Features
Daniel Raiskin, music director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, discusses his life – from his boyhood in Soviet Russia to his coming to Winnipeg and his admiration for the Jewish community here
By BERNIE BELLAN Daniel Raiskin has been the music director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra since 2018. This paper has been remiss not to have interviewed Raiskin until now, although to be fair to ourselves, he is an extremely busy fellow,
so finding a time when he could sit down and talk about his career, what life was like growing up in a Jewish family in Soviet Russia, and how he feels about spending a good part of his time in Winnipeg, was not easily arranged.
But then Covid-19 suddenly took over everyone’s lives – no matter who they are or where they live and, without much planning required, we were able to arrange to speak with Raiskin from his Amsterdam home.
At the outset of our conversation, which was conducted via WhatsAapp on Friday, April 3, Raiskin explained he’s “lived in Amsterdam for 30 years.” While he travels the world serving as guest conductor for many different orchestras, he “shares his time between Winnipeg and Amsterdam. My home is both in Amsterdam and Winnipeg,” he said.
I asked him, since he’s lived in The Netherlands for so many years whether he holds Dutch citizenship? Raiskin answered that he’s been a Dutch citizen for 26 years, although he still “has a Russian passport, too.”
At the present time Raiskin is also resigned, like the rest of us, to remaining in his Amsterdam home with his wife and two children (a son, 21, and a daughter, 16) for the foreseeable future..
“I was actually caught here between two projects – both of which were in Winnipeg,” Raiskin explained. “I was supposed to return to Winnipeg to spend 10 days there, but then things began to get really cloudy and we decided it doesn’t make any sense for me to fly into Winnipeg and get stuck there without my family, so I decided to stay here.”
We discussed how The Netherlands had taken a relatively hands-off approach to the Coronavirus to begin with, but as the danger has become more apparent, the liberal attitudes that most Dutch have in being uncomfortable with seeing their liberties restricted have begun to dissipate.
“People here are used to going to parks and to the seaside, but I’m afraid that on Monday (April 6) the lockdown is going to be announced,” Raiskin observed (on April 3).
Before we began to talk about Raiskin’s musical career, I said to him that I wanted “to take him back to his childhood in St. Petersburg.” I remarked to him that when I was a student in Israel (a very long time ago – 1974-75 to be exact). I became friends with a girl from St. Petersburg, who bragged to me that people from St. Petersburg were so much more sophisticated than Israelis, also that St. Petersburg had “the best ice cream in the world.”
I asked Raiskin whether the part about the ice cream was true.
“Yes, that ‘s very true,” he responded – “at least judging from my kids’ reaction any time we go to St. Petersburg, they say ‘this is really the best tasting ice cream.’ “
I wondered whether Raiskin was a musical prodigy as a child.
“I was not a prodigy at all,” he said. “I took up the violin when I was six – and I didn’t ‘take it up’. I was given it. It’s an old joke that with the wave of Russian Jewish immigration to Israel every second Russian landing in Israel at Ben Gurion Airport had a violin in his or her hands. Those that did not were piano players.”
“I was born into a Jewish family where music played a very important role,” Raiskin explained.
“My father is one of the foremost Russian musicologists (who is also a now retired physicist, Raiskin noted). One of the first sounds I heard when I was born was my brother (who tragically died at a the age of 34) practising his cello. By the time I was six – I like to joke my mother was so tired of carrying my brother’s cello around, she opted for something smaller for me: a violin.”
By the way, both Rasikin’s parents are alive and still living in St. Petersburg, he told me. His father’s first love was always music, Raiskin noted, but as part of the generation that grew up in the Soviet Union following World War II, it was unrealistic for anyone to make a career of music, he explained.
“He was teaching physics at a university in St. Petersburg when he was 35, but he graduated from a music conservatory when he was 40. That goes to show how important music was to him,” Raiskin observed.
“My mother stopped working a year ago (when she was 82),” Raiskin said. “She was a mathematician and a software programmer.”
I asked Raiskin whether his “parents ever endured any discrimination because they were Jewish that you can speak of? ” I added that “I didn’t want to seem naive by asking the question (since anyone who was following the fight of “refuseniks” in Russia attempting to leave Russia at the time that Raiskin was growing up would have known that anti-Semitism was rampant in that country.
” We lived in a country with a great rate of anti-Semitism,’ Raiskin answered. “My parents and my brother and me and friends all around us were all subject to state-sponsored anti-Semitism. At some point my family had also made the decision to leave (Russia), but it was too late. The Afghanistan war had broken out and everything was hermetically sealed. We got stuck.”
At that point I said to Raiskin that I wanted to talk about what it was like growing up as a young Jewish boy in Russia at that time – and how much love of music was inculcated into his and his peers’ lives.
“It was like – any given picture of Chagall has a violin in it,” Raiskin observed. “It’s part of the Jewish heritage and DNA; this whole ‘3,000 years of endurance’. Music was one of the things that kept us from getting alienated.”
At the same time though, Raiskin said that “music was not something that I particularly wanted to do. I wanted to play football and ice hockey with my mates outside. As a kid you don’t want to spend hours practising and doing scales for hours, looking out the window of your seventh-floor apartment while other kids are playing outside. I wanted to be more like them.”
“It’s very often a mistake to think that it’s the child who makes the decision at age six or seven to become a musician. Some kids are so incredibly gifted they show a unique talent at such a young age, there’s nothing else they want to do. I definitely don’t want to give the impression that I was one of those kids. I was pretty much normal and not very well behaved; I was pretty naughty.
“It was only later that I developed a real taste for music – and worked hard to become something.”
To that point we hadn’t discussed Raiskin’s particular musical interests. I noted that I had read in various articles and interviews that his favourite composer was Gustav Mahler (who was also Jewish, by the way). I wondered when Raiskin first became interested in Mahler’s music?
“You know, in fact, Mahler was not a composer whose music was very often played in my years in the Soviet Union,” Raiskin explained. “The performances of Mahler were always a great event,” but it was only one or two of his symphonies that were ever played, he noted.
“It was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Western orchestras that started to come on European tours that we really started to hear Mahler played. I’ll never forget the first time I heard Mahler’s Seventh Symphony played by the Pittsburgh Symphony…I think this was when it really hit me hard. This is the moment that I said to myself: ‘I’m going to conduct this once’…and I did, on many occasions…I try to conduct his music as often as I can.”
We skipped ahead to Raiskin’s first time coming to Winnipeg which, he said, was in 2015, as guest conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. There were two more appearances as guest conductor of the WSO in 2017 before Raiskin was appointed as music director in 2018.
“It was a lengthy process,” he said, “but I am, in fact, already looking back on five years of being associated with Winnipeg. It’s not like it started in 2018.”
Raiskin also observed that “no matter how successful a relationship a music director has with an orchestra – it’s never a relationship for life. It’s just the nature of the profession. It’s a marriage for a time…It’s not the conductors who play the music; it’s the orchestras. It’s about 67 musicians who play. It’s very important – the mandate we get from the musicians …and at a certain point it’s time for the conductor to go.”
However, Raiskin wanted to make clear that this is not something he is thinking about now. With his second season cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said that, |“more than ever our relationship and interdependency is being tested and I am confident we’ll get out if the crisis, whenever this might be, stronger than ever.“
Raiskin explained that, while he is contractually obligated to conduct the WSO for 12 weeks during the year, it is hugely important for any conductor to get out on the road as much as possible. He used the following analogy to illustrate his point: “A hockey player cannot perform at the highest level of his ability if he just plays home games. It’s also important how you perform outside.”
I noted at the outset of this article that, although Daniel Raiskin has been music director of the WSO for two years now, we still hadn’t interviewed him which, given that we’re a Jewish newspaper and he’s Jewish, is something that we should have done much earlier. But, since he’s now had time to get to know Winnipeg – and its Jewish community, much better, I asked him what his impression of our community was?
“I’m sure you’ve met Gail Asper,” I said (tongue in cheek; how could the music director of the WSO not have met one of the foremost supporters of the WSO – and arts in general in this city?)
“Yes, of course,” came Raiskin’s reply, “and many other people, like Laurel Malkin, and Michel Kay and Glenna Kay. You know, Winnipeg became a place where being Jewish for me suddenly started to matter in a very personal and positive way. Growing up in the Soviet Union was definitely not. I was once expelled from a music conservatory for visiting a synagogue – for the first time, just out of curiosity.
“And when you’re in a very cosmopolitan city like Amsterdam, with a very tragic history of Dutch Jews – one needs to acknowledge that there were 150,000 Dutch Jews before the Second World War, and only 15,000 survived – so, for me, connecting to the Jewish community here…like the first Rosh Hashanah dinner I ever attended was…in Winnipeg! Because some friends just took me and my wife and said: ‘Come’. I really feel that it matters in a very positive way that I’m Jewish and I can connect to many people in Winnipeg and many in our audiences are Jewish.”
“I feel more Jewish than ever since coming to Winnipeg,” Raiskin suggested. “Jewish music is so important to me. One of the first things I recorded as a musician – as an instrumentalist, was a complete edition of music for viola and piano by Ernst Bloch, the foremost Jewish composer.”
At the end of our interview we discussed the devastating effect that the current crisis is having on people’s lives – in so many ways. Raiskin said that he was still fully involved in planning for the coming season of the WSO – and for the season after that as well.
In terms of assessing people’s hunger for music, he had this to say: “I think there will be a sense of growing hunger…our souls and our spirits are being so hollowed, there will be a growing need to fill in this gap – and this is where we can step in.”
Raiskin closed our interview with this observation: “I feel: today, more than ever, people feel how important arts and culture are to them. We suddenly realize that we use art to communicate with each other!“
Features
What Is Next for Israel and Hezbollah?
By HENRY SREBRNIK During Operation Rising Lion in 2025, the Iranians discovered that the proxies they had built up for years failed to provide the assistance expected of them. Hezbollah, their most important ally, refrained from opening a front against Israel.
But in the current war, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Naim Qassem responded to pressure from Tehran and carried out his threat to open fire on Israel. It sent tens of thousands of Israelis in the Galilee into shelters several times a day. This time Hezbollah proved effective. What now?
On June 26, after a series of five bilateral meetings hosted by the United States, representatives of the Israeli, Lebanese, and U.S. governments signed the Trilateral Framework Agreement, declaring their shared “ambition to end conflict between them, ensure the sovereignty and security of both countries, and establish peaceful neighborly relations between the two countries.”
Israel and Lebanon agreed to a framework which would include the disarming of Hezbollah, the phased withdrawal of Israel from areas conquered over the last three years of war, and the deployment of the Western supported Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to the areas evacuated by Israel. So far, three “pilot zones” have been established, in the areas of Faroun, Srifa and Zawtar al-Gharbiya. “It’s the beginning of the beginning. There’s a lot of work ahead,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after the signing ceremony. That’s an understatement!
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun, a Maronite Christian, made his first ever White House visit on July 21. The Washington meeting with President Donald Trump, the first for a Lebanese president since 2009, was meant to move forward on the project to sever Lebanon from Iran’s orbit, disarm Tehran’s proxy Hezbollah, and pave a way toward Lebanon-Israel peace.
Aoun recalled that the army’s collapse in 1975 led to the emergence of militia groups, a civil war and the Palestinian takeover of the country’s south, which was used to launch attacks on Israel.
But there remain legitimate doubts about Beirut’s willingness to follow through on promises to disarm and dismantle Hezbollah. The last round of such efforts in late 2025 failed. Lebanese leaders have promised to disarm Hezbollah multiple times over the past thirty-five years, without success. The United States has sent the LAF more than $3 billion in aid since 2006. And yet two decades later, Hezbollah is still armed and still on Israel’s northern border.
“America needs to support the LAF,” Aoun told Trump. “Without the LAF,” he continued, “everything will collapse.” And as he told a group after his meeting with Trump, the aid must be “immediate and unconditional.” Could the army plausibly disarm Hezbollah? Since 2022 Washington has been paying LAF salaries directly, yet there has been no change.
The LAF is generally thought to consist of about 50 per cent Shia Lebanese among its rank and file, and around 30 per cent in its officer corps. Such a force would split along sectarian lines were it to be deployed against Hezbollah. Until Hezbollah’s control over the Shiite community weakens, it remains unclear whether the army can perform the task.
Anyhow, eliminating Hezbollah is virtually impossible, because its very existence is just part of what makes Lebanon an ongoing failed state. Hezbollah is not merely a military organization. It is the product of a particular geopolitical environment, a particular historical experience, and a particular understanding of survival.
Over the past four decades, it has evolved into a political party, social welfare provider, military force and ideological movement deeply rooted in Lebanon’s Shia communities. While military action can weaken it, the social and political foundations that sustain Hezbollah are much harder to remove.
The people who demand Hezbollah’s disarmament often begin with an idealized image of Lebanon rather than the Lebanon that exists. They imagine a state capable of protecting all its citizens equally and defending its borders independently. That is very far from reality.
Modern Lebanon was constructed around a delicate sectarian formula that sought to balance competing communities rather than forge a single national project. Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing arrangement was formed under the National Pact of 1943 and the Taif Agreement of 1989. Different factions cultivated different external patrons, be they France, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Syria. Political identity often became intertwined with foreign sponsorship and external alliances. The result was a state that never succeeded in creating a unified national consciousness.
For much of the country’s history, the Shia Muslims were widely regarded as the country’s most politically and economically marginalized community. They were often viewed with suspicion by the authorities and lacked the institutional recognition enjoyed by other religious communities.
So, for the Shia population, Hezbollah is not merely a political party or an armed movement. It is an insurance policy against annihilation. The Shia community in Lebanon looks around the region today and sees opponents everywhere — not just Israel, but Sunni Muslim militants ruling Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as well – states that consider Shia Islam a heresy to be extinguished. (Lebanon’s own Sunnis also fit that description.) Under such conditions, disarmament begins to look like suicide.
President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Syria might get involved in Lebanon again is ridiculous. Any Syrian intervention under its new Sunni rulers would allow Hezbollah to claim credibly that Lebanon faces a new external threat. Whereas many Lebanese question Hezbollah’s claims that it is protecting Lebanon from Israel, there would likely be greater agreement that a Syrian incursion merits resistance. Many Lebanese would view it through the lens of Syria’s 29-year occupation of Lebanon, fuelling concerns about a return of Syrian influence over the country.
Since the fall of the Assad regime, Hezbollah has portrayed the new government in Damascus as a jihadi organization that seeks to carry out sectarian massacres against the Shias. This has actually increased Hezbollah’s legitimacy within its own support base – those who already view Hezbollah as a resistance movement that seeks to fight against any external actor.
Nonetheless, in the recent conflict Israel has significantly weakened Hezbollah. The organization since the Gaza war began has lost most of its long-range and heavy missiles, and about 8,000 of its fighters and commanders have been killed, out of roughly 30,000.
But Hezbollah has not been decisively defeated, nor will it be. The problem is that when a state is faced with an armed force on its soil that doesn’t want to disarm, the usual recourse available to the state is coercion. The Lebanese state has neither the will nor capacity to do so and is no longer sovereign, in any meaningful sense.
As long as the conditions that created Hezbollah remain intact, the expectation that it will voluntarily surrender its weapons will remain a fantasy. It is up to Israel alone to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani River, where the group’s short-distance missiles and drones cannot reach Israel’s population centres.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
WINNIPEG EMPLOYERS SHOULD USE AI TO TRAIN, NOT JUST TRIM
By Dr. GLEB TSIPURSKY Generative AI has already entered everyday Canadian work. Statistics Canada reported that 35.9% of workers used generative AI in the previous 12 months. For Winnipeg employers, the important question is no longer whether staff will use these tools. The more consequential question is what kind of workforce employers will build while they use them.
An updated Stanford University analysis found employment among workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations 19% below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers, with the gap widening over time. That trend should concern Winnipeg employers because the work most exposed to automation often overlaps with the work through which beginners develop professional judgment.
Entry-level employees do more than produce first drafts, conduct basic research, summarize information, prepare routine analyses, or handle standard customer questions. Those tasks are also training. Repetition teaches people what good work looks like, where common mistakes appear, when a situation is routine, and when something unusual requires escalation.
If employers simply remove that work, they may save time today while weakening the pipeline of people capable of handling harder work tomorrow. A firm can automate a junior task quickly. Rebuilding several years of missing experience later is much harder.
The better approach is to redesign entry-level work around AI-assisted apprenticeship. New employees can use AI to produce a first draft, but they should also verify the output against reliable sources. They can use AI to summarize a customer issue, but they should explain which facts matter and what remains uncertain. They can use AI to analyze routine information, but they should flag exceptions and bring consequential decisions to experienced colleagues.
That changes the role of junior employees without eliminating the learning built into the role. Instead of rewarding people for producing routine work manually, employers can reward them for checking AI output, spotting edge cases, asking better questions, and knowing when human judgment is required.
Managers also need to change how they supervise. If a junior employee submits an AI-assisted answer, the manager should ask how the employee verified it, what assumptions the system made, what could go wrong, and what would cause the employee to escalate the issue. Those questions turn AI use into a training process rather than a shortcut around learning.
Winnipeg’s small and mid-sized employers may be especially well positioned to take this approach. They often cannot afford to separate technology adoption, training, and talent development into different departments. The same manager who wants more productivity today also needs capable employees next year. That makes it practical to connect AI use directly to coaching and skill development.
Employers should also resist measuring AI adoption only by time saved or tasks completed. Those metrics matter, but they can hide whether the organization is developing stronger judgment. A more useful set of questions is whether employees are catching more errors, escalating the right exceptions, becoming more independent over time, and learning which decisions should remain human-led.
None of this requires employers to preserve every old task exactly as it was. Some routine work should disappear. The goal should be to preserve the learning function, not the old workflow. If AI removes one form of repetition, employers should deliberately replace it with another way for junior staff to practice, receive feedback, and encounter progressively harder decisions.
Winnipeg businesses can gain real productivity from AI without turning entry-level work into a dead end. The strongest employers will use AI to accelerate the development of beginners rather than treating beginners as the easiest cost to remove. That approach can improve productivity now while still producing the experienced professionals Winnipeg will need in the years ahead.
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Adapted from: The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026). https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/aibook
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, a behavioral scientist called the “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times, helps tech-forward leaders stop overpaying for AI while boosting engagement and innovation. He serves as the CEO of the AI consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, and wrote eight books, including The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026).
Features
IPL 2026/27 Preview: Beer Sheva Defends Its Crown
Israeli football enters the 2026/27 season with a genuinely open title race for the first time in years. Hapoel Beer Sheva claimed a dramatic sixth championship last May, edging Beitar Jerusalem by just three points after a campaign interrupted by regional conflict and settled almost entirely on head-to-head form. That kind of finish leaves scores unsettled, and every major club has spent the summer either reinforcing a title push or plotting revenge. With four Israeli sides now competing in European qualifiers simultaneously, the new Ligat ha’Al campaign carries more weight than it has in years.
How Beer Sheva Won It
Ran Kozuk’s side did not simply outscore the league last season; they won the moments that mattered against the team chasing them hardest. Beitar Jerusalem lost twice to Beersheba across the regular campaign and could only draw both playoff meetings, a pattern one report summed up bluntly: if you want to be champions, you have to beat the champions, and Beitar never managed it. Kings Kangwa was named the league’s most valuable player, while captain Miguel Vitor and goalkeeper Ofir Marciano anchored a squad that closed out the title with a 4-2 win over Maccabi Tel Aviv. Owner Alona Barkat has kept that core together, giving Beersheba a real shot at back-to-back titles, assuming Champions League fixtures don’t wear the squad down.
Beitar’s Response and the Chase Pack
Losing a title race by three points after leading for large stretches tends to force change, and Beitar Jerusalem has responded accordingly. Almog Cohen, previously the club’s sporting director, has stepped into the head coach role, replacing Barak Itzhaki after the campaign ended in disappointment. Captain Yarden Shua, veteran forward Omer Atzili and Dor Hugi remain the attacking core, though the club opens the season without injured midfielder Adi Yona, a blow given how much Beitar leaned on midfield control last year. Maccabi Tel Aviv arrives with a different kind of statement: despite finishing outside the top two domestically, they won the Israel State Cup in a chaotic 2-1 final against Beersheba that produced six red cards, suggesting the squad has quality to challenge again even if consistency remains the question mark.
The Return of European Football on a Bigger Scale
What separates this season from recent ones is the sheer number of Israeli clubs competing for continental places at once. Beersheba enters Champions League qualifying as domestic champions, though for security reasons their ties have been relocated to Szombathely, Hungary rather than played at home. Maccabi Tel Aviv, seeded thanks to a healthy UEFA coefficient, goes into Europa League qualifying against the winner of Sheriff Tiraspol and Aluminij. Beitar Jerusalem and Hapoel Tel Aviv both enter Conference League qualifying, the latter having secured their spot via a fourth-place playoff finish. Playing qualifiers on neutral ground has become routine for Israeli clubs, and it hasn’t stopped them from competing credibly.
Mid-Table Ambition and the Promotion Effect
Beyond the four clubs chasing European nights, the middle of the table looks unusually competitive heading into August. Hapoel Petah Tikva and Hapoel Tel Aviv both returned to the top flight after a season away, and Hapoel Tel Aviv’s playoff run last term shows promoted clubs can climb quickly rather than simply survive. Maccabi Haifa and Ironi Kiryat Shmona, both capable of springing results against the traditional big three, will look to use a full pre-season to close the gap. That added depth tends to produce the unpredictable midweek results that make a 14-team division worth following from the opening whistle.
What to Watch as the Season Kicks Off
Beersheba’s fixture list is the one to track first, since balancing Champions League qualifying with league form in August and September will say a great deal about whether this squad has the depth to go back-to-back. Beitar’s response under a rookie head coach is the second storyline, particularly whether Cohen can get more out of a group that dominated possession last season but couldn’t finish off the champions when it counted. For fans following these storylines match by match, tracking how the market prices each side into the opening rounds is a useful gauge of who bookmakers actually rate, and anyone comparing options for the season ahead can check out the best betting sites in Canada for a sense of how odds and coverage are shaping up before a ball is kicked.
Between a defending champion carrying continental fixture congestion, a rival reshaping its coaching staff, and a deepening mid-table, Ligat ha’Al enters the new season with more storylines running in parallel than it has had in years. Whether Beer Sheva backs up their sixth title or Beitar finally converts near misses into silverware, the opening weeks should offer the first real clues.
