On September 9, the Munich Philharmonic inaugurated its 2025/26 season with the sort of solid, crowd-pleasing program that a major orchestra uses to set its tone for the year. From the elegant stage of the Isar philharmonic, the city’s new concert hall, the orchestra performed Elgar’s Cello Concerto featuring the radiant Sol Gabetta, Schubert’s “Unfinished,” and the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Lahav Shani, the orchestra’s chief conductor designate, was on the podium for a concert calibrated to please rather than to provoke.
Yet not even 24 hours after the last bars of Tristan faded away, the Munich Philharmonic and Shani, a 36-year-old Israeli conductor who also leads the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, were thrust into the global spotlight.
On September 10, the Flanders Festival, in Ghent, Belgium, abruptly canceled a long-scheduled Munich Philharmonic concert the following week. The festival oscillated between rationales for the sudden cancellation. On its own event page, the language leaned toward “serenity” and “safety” at performances — vague but recognizably logistical. In other statements, however, it was clear that they had been motivated by politics: despite Shani’s past statements in favor of peace and coexistence, the festival said it lacked “sufficient clarity” about his stance toward the “genocidal regime in Tel Aviv.”
Was it a security assessment or a litmus test? The festival left the line blurry.
Germany’s federal culture commissioner called the decision “a disgrace for Europe”; Belgium’s own foreign minister publicly deemed it “excessive.” In Paris, where the tour went on, Shani was greeted with a standing ovation and tears. A change.org petition in his support gathered nearly 16,000 signatures, including from the legendary pianist Martha Argerich. Overnight Shani unwittingly became a symbol: an artist placed on the fault line between war and conscience. And many institutions and individuals in and outside of the European arts establishment suddenly became very loud about where that fault line ought to run.
Munich answered in a single voice. The orchestra and the city issued a joint statement that rejected “placing Israeli artists under general suspicion and subjecting them to collective punishment” and called the move an “attack on fundamental European and democratic values.” The orchestra’s new Executive Director Florian Wiegand, recently arrived from the Salzburg Festival, said he was “profoundly shocked,” the city’s culture chief Marek Wiechers praised Shani’s “integrative” work, and Mayor Dieter Reiter said he stood firmly with the orchestra and its future chief. Their language was notable for its directness as well as for what it didn’t do: it didn’t ask Shani to clarify his position on the war in Gaza, saying that Shani’s “artistic work and personal conduct” spoke for themselves. “Lahav Shani stands for dialogue, humanism, and mutual understanding,” Munich’s statement ran. In a show of solidarity, Belgium’s new prime minister, Bart De Wever, crossed into Germany to attend a Munich Philharmonic’s rehearsal in Essen, close to the border.
Berlin, meanwhile, did what only Berlin can do fast: it found a hall. Musikfest Berlin added an extra concert for 15 September. Before the downbeat, Shani was invited to the Bellevue Palace. After the meeting, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the Ghent decision “klar antisemitisch” — clearly antisemitic. The phrasing landed with awkward and telling force. It illustrated a persistent confusion in German public life between Israeli and Jewish, and a tendency to treat offense to the former as injury to the latter. The president’s statement, posted by his own office, explicitly grounded its verdict in Shani’s Jewishness — “the performance of a Jewish artist…made dependent on distancing himself from the Israeli government” — a framing that reveals as much about Germany’s reflexes as it does about Ghent’s motives. The line between protecting Jewish life and policing discourse about Israel continues to be blurred in Germany, at cost to both.
The Belgian festival did not bar Jews; it fired an Israeli. That can still be antisemitic by effect or logic. But Germany’s political class reaches for the antisemitism label so quickly, and so categorically, that it erases the possibility that one can object to Israel’s government without targeting Jews qua Jews. If you care about Jewish life in Germany, you should want that distinction recognized rigorously. If you care about Palestinian life, you should want it, too. And if you care about art, you should be allergic to protocols that reduce performers to mouthpieces.
The rest of the month turned into a running referendum on where artistic authority sits, with politicians, journalists and cultural figures in Munich (where I live) and beyond weighing in on the Shani affair.
In late September, the online music periodical VAN published a provocative analysis of the episode, “Selective Empathy.” In it, Hartmut Welscher, the magazine’s publisher, editor-in-chief and one of its founders, argues that German classical music’s reflexive defense was a missed chance to demonstrate equal solidarity with Palestinians, or to censure Israel’s conduct more plainly. I understand the thrust of Welscher’s argument and I don’t gainsay the larger moral indictment of German public life since Oct. 7, 2023. But I don’t believe the Ghent flare-up was the right occasion, or Lahav Shani the right proxy, through which to stage that reckoning. If anything, making Shani a stand-in for a national debate cheapens it, collapsing the difference between open-ended art and partisan alignment into a brittle litmus test no orchestra can pass without harming its purpose.
Start with Shani himself. There has been nothing truculent or self-excusing in his comportment — no waving of flags, no sloganeering from the rostrum. When pressed, he has spoken of reconciliation, of the necessity (and fragility) of dialogue; he has conducted mixed ensembles across borders; and he has done so with a kind of unobtrusive decency that resists being instrumentalized by either side. Even the German government’s defense of him boils down to a simple point: you cannot fight polarization by canceling those who are demonstrably trying to de-polarize. Condemn a policy, yes; draw red lines around hate, yes; but be extremely careful before you punish artists whose record points toward repair rather than rupture.
On September 11, a day after Ghent’s disinvitation, the season’s other conductor-as-citizen story played out at the BBC Proms in London. The Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov, leading the BBC Scottish Symphony, waited until after the program to condemn his country’s military campaign in Gaza as “atrocious and horrific.” The station cut the broadcast before the speech—saying it hadn’t been informed — but video footage taken by members of the audience and posted to social media went viral.
“Israelis-Jews and Palestinians won’t be able to stop this alone. I ask you all to do whatever is in your power to stop this madness,” Volkov, 49, implored the Proms audience. “Every little action counts while governments hesitate and wait. We cannot let this go on any longer, every moment that passes puts the safety of millions in risk.”
Speaking days later to the Times of London’s Jessica Duchen, Volkov clarified that what Ghent did by disinviting Shani was the wrong kind of action. Requiring artists to speak out, he told her, is just as misguided as demanding that they “shut up and play.”
“We cannot make it a test for every person in a concert hall, to see if they are anti-fascist enough for us. What we have to do is have solidarity with each other. Work together. Listen to each other,” he told The Times.
Days later, Volkov was arrested in Israel at a protest near the Gaza border; in an interview he said he would not work in Israel “for the foreseeable future.” That is a conductor making an explicit political choice and accepting the fallout.
Volkov’s statement was not unique; Israeli and Jewish artists across Europe have publicly mourned the dead in Gaza, called for a cease-fire, and questioned Israel’s leadership in the strongest possible terms. One of the salutary features of this past year has been an insistence by many artists on the right to hold complexity in public, to look and sound ambivalent, to refuse the demand that every utterance end with a hashtag. That these gestures are uneven, sometimes contradictory, is not proof of hypocrisy so much as evidence of what the best art does: it makes space for serious thought which the news cycle cannot accommodate.
A recurrent analogy in the Ghent chatter has compared Shani’s disinvitation with Valery Gergiev’s swift ouster after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. (Gergiev, Shani’s predecessor, led the Munich Philharmonic from 2015 until 2022). But the difference is not subtle. Gergiev’s long, explicit allegiance to the Kremlin, the photo-ops, the cultivated role as a cultural arm of state power, and his refusal to dissociate himself from that power made his case unusual even by the fraught standards of cultural politics.
Even so, the Gergiev precedent hangs over this debate like a cautionary tale. That decision, whatever one thinks of its wisdom, was made in response to decades of open alignment with Putin’s regime and, at a minimum, to silence in the face of an ongoing invasion. It targeted speech and association Gergiev actually made — or pointedly refused to make.
The Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis, whose main orchestra, MusicAeterna, is based in St. Petersburg, offers yet another typology: a maestro who built his world-class ensemble on Kremlin-linked money (VTB, a bank on the international sanctions list) and proceeded, post-invasion, largely by tact and silence. He has been dropped by halls and festivals; some defenders argue that silence can be protective when 150 livelihoods — the combined forces of his orchestra and chorus — depend on you and speaking out, for instance, by just calling what is happening in Ukraine “a war,” can land you in prison. The opera director Peter Sellars, who has collaborated with Currentzis on stagings of works by Henry Purcell and Jean-Philippe Rameau put it this way in an interview with me earlier this year: Discretion doesn’t equal indifference. You can trumpet truth from Paris; it’s different if your team is in St. Petersburg.
You don’t have to agree with Sellars to see that “speaking” and “not speaking” are not morally simple categories. If audiences can sit through the three hours of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux and miss the anti-war argument radiating from the stage, as Peter Sellars mordantly observed, then the corrective is not to force artists to deliver stump speeches before downbeat.
Shani’s record points in a different direction than either the Russian or the Greek maestro: he has steered clear of hasbara (Israeli propaganda), argued for reconciliation, and kept his public interventions restrained and humane. Conflating these cases risks making boycotts feel arbitrary, which is the surest way to discredit them even when they are necessary.
This is where Shani’s particular biography matters. He is a protégé of Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli-Argentine conductor, pianist and peace activist, and has appeared with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded by Barenboim and the Palestinian scholar Edward-Said and made up of Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. And he leads an Israeli institution that fosters dialogue through educational and performing initiatives, including the Arab Jewish Ensemble Shesh-Besh, which was founded in 2000. None of that grants him immunity from critique. It does, however, show that a life in music can be oriented toward coexistence without passing a weekly social media purity test. You can dispute what symbolic ensembles change in the real world, but you can’t in good faith paint Shani as a cheerleader for Israeli power.
In a recent interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, the director Amos Gitai — whose cinema has anatomized Israeli violence, Palestinian dispossession, and the fraught textures of home and memory more searingly than almost any other Israeli filmmaker — warns that broad-brush cultural boycotts function as a “party for Netanyahu.” They flatten the very complexities artists work to keep visible and reward the political actors most invested in reducing an entire culture to a flag. Gitai is not calling for silence; he is calling for a cultural politics precise enough to hurt the right targets and humane enough to keep people talking. If we mean to combat extremism, we cannot do it with theater that only performs moral certainty.
In the face of the brutality and carnage Israel has inflicted on Gaza, its society remains robustly pluralistic, with the intelligentsia and creative class often engaging in the most enraged critiques of how the war and the policies of Netanyahu’s right-wing government has corroded the Jewish State. Cultural boycotts target and exclude many of the most progressive Israelis from the rest of the cultural world. Full stop. Such performative acts weaken precisely the part of Israeli society that resists authoritarianism. Cancelling Israeli musicians, filmmakers and artists hands Netanyahu what he wants — fewer Israeli arguments, less Israeli dissent.
The zero-sum logic of blanket boycotts and cancellations, arguing that any “platforming” of Israeli artists normalizes genocide and helps launder Israel’s crimes, turns people into symbols — and symbols make bad art and worse politics. Israel’s cultural field, meanwhile, is not a monolith marching in lockstep with a government whose policies many of those artists detest. In the film world alone, consider this fall’s Ophir awards, Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars. Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s The Sea, about a Palestinian boy (played by Muhammad Gazawi, a 13-year-old Arab Israeli) on a solitary quest to reach the Mediterranean, won Best Film. The country’s culture minister threatened to cut funding if the academy did not change “anti-Israel” criteria.
And then there’s Nadav Lapid’s searing new film Yes, which premiered at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in May. It’s a hellish satire set in the late aftermath of Oct. 7 in which an artist-clown (Ariel Bronz in a virtuosically unhinged performance) debases himself to satisfy obscene demands from those in power: a vision that reads as an unflinching interrogation of a traumatized, morally unmoored Israeli society. I bring it up to indicate the range of what Israeli artists are saying at this moment—and to notice that the most uncompromising indictment of Israeli reality in the past two years could only have been made, with this kind of intimacy and rage, by an Israeli.
If your aim is to isolate a government and the policies it enacts, train your pressure on the people and supply chains that sustain those policies, not on artists whose work demonstrably expands the space for dissent inside Israel and complicates the caricature outside it. Israel’s intelligentsia is not marching in formation. It is, right now, producing films like The Sea and Yes, arguing against the government at real cost, and keeping open the fragile channels where Israelis and Palestinians still play and speak together. That’s not “normalizing” or “platforming” anything. That’s refusing the narcotic clarity of the zero-sum.
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What, then, of Germany? The right critique, it seems to me, is not that Germans missed their chance to declare solidarity with Palestinians in the Ghent episode, but that German discourse has still not found a stable register in which one can say three sentences at once: that October 7 was a grotesque crime; that the campaign in Gaza has been a humanitarian catastrophe; and that both the Palestinians and the Israelis deserve life, dignity, sovereignty, and security. A society that struggles to say those sentences together will naturally seek tidy stages on which to pantomime them.
“Selective empathy” doesn’t quite capture what happened when German institutions rallied around Shani. Yes, there is a chronic selectivity in the German public’s sorrow—toward Gaza, toward Arab grief more broadly—and it is a selectivity exacerbated by the country’s singular historical burdens. (One need not rehearse the bans on pro-Palestinian demonstrations in late 2023, or the skittish cultural cancellations, to know how badly those early weeks and months went.) Yet the Shani defense read less like kneejerk pro-Israelism than a defense of an artist who, despite his long record in promoting coexistence and peace through music, was turned, by some, into a symbol of his government’s crimes.
Shani is not the index by which to measure German seriousness about Gaza. That measure is elsewhere: in arms exports and court cases; in whether this country affirms its obligations to Israel’s survival while also acknowledging its responsibilities to universal human rights and the laws of war; in whether German media can sustain a vocabulary that is not merely defensive or accusatory but analytical; and in whether, if and when the conflict ends, German cultural institutions are places to which Israelis and Palestinians both feel invited to perform and create. That is the horizon against which September’s cancellations and ovations must be seen. Shani’s baton will keep marking time.
In practical terms, that means dialing down performative purity tests and doubling down on specific, targeted, factual speech. It means defending artists—Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Jewish, anyone—who make space for hard listening. It means learning from someone like Barenboim, whose interventions aren’t Twitter-sized but fill entire institutions. He built an orchestra and an academy to embody the arguments he wanted to make.
After Ghent’s disinvitation, it took Shani nearly a week – an eternity in today’s media landscape – to formulate a response. When he finally spoke, on September 16, the morning after the make-up concert in Berlin, he didn’t offer the performative self-abnegation the Ghent ultimatum had demanded, nor did he stage rhetorical counter-attack or a public lashing-out.
The conductor who refused to be instrumented did not turn to slogans. He described the grief in Israel after 7 October and the “deeply distressing” images from Gaza. He wrote that “it is impossible to remain indifferent to the suffering of civilians in Gaza,” and that “everything must be done to end the war as soon as possible.” He thanked colleagues and politicians and honored the invitation to play in Berlin. He also took the opportunity to correct the record by showing that his job with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra – an institution that in 2024 received just shy of 13% of its budget from government subsidies – does not make him Netanyahu’s stooge.
“I was entrusted with the musical leadership of the Israel Philharmonic after a long line of some of the greatest and most humanitarian musicians, like Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the orchestra’s very first musicians – Jewish refugees who had managed to flee Europe – Leonard Bernstein, and Zubin Mehta. The Israel Philharmonic is a unique example of the freedom artists should have to perform, as from its founding it has been governed by its musicians. Under their guidance, the advancement of classical music has always gone hand in hand with efforts to connect people within Israel and between Israel and the world,” he wrote. Spoken like a true mentsch.
The recent mass demonstrations in Berlin, where tens of thousands marched for an end to the war in late September mark a real shift in public discourse here: a large cross section of Berliners now insists that the killing in Gaza stop, that Israel be held to account for its crimes and that German complicity be scrutinized. That is what civic space is for; that is what political speech is for. One of the organizers was Michael Barenboim — violinist, son of Daniel, a German Jew, former Dean of the Barenboim-Said Akademie — who stood near the stage at Alexanderplatz and told the daily taz that the protest against German policy was already mainstream, and that “Stoppt den Völkermord” (“Stop the Genocide”) is a slogan behind which many can gather. (Barenboim fils has also said that he will no longer perform with the Israel Philharmonic and can’t see himself return to the country in next “ten or 20 years.” While expressing admiration for Shani, he also views him as a legitimate target for boycotts as a “cultural ambassador for Israel.”)
Let those arguments play out in the streets, the Bundestag, the op-ed pages, and the courts. Let them play out in film, too—Gitai’s medium, where the language of ambiguity can be held longer than a rally sign allows. But let’s be careful about the uses of the concert hall. It is not a neutral space, and yet it is also not a tribunal.