Orchestrating Peace: Can performance change the world?

Yoram Meital, professor in the Department of Middle East Studies and chair of the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy at Ben-Gurion University, will be a special guest in a Sept. 21 program on campus that will consider the potential effect of music as an instrument of peace.

Meital will participate in the panel discussion titled ?Can Performance Change the World?? as part of ?Orchestrating Peace,? a collaboration between the Greenberg residency, the Department of Music, and the Office of Jewish Student Life and Interfaith Programming at Skidmore.
?Orchestrating Peace? will include a screening of the 2006 Paul Smaczny film, Knowledge is the Beginning, Daniel Berenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra,
followed by a light dinner and a panel discussion titled ?Can Performance Change the World?? Music Professor Thomas Denny will chair the panel, which will include Meital as well as the following participants: Meena Bhasin, violist and fellow of the Academy (a program of Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute); Israel Ibrahim Miari, theater director for Peace Camp Canada and Building Bridges for Peace; and Yael Rubenstein, principal cellist, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and New England Conservatory of Music.

The movie will be screened at 5 p.m. in Filene Auditorium, with a light dinner at 6:30 p.m. in the Filene lobby. The panel begins at 7 p.m. in Filene Auditorium. Admission to both the lecture and to ?Orchestrating Peace? is free and open to the public.

Meital is this fall?s Greenberg Middle East Scholar-in-Residence at Skidmore. His residency, which runs through mid-October, combines teaching and public lectures.

Meital is the author of Peace in Tatters: Israel, Palestine and the Middle East (2005, Lynne Rienner Publishers). The book ?points out persuasively the great damage done to the prospects for peace by the success of the Barak, Clinton, Sharon, and Bush administrations in entrenching the view that the Palestinians were exclusively to blame,? according to Philip C. Wilcox, Middle East Journal.

Meital earned bachelor?s, master?s, and doctoral degrees in Middle Eastern history from Haifa University and held a post-doctoral position as senior associate member at St. Anthony's College, Oxford. He was recently a distinguished visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at Northeastern University, and has lectured widely in the U.S. as well as Europe, Turkey, Egypt, and throughout Israel.

His other publications include Egypt's Struggle for Peace: Continuity and Change, 1967-1977, and articles and chapters on such topics as the Egyptian perspective on the October 1973 war; the teaching of history in public education in the Arab Middle East; the historical meanings in Arab national songs and especially in those of the Arab world's most well known singer Umm Kulthum; Arab political discourses on peace and terrorism; political prisoners and resistance movements in Egypt; and Jewish life in Egypt.

With support from Skidmore alumna Jane Greenberg, through a fund honoring her late uncle Jacob Perlow, the Greenberg Middle East Scholar-in-Residence Program enables Skidmore to invite esteemed guests and scholars who will, through teaching, lecturing and participation in the life of the institution, educate the Skidmore and larger community on a range of topics concerning life in the Middle East. The program is administered by the Office of the Dean of Special Programs.