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
Today’s Antizionism is Jew-Hatred
By HENRY SREBRNIK The Jewish world has grown darker. I’m not going to compare the anti-Jewish hate that has spread across this and other countries since October 7, 2023, to the Holocaust, but we know that Jewish life has become far more precarious. And so much of the hatred flies under the rubric of so-called “antizionism,” with people claiming that this isn’t “antisemitism.” But this is a false dichotomy. And we know it when we see it.
“Antizionism” is not about the now arcane historical debates that occurred mainly within Jewish communities from the 19th century through 1948, in which those who became Zionists sought to actualize the Jewish ties to biblical Israel and recreate a modern state. By “Zionists,” today’s enemies are not referring to supporters of the 19th century self-liberation movement of the Jewish people, whose goal was to establish a national home. They known little of this history. They’ve never heard of Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Ber Borochov, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, or Chaim Weizmann.
As a derogatory slur, a pejorative, it simply means “Jew,” the way earlier words, now archaic, used to. Some call Jews “Zios.” They mean the Jewish people, who exist in opposition to everything good in the world, and who are figures of emblematic wickedness. In this they simply update what Nazis said a century ago. Hitler, too, was an “antizionist,” along with his racial antisemitism. It attacks Jews, here in Western countries like Canada – in the cities where they live, in the universities they attend, in the publishing houses where they send their manuscripts, and in the entertainment world where they act and sing.
Note that it calls itself antizionism, not anti-Israelism, so that the net can grab virtually every Jew who simply wants to see Israel not destroyed – and that’s the vast, vast majority. We Jews know what it means, regardless of what our enemies claim. Would anyone think that the term antisemitism means hatred of Semites?
Clearly a ludicrous idea; it was invented in the 19th century by a German Jew-hater, Wilhelm Marr, to make it sound more “racially scientific.” No one is fooled by that, of course, nor should they be by so-called “antizionism.” In its effects, it is for Jews a distinction with a negligible difference. It is meant to portray Jews as villains, and while it may fool some gullible people, it will deceive very, very few of us.
After all, as Michel Coren noted in “Roald Dahl’s Antisemitism Feels Painfully Familiar,” in the British magazine the Spectator March 16, “most Jewish people do in fact to varying degrees support Israel, partly because centuries of bigotry, violence, massacre, and attempted genocide have given them little alternative. They may oppose Israeli policy, may condemn the current government, may even want radical compromises, but there’s still support. And in the current climate of leftist and Islamist triumphalism, it’s all Zionism and none of it acceptable.”
Anti-Zionism is marked by three core “libels”: that “Zionists” are colonizers, guilty of apartheid, and committing genocide. (Actually, the only time we were settler-colonialists was when we conquered Canaan, but that was God’s doing!) Anti-Israel activists incorporate historical manifestations of anti-Jewish discrimination under the guise of anti-Zionist political activism, from the blood libel to Nazi-era tropes, mixed with contemporary academic theories. Anti-Zionism acts as a container for these historical tropes, blending them together with progressive talking points.
George Washington University professor Daniel Schwartz, in “Vocabulary Lesson,” Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2026, describes a pro-Palestinian demonstration in 2025 at his campus where a student held a placard with Israel at the center and spokes radiating outward to other evils: imperialism, white supremacy, even reproductive injustice. “This is not garden-variety political criticism of Israel policies or conduct. It invokes a symbolic architecture in which the Jewish state becomes the universal source of global suffering — a structure with deep resonance in antisemitic thought.”
Scholars argue that it is the third major iteration of discrimination against Jews. The first was anti-Judaism, based on religion, the second was antisemitism, focused on race, and the third, anti-Zionism, is a hatred of Jewish peoplehood.
“Anti-Zionism transforms the very meaning of Zionism,” contends Adam Louis-Klein. “The Jew is reconstructed through a new symbolic logic and a new repertoire of stereotypes.” Where antisemites invoked the pseudo-biological figure of “the Semite” to cast Jews as an Oriental race infiltrating the West, anti-Zionists invoke the authority of the social sciences to recode the Jew as the “Zionist,” a European colonizer destined to commit genocide of a non-European population.
“Erasing Jewish indigeneity and severing Jewish belonging to the land of Israel, anti-Zionism transforms the race polluter of antisemitism into the white settler of anti-Zionism,” he asserts in his March 24, 2026 Free Press article “Yes, Anti-Zionism Is Discrimination.”
For this reason, he writes, it’s imperative that organizations and institutions committed to protecting Jews and fighting the scourge of Jew-hatred start condemning—clearly and without apology—antisemitism and antizionism. This goes to the moral core of the matter: the right of Jews to a homeland versus the bigotry of those who deny them that right.
After the Holocaust, explicit Jew-hatred became unfashionable in polite society, but the impulse never disappeared. The workaround was simple: separate Zionism from Judaism in name, then recycle every old anti-Jewish trope and pin it on “the Zionists.”
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Artificial Intelligence, Sports Data, and What It Means for Community Values
Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly visible part of modern life, shaping how information is analyzed and decisions are made. While often discussed in fields such as healthcare, finance, and education, sports analytics provides a particularly clear example of how these systems function in real time. For many readers, the relevance of this topic goes beyond sports itself and speaks to broader questions about technology and community values.
Within Jewish communities, where education, critical thinking, and ethical responsibility have long been central principles, the rise of AI invites meaningful discussion. Understanding how automated systems operate is not only a technical issue but also a cultural and intellectual one. In global digital environments, references to platforms such as 1xbet Republic of Ireland often appear in discussions about real-time data processing, illustrating how widely these technologies are applied.
From Human Judgment to Algorithmic Thinking
Traditionally, interpreting sports performance required human observation and experience. Analysts would review statistics, assess player form, and make informed judgments based on knowledge built over time. While this method remains valuable, it is now being supplemented by artificial intelligence.
AI systems can process large volumes of data instantly, identifying patterns and trends that might otherwise go unnoticed. This shift reflects a broader movement toward algorithmic thinking—where decisions are increasingly informed by data rather than intuition alone.
For communities that place a strong emphasis on learning and inquiry, this raises important questions. How should data be interpreted? What role should human judgment continue to play? And how do we ensure that reliance on technology does not replace thoughtful analysis?
What AI Systems Analyze
Modern AI models draw on a wide range of data inputs to generate insights. In the context of sports, this includes:
- real-time performance data
- historical comparisons
- individual player metrics
- behavioural patterns
- external conditions
The ability to integrate these variables allows AI to produce highly detailed assessments. However, it also creates a layer of complexity that is not always easy to understand.
This challenge is particularly relevant in educational settings. As younger generations become more familiar with technology, there is a growing need to teach not only how to use these systems, but also how to question and evaluate them.
Ethics, Transparency, and Responsibility
The increasing role of AI naturally leads to ethical considerations. In Jewish thought, concepts such as responsibility, fairness, and accountability are deeply rooted and widely discussed. These ideas are highly relevant when considering how automated systems are designed and used.
One of the key concerns surrounding AI is transparency. When decisions are made by complex algorithms, it can be difficult to understand the reasoning behind them. This raises questions about trust and oversight.
Ensuring that AI systems are used responsibly requires a balance between innovation and ethical awareness. Community dialogue plays an essential role in this process, helping to define how technology should align with shared values.
A Community Conversation About the Future
The use of artificial intelligence in sports analytics may seem like a narrow topic, but it reflects a much larger transformation. Across many areas of life, data-driven systems are becoming the norm, influencing how information is processed and decisions are made.
For Jewish communities, this moment presents an opportunity for reflection and engagement. By approaching technology with curiosity, critical thinking, and a strong ethical framework, it is possible to better understand both its potential and its limitations.
Ultimately, the conversation about AI is not just about technology. It is about how communities adapt, preserve their values, and shape the future in a rapidly changing world.
Features
The moral degradation of Israel’s far-right is even worse than you think
By Dan Perry (Posted March 27, 2026)
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
This week, an Israeli Knesset member said something that should have been shocking, horrifying and unanimously condemned.
“I stand behind IDF soldiers in every situation,” said Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of the ultranationalist Otzmah Yehudit Party. Even if the “collateral damage is children or women — it does not matter to me.”
“In Jenin, there are no innocent civilians,” he added. “In Jenin, there are no innocent children.”
Kroizer was referring to a genuine tragedy: The killing of almost an entire Palestinian family by Israel undercover forces on March 15, near the village of Tammun. The forces opened fire on the family’s car as they returned from a shopping trip. Waed Bani Ohde, her husband Ali, and two of their young children Othman, 7, and Mohammed, 5, were killed. Two sons survived. The army says the car accelerated toward the forces; Palestinian witnesses say the IDF gave no warning before attacking.
It is tempting to dismiss statements like Kroizer’s as the rhetoric of the extreme. Indeed, I often find myself making that point when talking to people inclined to think the worst of Israel: They do not represent the majority, and not even the immoral government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But that, while true, is becoming a little too pat.
For it is also true that as time goes, as the wars continue and hearts harden, what Kroizer articulated is a moral framework that is steadily taking hold in the Israeli right.
That’s why the statements were not condemned by anyone associated with the government. And, indeed, Israeli far-right activists responded to the deaths with social media posts rejoicing in the death of the unarmed “terrorists.”
No senior Israeli official apologized for the shooting. No one said publicly that even if the soldiers believed they were acting under threat, the killing of two children demands something more than a routine internal review.
No official has even conceded that this type of event might contribute to agitation and instability in the West Bank, and perhaps spark another uprising. Set empathy aside; even enlightened self-interest is beyond the current Israeli government.
Yes, an investigation has been opened. But military investigations almost never lead to concrete action against the troops. A Guardian report this week revealed that no Israeli citizen has been prosecuted for a killing in the West Bank since 2020, despite a radical uptick in violence; settlers and police have already killed 10 Palestinian civilians this month alone.
The undercover soldiers, especially, are something like the real life version of the international hit Fauda, widely admired for their counter-terrorism activity. There is little appetite for throwing the book at them.
So while it’s tempting to chalk this up as just another tragedy in a long list of tragedies on both sides, it is actually much more: a devastating manifestation of something fundamental — not just a personal tragedy but a national one.
That’s a tragedy I’ve seen unfolding slowly, since even before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
I’ve seen it in the rhetoric of far-right leaders like cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. But I’ve also seen it firsthand, as when I found myself on wartime television panels where I was besieged by right-wingers enraged at my assertion that innocents have been killed during the war in Gaza. I challenged one of them about whether this idea would include a two-week old baby.
“OK, maybe not the baby!” he conceded, unhappily.
The descent of part of Israeli society into this unforgivable lack of compassion is, some have argued, an inevitable outcome of indefinite control over the Palestinian territories. For years, warnings that rule over millions of disenfranchised Arabs would mutate Israel’s character were treated as excessive, even hysterical.
Israel was not a colonial power in the classic sense, its defenders argued; it was a democracy under siege, navigating impossible dilemmas. The West Bank may be “occupied” but that was justifiable because of the threat its near proximity posed. Israel’s actions might be harsh, but they were necessary, the argument went. It was said that the country’s moral core, despite pressures, would remain intact.
The initial signs after this latest tragedy are not exactly reassuring. Far from condemning Kroizer, as they rightly should have, the cabinet convened this week to offer his party a great gift: the legalization of 30 illegal settlement outposts, including some in “Area A,” which is supposed to be under full Palestinian control.
Israel did not begin this way. Its founding story was deeply bound up with an acute awareness of the need to maintain morality. The early Zionists envisioned a country that would be a “light unto the nations.”
As occupation has become an entrenched reality, most Israelis have wanted to look away; the problem is too complicated. This position may not be possible for much longer. The moral rot is too extreme. But the good news is that it has not infected everything and everyone. Israel’s public broadcaster devoted a segment to the Palestinian family’s tragedy, characterizing Kroizer’s statements as a disgrace.
The humanistic ideas through which Israel once judged itself have eroded. We must now hope that they won’t entirely vanish.
Dan Perry is the former chief editor of The Associated Press in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books about Israel. Follow his newsletter “Ask Questions Later” at danperry.substack.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email opinion@forward.com.
This story was originally published on the Forward.