Nia Wa Ja Shu

I am a composer in the process of converting and have contributed several pieces to the Artist’s Beit Midrash for Town and Village Synagogue in New York including Multitudes and Tightrope which was written with Tatiana Wechsler. But my story begins much earlier. My father was very involved in the Jewish community in Munich, even wanting to convert, and when I was young, I would hear the same rant every single morning: “I hate Germans, they should have all been gassed. They are worth nothing.” I once asked him, “But father, I am German too, should I also die?”. He replied: “No son, you’re an old Korean reincarnation and your mother is the reincarnation of Persian princess”. There isn’t much you can do about that as a young child but it informed a very important question I had to answer. Would I internalize hatred, ignore what I didn’t want to hear or listen to other people’s stories and learn what the story means to them? I chose the latter and focused my life’s work to take the question further helping people find a way to tell a new transformational story with music and words.