Mikhail Gnessin (1883–1957) was a Russian Jewish composer and teacher who came to be nicknamed “the Jewish Glinka.” Gnessin was the son of a rabbi, and part of a very musical family: in 1895, five of his sisters (three of whom graduated from the Moscow Conservatory with distinction) founded the Gnessin Institute, a music school which remains operational and prestigious to this day. Gnessin studied under the likes of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, founded the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music alongside several colleagues in 1908, and was an early adherent of socialism who taught music lessons to factory workers well before the Russian Revolution. After the Revolution, there was a brief period of the early Soviet Union in which Russian Jews faced far less discrimination and violence than they had over the prior several decades. Gnessin’s most famous works, drawing upon his heritage and a new wave of Jewish nationalism, were written between 1918 and 1930; this included his operas The Maccabees and The Youth of Abraham (the latter features a libretto in Hebrew). His career as a teacher thrived as well, and it was during this time that he taught his best-known student, Aram Khachaturian. However, under Stalin and amidst the rise of Hitler, Gnessin was pressured out of writing more Jewish compositions as well as pursuing his still-progressive politics. After the end of World War II, while Gnessin remained as the head of the Gnessin Institute until his death in 1957, his sister Yelena was forced by the Soviet Committee of Arts to release him from his teaching duties.