In the spring of 1941, Landau gave an outline for a series called Forbidden Music to a B'nai B'rith lodge in Forest Hills, a well-to-do neighborhood in Queens. She thought her parents’ participation in the lodge in Halle and Leipzig might act as an entrée in New York. The series would be devoted to many of the Jewish composers she had researched and talked about before. But, without the pressure and constraints of Nazi Germany, the New York series would be entirely her own—at least initially. In its original conception, it was a continuation of past work on her own terms. And those terms included a new, more expansive aim: she wanted to shine a light on all music suppressed in Axis-controlled countries, not just Jewish music. Far from Germany, she was standing up again.

After one year, in early 1942, the lodge got back to her when they had a cancellation in their regular lineup of lecturers. The scheduled speaker, Abram Leon Sachar, was ill. Landau was contacted a week before the lecture. She knew immediately that the audience planning to attend would be large, given Sachar's stature. He was the author of A History of the Jews (1938) and Sufferance Is the Badge (1939) as well as the leader of the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation. And he would be appointed the inaugural president of Brandeis University (near Boston) in 1948.

Undaunted, Landau agreed to fill in. She had to hurry to prepare, quickly calling together “her artists” once again. Among them was soprano Mascha Benya, from Lithuania, who had regularly performed with Landau in Berlin and who had also made her way to the United States after Kristallnacht. Landau would introduce Benya with special flare as “the star of our Culture League opera in Berlin.” In the lecture the two would be “reunited.” At the piano Landau enlisted a recent acquaintance, Kurt Adler, from the Friendship House. The program was advertised in one paper under the heading “The Nazis Banned Them” with photos of Landau and Benya. The apparent draw was both the forbidden music and the forbidden artists—Landau included.