permanent police presence for the duration of its six-week run.
The play is a “100% verbatim play drawn directly from survivor testimonies of Israel’s darkest day,” and it is a “dramatized staged reading” that recounts the horrors and heroism of October 7. The screening comes just days after Israel recovered the remains of Ran Gvili, the final hostage whose body had been held by Palestinian terrorists since he was murdered on October 7, 2023.
OCTOBER 7, which has been on a nationwide college campus tour, features Israelis who are “young and old, secular and religious, people who were with family and those who were at a dance party when the unthinkable happened,” the organizers said.
The Trump Kennedy Center is an unsurprising venue for the show, given that Trump and Grenell previously convened much of Trump’s cabinet on-site on the anniversary of October 7 in 2025.
McElhinney, one of the OCTOBER 7 producers, was in Ireland during the terrorist attack itself, and she noted that “on October 8, conversations around the world were already shifting to blaming Israel and ignoring the massacre that was still happening. Israel was being condemned for turning off the electricity in Gaza — after the single worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust.”
“It was both bizarre and unacceptable that journalists were already shifting attention away from the horrific Hamas attack,” McElhinney added.
The show that she produced with her husband, McAleer, centers on the stories of “the wounded and the bereaved, but we also meet the heroes who rescued dozens or fought back, saving multiple lives,” the producers explained. “We hear from mothers who hid for hours, wondering if their family had survived, a policeman armed with a pistol and nine bullets who killed several Hamas members and saved dozens of his neighbors.”
“We meet the off-duty soldier who picked up his gun, protected his village, and was shot five times by three different terrorists,” they added. “We hear how young people enjoying a dance party had to flee for their lives as they witnessed the slaughter around them.”
McAleer and McElhinney explained that the message the Trump Kennedy Center is showing by being the venue to showcase OCTOBER 7 is clear: “it reaffirms the venue’s mission as the nation’s beacon for the performing arts, engaging artists and audiences and presenting, producing, and curating world-class art: offering powerful education to people of all ages, everywhere.”
The latest showing of OCTOBER 7 took on added significance to the duo following the passing of Itamar Alus, whose heroism is one of their play’s focal points. Alus, an Israeli police officer who saved dozens of lives on October 7, died of natural causes a few days ago. The pair announced that this showing is dedicated to Alus’s memory. On October 7, Alus was serving as an off-duty police officer who left his home in Ofakim with a pistol and nine bullets. “Itamar killed a heavily armed terrorist, rescued a wounded rabbi, and an IDF soldier who had been shot five times,” the show itself details.
“Itamar’s story is one of the most compelling in the OCTOBER 7 play, and his legacy of bravery will continue to inspire audiences worldwide,” the producers said.
Alus himself previously discussed his actions of that fateful day. “I did what I needed to do, and God was with me,” he said. “And all the time, God is using me like a shield, and he’s playing with me, God plays with me and tells me, ‘go here, go there.’”
“In Ofakim, 48 people died, but they got no hostages,” Alus said. “16 terrorists came in two trucks. We killed all 16. They couldn’t believe how many people from this neighborhood came out, not just me. I’m only one story.”
Due to a historic winter storm, both Enduring Music and OCTOBER 7 have an unexpected availability of tickets. Tickets for the former are available here, and for the latter here.
