RSS
The Jewish violinist who saved Carnegie Hall from the brink of destruction
(New York Jewish Week) — Violinist Isaac Stern made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1943, but it would hardly be his last performance at the famed concert venue: He performed there more than 200 times between then and his death in 2001 at the age of 81.
Carnegie Hall was “part of his DNA,” his daughter, Rabbi Shira Stern, told the New York Jewish Week.
The opposite is likely true as well: As the person who fought to save the famed concert hall from demolition in the 1950s, and then served as the president of Carnegie Hall Corporation for 41 years, Stern’s “DNA,” if you will, is all over the iconic institution at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 57th Street.
Carnegie Hall, built by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1891, isn’t just the punchline of an old joke (“practice, practice, practice”). It’s a bonafide cultural colossus, having hosted performances by musicians as varied and famous as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and The Beatles.
And though it seems inconceivable today, by the late 1950s the hall had fallen into disrepair and was set to be demolished. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts was being built and Carnegie Hall’s primary tenant, the New York Philharmonic, had plans to make Lincoln Center its new home. It declined an offer to buy Carnegie Hall for $4 million.
Stern, however — who, beginning in 1944, had performed with the New York Philharmonic more than 100 times — could not allow Carnegie Hall to simply disappear. He organized the Citizens’ Committee to Save Carnegie Hall, a group of musicians and philanthropists — and his efforts led to legislation that allowed the City of New York to purchase the venue and save it from the wrecking ball.
“The young people of this country are demanding more and more music and producing more and more first-rate musicians,” Stern was quoted as saying in his New York Times obituary. “How dare we take away from them, the music, and the audiences of the future, one of the great music rooms of the world?”
Stern was elected the first president of the Carnegie Hall Corporation, the entity that was formed to operate the venue, at its founding in 1960. It was a positions he held until his death in 2001. As president, Stern pursued a vision that Carnegie Hall could become a major center for music education and training. Under his leadership, the hall underwent major renovations in 1986 and celebrated its centennial in 1991, according to the Carnegie Hall’s Rose Archives.
Additionally, under Stern’s leadership, Carnegie Hall began to establish itself as a global cultural institution, bringing in various international ensembles and branching out into other genres of music besides classical. In 1997, the main hall was named the Isaac Stern Hall in his honor.
For all of these reasons, on May 16, 2003 — two years after he died and exactly 43 years after the founding of The Carnegie Hall Corporation — the corner of West 57th Street and Seventh Avenue was renamed “Isaac Stern Place.”
“To me Carnegie Hall is nothing less than an affirmation of the human spirit,” the violinist was quoted as saying in an Associated Press story about the street co-naming.
Stern had undying support for the Hall and for what it could do for others, specifically “opening it up to young musicians so that they would be able to have access to consummate musicians,” Shira Stern said. She told the New York Jewish Week about “the red phone” — a direct line to Carnegie Hall that rang in her father’s study in case of an emergency.
“There was a certain idealism in Isaac Stern that had to do with music, with art, with politics, with culture, with not accepting when someone would say this is impossible,” violinist Philip Setzer of the Emerson String Quartet told JTA in 2001.
“He was grounded in music before he was born,” his daughter said.
Isaac Stern in 1979. (Bogaerts, Rob/Anefo; Dutch National Archives)
The family immigrated to San Francisco when Stern was an infant, and at a young age it “was clear that he was gifted” in music, according to his daughter. Stern dropped out of public school after second grade and began a life dedicated to violin. He enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory at 8, where he studied under Naoum Blinder — who he later regarded as his main influence — and played his first concert at age 15 with the San Francisco Symphony.
In 1949, under impresario Sol Hurok, Stern played 120 concerts over a seven-month tour of the United States, Europe and South America. “By 1950, Mr. Stern had established himself as one of the best young violinists on the concert circuit, and the first American-trained violinist to gain so great a measure of international respect,” having performed with every major orchestra by that point, Stern’s New York Times obituary noted.
Stern was also known for helping to establish young talent, particularly cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Israeli-born violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zuckerman. “He found people who had talent, he nurtured them, he mentored them,” said Shira Stern. “Teaching was his delight.”
“He wasn’t religiously Jewish, but he was extraordinarily spiritual,” said Shira Stern about her father. “[He] realized that his spiritual language wasn’t Hebrew, his spiritual language was music.”
She recalled the time Stern was supposed to play a concert right after former President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. “He asked that the orchestra not play, and he played 45 minutes to an hour of unaccompanied Bach, because he said that this was the highest form of prayer for him.”
Though he may not have been religious, Stern was a Zionist who regularly performed in Israel. He rushed there during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 in order to play at the bedsides of wounded soldiers and for troops in the Negev. Shira Stern said her father would weave “Hatikva,” Israel’s national anthem, into these performances, because he knew “that it was a comfort to people,” she said.
That same year, Stern founded the Jerusalem Music Center, “which still is vibrant and continues to provide masterclasses and training for young musicians in Israel,” said Shira Stern, adding that her father was the chairman of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation alongside his second wife, Vera.
In 1991, Stern was playing a concert in Jerusalem when a Scud missile attack interrupted his performance. While other musicians left the stage, he donned a gas mask and continued playing.
Shira Stern described her father as an “activist.” Beyond his role in saving Carnegie Hall, Stern was passionate that the U.S. government play a role in funding the arts and held an advisory role in the creation of the National Endowment of the Arts in the 1960s. He organized a musicians’ boycott in 1974 when UNESCO suspended its programs in Israel, and would not perform in Germany because of the Holocaust, although he did urge Israeli artists to perform there in order to establish an artistic presence.
“He would have been 103 this year and people are still talking about what he has done for them,” Shira Stern. In addition to the musically inclined rabbi, both of Stern’s sons, Michael and David, are composers, helping to realize their father’s long held dream. “He just wanted to make sure that there was a solid next generation of musicians and music lovers,” she said.
—
The post The Jewish violinist who saved Carnegie Hall from the brink of destruction appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Gaza 70-Degree ‘Cold’ Chills Media Curiosity as New York Times Depicts Israel as Baby Killer
A general view shows destroyed buildings in northern Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, near the Israel-Gaza border, Nov. 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
The “cold” temperatures in Gaza have been a staple of New York Times and other news coverage — and of anti-Israel activism in the US — in recent weeks. But just how cold is it, actually, in Gaza?
“At Least 5 Babies Are Dead From Cold as Winter Grips Gaza,” was a Dec. 31, 2024 headline in the New York Times. “Dead From Cold” was something of a euphemism, as the real baby-killers, the Times made clear with echoes of classical libels against Jews, were the “Israeli military’s bombardment and attacks.”
Toward the end of the article came a mention of “more heavy rain expected in the coming days, and lows in the mid-40s Fahrenheit.”
The Times doubled down on this with a follow-up piece in its Jan. 2, 2024 edition headlined, “No Respite for Gazans as the War Grinds On.”
“Over the past few days, Gazans have endured chilly winter rainstorms; Gazan officials say some infants have died from the cold,” the article said, with no mention of any temperature readings.
Such claims were widespread. “Born at war, dying in the cold,” was an NBC News headline. “Babies are dying in the cold,” said a Washington Post article published on Jan. 6, about “at least seven infants in Gaza who have died in the cold in recent weeks, according to relatives, doctors, and the enclave’s Health Ministry.” The Post, too, made clear who the real baby-killers were — the Jews — referring to :ongoing Israeli restrictions on aid convoys.”
So, how cold has it been in Gaza? According to TimeAndDate.com, which seems reasonably reliable, the coldest it got in Gaza City for the entire month of December 2024 was 45 degrees Fahrenheit. On Dec. 25 the temperature hit 70 degrees. According to Google, the weather in Rafah, Gaza on Jan. 7, 2025 was sunny with a high of 69, a low of 51, and zero precipitation. Not exactly the Yukon permafrost.
Any infant’s death is tragic. It is indeed possible to die of hypothermia in wet conditions in the 40s, especially without adequate shelter and clothing. Yet it’s also possible to survive in even lower temperatures, even without a fire.
You wouldn’t know it from the press coverage, but infants also do die for reasons other than cold or Israeli bombardment. In New York City in 2021, 400 infants died before their first birthday, for causes including respiratory distress, infections, cardiovascular disorders, sudden infant death syndrome, and congenital malformations. The Times has paid those New York City deaths less attention than the ones in Gaza, perhaps because they don’t provide as ready an opportunity to vilify the Jewish state.
The “Gazan officials” the Times mentions are part of a Hamas power structure dedicated to defaming Israel. Those officials use information as warfare against the Jewish state they are dedicated to destroy. The Gaza doctors are largely the same. Any claims coming out of Gaza deserve to be treated with a substantial dose of skepticism. They often reflect not so much the reality on the ground but the propaganda agenda of what remains of the Hamas terror organization.
Time and time again, the most extreme claims coming out of Gaza have proven false. There was the New York Times claim that Israel had bombed a hospital. The Times published an editors’ note after it had accompanied the original claim with a photograph of a different demolished building, and after it turned out that the damage to the hospital site was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket meant for the Jewish state, not an Israeli air strike targeting terrorists in Gaza.
There was also the New York Times claim that Israel was starving Gazan children to death, which left out the UN statistics showing Gazans about as well fed as children in India, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
Now the Times and the rest of the media crowd are claiming that Gazan children are freezing to death in a place that enjoys 70-degree sunshine during the day and 40-50 degree lows at night.
For sure, I’d rather be here in the US than there in Gaza. I don’t doubt that some young Gazan children are genuinely miserable. There are also Israelis who are miserable because they are in bomb shelters hiding from Iranian-supplied rockets and missiles, and because their family members are kidnapped or serving on reserve duty.
The best way to improve the lot of innocent Gazans would be for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to immediately put down their arms, surrender, and release to freedom the hostages who were kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023.
The coldest things of all in Gaza are the hearts of the Hamas terrorists. That is a fact that the international press, in its newfound fascination with the not-actually-that-frosty Gaza weather, seems intimidated by, and also a fact that the press is all too frequently unwilling to share directly with readers.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
The post Gaza 70-Degree ‘Cold’ Chills Media Curiosity as New York Times Depicts Israel as Baby Killer first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
‘Free Palestine’ Activist in Arizona Wearing ‘Israel Kills Children’ T-Shirt Gets Arrested After Refusing to Leave Gym
A pro-Palestinian activist who was kicked out of a gym in Gilbert, Arizona, and arrested after he wore a shirt that read “Israel Kills Children.” Photo: Screenshot
A pro-Palestinian activist wearing an offensive T-shirt critical of Israel was kicked out of a gym in Gilbert, Arizona, and arrested this week after he ignored requests by gym management to leave the premises.
The man, who goes by the social media handle Resistance is Beautiful, posted videos of the incident on Wednesday on Instagram. It began when he was exercising at a Life Time gym in Gilbert while wearing a black short-sleeve T-shirt that said “Israel Kills Children.” He said that when he arrived at the gym and was checked in, a gym employee told him that he needed to take off the shirt, whose message was an apparent commentary on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war falsely accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. He refused to take off the shirt.
Shortly afterward, the gym’s manager approached the activist and told him that he must leave the premises for not having “an active membership, or the gym would call the police. When the activist refused to leave the facility, police were called to escort him out of the building.
“You don’t have an active membership so I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the gym’s manager, Mike Esposito, said to the anti-Israel activist in a video shared on Instagram.
“I just paid for my membership, what do you mean?” the activist replied. “I pay for my membership … I’ve been a member here for three years. Payment goes through every month.”
“Someone from corporate … the cops are on their way,” Esposito said. “Your membership is not active so we called the police because you’re trespassing here in the club.”
The activist then asked Esposito, “Is the problem the shirt? Or is it the skin color?” He also told the manager: “You know where there are no more gyms left? In Palestine. Because you guys bombed it all. Are you offended by the shirt or the fact that you guys kill all the Palestinians in the gyms over there [in Gaza]. Is the problem the shirt?”
Esposito, who is reportedly not Jewish or Israeli but of Italian descent, ignored the man’s questions about the T-shirt and his remarks about Palestinians. Instead, the manager repeatedly said that the activist does not have an active membership at the facility. “You just don’t have an active membership, so right now you’re trespassing because you’re in the club without an active membership,” he said. “We have to ask you to leave.”
Two Gilbert police officers arrived not long afterward and arrested the anti-Israel activist for trespassing. Before they escorted him out of the gym, he told police, “There’s a Holocaust going on in Palestine … there are no more gyms left in Palestine, you guys bombed all of them. Free Palestine.” He also shared that he wore the “Israel Kills Children” T-shirt previously at the gym, and staff members told him in the past that it was offensive. “They’ve always said, ‘Oh that shirt is offensive.’ You know, typical Gilbert white supremacy stuff,” he said.
The founder, CEO, chairman, and president of Life Time is Bahram Akradi, who was born in Tehran, Iran, and emigrated to the US months before the 1979 Iranian revolution. He founded the chain of gyms in 1992.
The activist was released from the Gilbert police station shortly after the incident at the gym. “There is no greater honor in the world than to sit in a jail cell for Palestine,” he said in an Instagram video posted on Wednesday after his release. “And we’ll do it over and over and over again until we break this enemy and we get Palestine back. That’s my word.”
The man has shared other photos and videos on social media of him clashing with police officers in Gilbert, trespassing while carrying a Palestinian flag and getting arrested for his anti-Israel activism. He also shared clips of himself wearing other anti-Israel shirts, including one that read “Israel is a terrorist project, Free Palestine,” and another that said, “Israel KILLS and America covers it up.”
The post ‘Free Palestine’ Activist in Arizona Wearing ‘Israel Kills Children’ T-Shirt Gets Arrested After Refusing to Leave Gym first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Gal Gadot Addresses Controversy Over Not Wearing Hostage Pin to the Golden Globes
Gal Gadot at the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California on Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025. Photo: Dan MacMedan-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
Israeli actress Gal Gadot took to social media on Wednesday to explain why she did not wear to the 82nd Golden Globes this past weekend a pin in solidarity with the 100 hostages still held by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip for more than 450 days.
In a message shared on her Instagram Story, the “Wonder Woman” star, 39, started by clarifying that contrary to Israeli media reports, she was “never forbidden” by Golden Globes organizers from wearing to the award ceremony on Sunday night in Beverly Hills a pin that featured a yellow ribbon, which is a symbol that calls for the return of hostages abducted by Hamas terrorists from Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Some people chose to tell a story that never happened, and I prefer to focus on what’s real and truly important — our hostages,” she wrote. She then detailed her conscious decision not to wear a pin with a yellow ribbon to the Golden Globes — a move for which she was widely criticized by many pro-Israel supporters on social media. The “Red Notice” star explained that she instead chose to show solidarity with the hostages by wearing a yellow sapphire ring to the award show, where she was a presenter.
“Everyone expresses their support in a way that suits them. I chose to share a post with global reach and wear a yellow ring as a symbol of solidarity,” she wrote in the Instagram Story. “What truly matters is that the hostages come home now. My heart is with the families waiting for them. May we experience quieter and safer days.”
The message on her Instagram Story was written in both English and Hebrew, and was accompanied by an image of a yellow ribbon.
Before the Golden Globes took place on Sunday night, Gadot uploaded a post on Instagram that featured a statement and photos about the remaining 100 hostages with a focus on 20-year-old Israeli hostage Liri Albag, who was featured in a video that Hamas released on Saturday. Albag was taken hostage along with six other female soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces at the Nahal Oz army base on the Israel-Gaza border during the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack in southern Israel in October 2023. The five women are still held hostage by Hamas.
Gadot wrote in her Instagram post on Sunday afternoon that while she prepared to attend the Golden Globes, “my heart is heavy, and my soul aches knowing the hostages are still there [in Gaza].” She added: “Every day that passes without an agreement puts their lives in greater danger. I can’t stop thinking about the families, waiting for them, counting the hours, the minutes, clinging to hope. They must come home. We all deserve to see them return, alive. Bring them home now.”
Gadot presented at the 82nd Golden Globes wearing a custom black silk Giorgio Armani Privé long sleeve gown that she styled with Tiffany & Co. jewelry and a yellow sapphire ring.
A screenshot of Gal Gadot’s Instagram Story.
The post Gal Gadot Addresses Controversy Over Not Wearing Hostage Pin to the Golden Globes first appeared on Algemeiner.com.