The administrators of a prestigious retirement home in the Netherlands canceled a concert by Lenny Kuhr, a Dutch-Jewish singer-songwriter who won the 1969 Eurovision Song Festival, because anti-Israel activists had protested at one of her previous shows, Kuhr, who’s Jewish and preparing to immigrate to Israel, said on Monday.
The Rosa Spier House in Laren near Amsterdam “has deemed it necessary to cancel our concert ‘LICHT’ on May 24 because a few people were recently waving Palestinian flags just before our performance in Huizen. In Dordrecht, a second concert has been added on May 29 at the Oude School,” Kuhr, who is Jewish, wrote on X.
Disruptions of concerts by Kuhr, who won in the 1969 contest with the song “De troubadour” and who had performed together with French chanson legend George Bressans, began in 2024 in Waalwijk near Rotterdam. One protester called Kuhr, who has children living in Israel, “a terrorist, a Zionist” before being escorted out of the venue. Several such incidents have repeated themselves and her concerts became targets for anti-Israel activists.
The Rosa Spier retirement home, which is well known because famous performers moved to and perform there, had not replied to a request for comment at time for publication.
The cancellation follows a string of boycott actions in the Netherlands against Jewish and Israeli performers. Last year, Amsterdam’s Royal Concert Hall announced the cancellation of a Chanukkah concert because one of the performers was a reserve soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. The institution reversed the decision under threat of legal action. Earlier in the year, a Dutch singer declined to perform at a Jewish event citing “expressions of Zionism” there. He later claimed that police had advised him to leave the Netherlands for his safety following threats, but a police source reportedly denied this. The singer, Bob Douwe, also appeared to claim, falsely, that he was Jewish before correcting his statement to reflect that he had been in a relationship with a Jewish woman.
Kuhr told JNS on Wednesday that the incident strengthened her resolve that moving to Israel was the best decision for her.
Asked whether she believed that the artistic scene in the Netherlands is still hospitable enough for Jewish artists who wished to remain neutral on Israel or supported it, she said: “I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult. As a Jew, you can still keep working if you’re not a Zionist, or in other words, if you don’t support Israel’s right to exist. Then you’re ‘a good Jew.’”
However, Kuhr told JNS, “Anyone who dares to speak out positively [about Israel] and dare to come out as a Zionist, my expectation is that they’ll have an increasingly tough time booking venues.”
Kuhr posted on X about the cancellation, attaching a photograph of a famous monument that stands in southern Amsterdam, not far from where Anne Frank and her family had lived before they went into hiding in the city’s center.
The monument reads: “A people that yields to tyrants will lose more than body and property; then the light will go out,” a quote from a poem by Hendrik Mattheus van Randwijk, a Dutch resistance hero and journalist during World War II. The title of Kuhr’s concert tour, “Licht,” means “light” in Dutch.
