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NY Times, January 26, 2005
Barenboim Criticizes Israeli Views
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Daniel Barenboim, the politically outspoken conductor and pianist, lectured
at Columbia University on Monday night and drew a link between the taboo on
playing Wagner in Israel and that country's treatment of Palestinians.
Mr. Barenboim, an Israeli who is a frequent defender of Palestinian rights,
stirred debate several years ago by performing Wagner's music in Israel,
upsetting some Israelis because of the composer's anti-Semitism and his
adoption as a symbol by the Nazis.
Mr. Barenboim said Wagner's anti-Jewish vitriol had to be placed in the
context of 19th-century European nationalist feeling. He said that he
understood the pain of Holocaust survivors but that it was hypocritical to
keep Wagner off the concert stage when audio and video recordings of his
work were available, and even cellphones in Israel rang with "The Ride of
the Walkyries."
He blamed the taboo on a lingering sense of minority status and victimhood.
"It is this fear, this conviction of being yet again the victim, that does
not allow the Israeli public to accept Wagner's anti-Semitism," Mr.
Barenboim said. "It is the same cell in the collective brain that does not
allow them to make progress in their understanding of the needs of the
Palestinian people."
Mr. Barenboim said that the failure of the Israeli government to accept the
Palestinians' "narration" had led to a new wave of anti-Semitism, and that
suicide bombings in Israel had "to be seen in the context of the historical
development at which we have arrived."
His lecture was the first in honor of Edward Said, the Columbia scholar and
Palestinian advocate, who died in 2003. The two men, who were friends,
founded the West-Eastern Divan Workshop, intended to bring Israeli and Arab
musicians together. (Said was also a pianist.)
The lecture, at the Miller Theater at Columbia, came at a time when the
university was dealing with accusations by some Jewish students that they
had been marginalized by pro-Palestinian professors.
At the end, after an audience member asked Mr. Barenboim to play, he
performed Schubert's Impromptu in A flat (Op. 142).
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