The Bombshell Who Left the Party

For most of two decades, Sarah Hildering van Lith's professional life was organized around a single proposition: that a dance floor is one of the few places left where a room full of strangers agrees, for a few hours, to stop caring who everyone else is. She built a career on it. At FUGA she worked the machinery of distribution; at Don Diablo's HEXAGON she worked the artist side; in October 2021 Ingrooves Music Group created a role for her, Director of Dance & Electronic, based in Amsterdam, to expand the company across the Benelux, a role that carried into Universal Music Group. She was no bystander to the culture, either. As co-chair of the Association For Electronic Music, she wrote AFEM's Code of Conduct on sexual harassment and gender discrimination and spent three years running a global independent study on gender balance in the sector. She holds a doctorate in psychology, which is a useful credential in an industry where a surprising amount of the job is talking people off ledges, sometimes literally, at four in the morning, in a booth in Ibiza. Not every co-founded venture became a landmark; Ledo, the DIY distribution platform she started with Eelko van Kooten, lasted two months before bankruptcy. Anyone who has actually built something will recognize the résumé of a person who takes swings.

What happened after October 7, 2023 was, by her own account, not a change in her values but a discovery about everyone else's. In a Jerusalem Post opinion essay published this year, she put it with the particular bluntness of a convert to disillusionment: "If DEI ever mattered as much as I believed it did in the music industry and rave culture, 7 October 2023 would become a rude awakening." The industry that had mobilized with real speed and real money for #MeToo and for Black Lives Matter, causes she had worked on from the inside, with documents and data, not hashtags, found itself unable to locate its voice when the victims were Jews and Israelis, including the young people murdered at a music festival. This was the Nova festival: a rave. Her own constituency. "Radical inclusion, it seemed," she wrote, "had added an exception: it did not apply to people born in a particular country, or to Jews and Israelis." She tried to do something about it from within, proposing Holocaust-related programming and conversations with survivors of October 7 to colleagues and venues. She found, she told The Jerusalem Post, that "all the doors were closed."

The cost of saying so out loud was not theoretical. She describes being assaulted on an Amsterdam street in March 2024 by several men after a Star of David necklace identified her; a road-rage confrontation in May 2025 in which a driver drew a finger across his throat; and a burglary of her home in November 2025 that surveillance footage suggested was not random. She is not Jewish. She wore the necklace anyway, which is the entire point: the necklace was a statement of solidarity, and the people who attacked her understood it as one. In November 2025 she bought a one-way ticket to Israel. She now volunteers there and has begun the formal process of conversion to Judaism. Her summary of the change is almost comically modest given what it took to get there, she is "living a life, going outside after dark... without being afraid." A woman leaves the safest-seeming city in Western Europe for the Middle East and reports an improvement in her nerves. That sentence should keep a few European ministers up at night, and probably won't.

It would be easy, and wrong, to read her move as a rejection of her industry's ideals. Read her actual argument and it is the opposite: she left because she still believes them. "When we try to make music morally pure," she wrote, "we destroy precisely the thing that made it morally valuable: its ability to bring together people who would otherwise never meet." That is not a political slogan; it is the thesis of her entire career, stated by someone who wrote the code of conduct and then declined to be the first to break it. The tragedy she identifies is not that the music business has values, but that it discovered an exception, and an exception is how a principle dies. She went looking for a place where the stated values and the lived values were the same document, and she decided she had a better chance of finding it in a country that does not pretend to be at peace than in one that does.

For this, the Jewish people owe her something we do not always say plainly enough: hakarat hatov. Gratitude for the good. Sarah Hildering van Lith had no obligation here. She had no grandparents to answer to, no community pressure, no upside, only a career built on relationships in a business that runs entirely on relationships, and the working knowledge that spending those relationships on this particular cause would leave her with fewer of them. She spent them anyway, and kept speaking after the assault, after the threat, after the break-in, and after the move. There is a small and unglamorous category of people who look at a moral emergency, notice that nobody is coming, and conclude that this makes it their job. They are usually right, and they usually pay for it. The least the rest of us can do is learn their names correctly, say them out loud, and make sure that when she looks back at what her stand cost her, she can also see who was standing behind her.