Once again, Bard President Leon Botstein is stepping into the breach.
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Botstein, who directs the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, will perform next month as part of the 60th anniversary celebration of the state of Israel at a time when several other noted Israeli artists, including pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, are staying away.
The commemoration has aroused the ire of some Israelis, who question the government’s plans for celebration amid so much political and economic turmoil. But Botstein, a political progressive and secular Jew, is going his own way, appearing in the week-long program along with American singer Barbra Streisand.
He told the Forward several years ago that he had little patience for artists who canceled performances in Israel because of the goverment’s policies towards the Palestinians.
“I’ve been a lifelong believer in Israel, and I have also been severely critical of many of its policies, which simply puts me in league with thousands and millions of other Israelis,” he said then. “The point of working in Israel is to support its potential and future as a secular democracy. The only countries that deserve to be boycotted are countries that have authoritarian regimes where there is no freedom, no opportunity for artistic expression.”
Botstein has always defied easy categorization. He rails against the failures of higher education, even as he heads the small, selective Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and is the product of America’s most elite universities – Harvard and the University of Chicago.
He promotes an agenda of social change through programs like the Bard Prison Initiative, the largest degree-granting program in the American jail system, while working tirelessly to spread the classical music canon as director of both the Jerusalem Symphony and the American Symphony Orchestra. A frequent critic of pop culture, he makes appearances on both “60 Minutes” and “The Colbert Report” to tout pet projects.
“People have so little tolerance for dissent,” he told the New York Times when criticized or accepting money to establish both an Alger Hiss endowed chair and a Henry R. Luce chair for Bard faculty.
“What happened to free thought?” he said. “Individual ideas? What happened to Thoreau? What happened to this tradition in America? ‘You’re either for ‘em or agin ‘em.’ What are we discussing, subtle issues with a meat cleaver?”
Botstein was born in Switzerland where his physician-parents had sought refuge from Lotz, Poland. The parents, who subsequently moved the family to New York, encouraged their children to become doctors, and Botstein’s sister Eva, is a pediatric cardiologist, while his older brother, David is a biologist who heads the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University.
Predictably, the young Leon did his own thing. After graduating from New York City’s High School of Music and Art in New York at 16, he was pursuing a Ph.D. in history from Harvard and living with Jill Lundquist, when her father, a college trustee, asked him what he might do to help Franconia College. His answer earned him the job of president of Franconia.
Botstein came to Bard in 1975, making him one of the longest-serving presidents of an American college.
His second wife, Barbara Haskell, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, told the Times that his devotion to music has shaped her husband’s ideas about education.
“The notes on a sheet of music are given, just the way knowledge is given,” she said. “It is the way one interprets those notes, what one does with knowledge one has acquired, that makes the life of the mind.”
Botstein’s life is in many ways an improvisation between his crusader’s zeal and classical tastes. When a group of Bard students ran short of money while in New Orleans on a college program to help rebuild the city last winter, Botstein wrote a personal check to keep the program running.
Last fall, when one of his pet projects, Bard High School Early College, an alternative secondary school that lets high school students begin college studies, earned poor grades from the New York City Board of Education, Botstein balked. “Let’s say we’re a vegetarian restaurant and you’re telling me our meat is not good. I’m telling you we don’t serve meat,” he said. Botstein prevailed in getting another review.
Last summer, when the publicly funded Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra faced drastic cuts by the Israeli government, Botstein managed to eke out another year’s funding, contending the savings were too small to matter to the government – but would kill the orchestra.
“Here comes the… Israel Broadcasting Authority [acting] like an overweight person who decides to lose weight by having a haircut,” he said.
On May 7, despite the embattled positions of both the country and the orchestra, Botstein will mount the podium in Jerusalem’s Henry Crown Hall to conduct Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, op. 95 from The New World.