On October 8th the Mann Center is slated to host “A Taste of Home,” a live musical event with a cooking demonstration and “storytelling” by celebrity chef Michael Solomonov. A description of the event:
Patrons will enjoy a multi-course family-style meal prepared by one of Philadelphia's most renowned chefs as he shares a rare behind-the-scenes look into his culinary process and inspirations.
Live musical accompaniment will be provided by the touring “Israeli” normalization project Polyphony, an organization with the following self-described mission:
Polyphony Education seeks to transcend entrenched cultural and social barriers between Arab and Jewish communities in Israel through classical music and other related art forms.
What is a cultural boycott?
The broader movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the Zionist state includes the boycott of complicit Israeli cultural and academic institutions and productions. BDS targets “Israeli” universities, governmental bodies, cultural programs and arts organizations because of the role they play in maintaining and normalizing systems of oppression, apartheid, occupation and genocide. Cultural boycott also targets individuals who have been commissioned or recruited to participate in “Israel”’s efforts to “rebrand” itself.
Aside from being a violation of the local boycott of CookNSolo ventures, the Mike Solomonov and Polyphony event at the Mann Center is subject to boycott for two reasons:
Complicity: Both Polyphony and CooknSolo maintain direct associations and sponsorships with official Israeli governmental bodies and complicit institutions and/or lobbying organizations.
Normalization: A normalizing project is one in which Palestinian and Israeli people are presented as equals on opposite sides of a “conflict” with an equal hand in resolving it through a mutual exchange of understanding. This framework renders occupation and apartheid as normal, erasing them as the central cause of the “conflict”. Normalization attempts to obscure the fundamental lack of parity between an occupied people and their occupiers.
Polyphony partners with the Israeli Ministry of Culture, the Israeli Ministry of Education, Haifa Municipality, Akko Municipality, Houra Local Council, The Minerva Institute for Humanity at Tel Aviv University, The Institute for Social Integration at Bar Ilan University, The Israeli Opera, Keshet Elion Music Center, Jerusalem Music Academy, and Zevulun regional council.
Since 2017, Michael Solomonov has been an official culinary ambassador for the state of Israel in partnership with the Israel Ministry of Tourism as noted in the Foreign Agents Registration Act filing pertaining to him. In this role, he promotes tourism on occupied Palestinian land, leads tours, and celebrates Israel at all kinds of speaking and cooking engagements. He even starred in a documentary about “Israeli” cuisine. These endeavors explicitly serve both financial and propagandistic purposes. Through their restaurant group CookNSolo, Solomonov and his business partner Steve Cook have provided direct support to Israeli lobbyists and pro-Israel politicians in the U.S., as well as the Jewish National Fund and Birthright.
Both Polyphony and CookNSolo’s restaurant empire serve a normalizing function. Polyphony tours the world to spread a specific image of “Israel” as a tolerant, pluralistic society. Their project pushes the misleading premise that the “conflict” is due to cultural misunderstandings and polarization. They claim they are “using the arts to build a common future for Arab and Jewish groups based on empathy, equality, mutual respect, and partnership.” However, this “common” future is built on the ashes of Palestine, and does not acknowledge the occupation, apartheid, and genocide that are the foundation of the Zionist project and its bloody maintenance.
As some of the biggest names repping “Israeli” culture and cuisine here in Philadelphia and across the US, Mike Solomonov and Steve Cook serve a similar function. In their writing and speeches, Cook and Solomonov routinely use the common Zionist trope of describing “Israel” as a unique melting pot of peoples coming together to form a new, harmonious yet brashly innovative culture. Simultaneously, they present “Israelis” as somehow having ancient ties to the land their ethnonationalist state now occupies. This contradictory message is supported by the same violence it obscures: the innovations in war and surveillance technology, the imposed starvation of Palestinian people, land theft, crop destruction and the Zionist entity’s attempts to erase Palestinian culture and history.
Cook and Solomonov routinely state in interviews that they hope their food, and the “experiences” they sell at their restaurants, will counter the growing understanding here in the U.S. of what the Zionist project really is.
Who are some of the people behind Polyphony?
Nabeel Abboud Ashkar
Abboud-Ashkar is the founder of Polyphony, building off his experience in a similar project in Europe. The website describes the project’s inception this way:
Polyphony’s early days began when Nabeel Abboud-Ashkar, then a young professional violinist with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, was compelled to answer his community’s need for classical music. At the time, Nabeel’s hometown of Nazareth, Israel, an Arab-majority city, had no musical training opportunities and almost no afterschool development programs for young people in the arts or sports. [source]
According to Nabeel, the Taste of Home event came about because of his personal friendship with Mike Solomonov:
Mr. Abboud Ashkar created “A Taste of Home” with his friend Michael Solomonov, the famous Israeli-American chef whose best-known restaurant, Zahav, was named as “outstanding” by the James Beard Foundation in 2019. “I have been thinking about doing it for many years,” Mr. Abboud Ashkar said. “I shared the fantasy with Michael, and he said, ‘Well, we have to do it.’ “I first met Michael about three years ago. He was very interested in Polyphony, and he started to get more and more involved, and to support it in many ways. And then this idea became not just support, not just an appreciation, but a collaboration. Going through that process together was very enjoyable to me, because of our friendship. [source]
Craig and Deborah Cogut
The foundation really got off the ground when it received financial backing from the Coguts and their donor networks:
In 2011, Craig and Deborah Cogut, two Jewish-American social entrepreneurs, met Nabeel. They were moved by his passion and dedication to social transformation. In 2012, the three of them launched the Polyphony Foundation to support efforts to bring together Arab and Jewish children in Israel by offering them equal opportunities in music. In 2012 Polyphony Education (cc) was established in Israel as an Israeli Article 46 exempt not-for-profit public institution that develops and implements Polyphony programs and activities. With the formidable support of like-minded partners and donors across the world, Polyphony continues to grow in reach and impact. [source]
Craig Cogut was a founding partner of Apollo Advisors L.P. (now Apollo Global Management). The firm was co founded and run by Leon Black, Josh Harris, and Marc Rowan. Leon Black, a major donor to zionist causes, was forced to resign from both Apollo Global and the Museum of Modern Art because of his extensive connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Josh Harris (who appears in the Epstein files) is the billionaire owner of the Philadelphia 76ers and also funds an occupation basketball team named after the year of the Nakba that aims to transition disenfranchised youth into the “Israeli” military. Marc Rowan (also an Epstein associate) was appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump to his so-called “board of peace,” an illegal and immoral ethnic cleansing and “reconstruction” project in Gaza. As a major donor to Penn, Rowan also led the charge to try to cancel the Palestine Writes festival in 2023.
After leaving Apollo Global, Craig Cogut founded Pegasus Capital Advisors, an “eco-conscious” investment manager with a history of investment in “Israeli” water, renewable energy, and homeland security technology companies, and partnering with several UN development funds. Deborah Cogut is an attorney. Craig and Deborah Cogut are such large-scale donors to Brown University that the Brown Humanities Center was renamed after them.
Hannah Gaifman
Born in former Czechoslovakia and educated in “Israeli” schools from her teenage years, Hannah Arie-Gaifman sits on the board of Directors for Polyphony. For 20 years she was the Director of the 92nd Street Y’s Tisch Center for the Arts, leaving the role in 2021. 92NY is an explicitly Zionist organization with a history of both platforming genocidal rhetoric and figures and banning artists for speaking out against genocide. It is currently the target of a robust boycott campaign. In a recent interview about representing Israel in the cultural sphere, Gaifman manages to exemplify the normalizing of violence through culture, while speaking with great pride about the integration of musicians into IOF service, saying “we should celebrate that we have string quartets in the army.”
Lynn Holstein
Board member Lynn Holstein is an American with a career background at the Jewish Museum, The Harvard Design School and the “Israeli” Musem who authored a book on “Israeli Craft” with a narrative identical to the “innovative melting pot” one CookNSolo promotes. In 2000 she “made aliyah” and became a settler in the occupation, directing Stef Wertheimer’s “New Marshall Plan for the Middle East.” [source] Wertheimer was an “Israeli” billionare and former member of the Knesset with a long history of manufacturing arms for the Zionist project, including developing cannons for the Haganah (a Jewish paramilitary organization in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1920 to 1948) and working for Rafael, an “Israeli” defense tech company.
Wertheimer’s “New Marshall Plan for the Middle East” consisted of massive industrial investment and development, primarily in “Israel”, presented as a project of overt normalization to suppress liberation movements in the region, particularly in occupied Palestine. Wertheimer has said, “Coexistence in the industrial park in Arab Nazareth is a good example of coexistence. When people work together, they have no time for nonsense. They're too tired at night to commit terrorist acts. They're satisfied; they engage in producing.” [source] There’s a clear and obvious line to be drawn between Holstein’s previous work on a project of normalization through industry and her current work on a project of normalization through culture.
This isn’t the first time CookNSolo Got involved in a project like this
Michael Solomonov giving a live cooking demo during his "Dinner in the Desert"
In 2018 (one year after Mike Solomonov was made an official Culinary Ambassador for “Israel” in partnership with the “Israel” Ministry of Tourism), the Philadelphia Orchestra traveled to “Israel” to perform, and included in their itinerary Solomonov’s “Dinner in the Desert” event, organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. Lead funders of the endeavor included Joseph and Jeanette Neubauer, along with Connie Smukler. “The itinerary (open to orchestra members and patrons joining the trip) boasts multiple visits with military personnel, including a “VIP visit to an IDF [military] base." [source]
The U.S. State Department also donated roughly 1,000 tickets to schoolchildren for the Jerusalem performance. It is worth nothing here that Solomonov is part of the US State Department’s Culinary Ambassador program, as well being a Culinary Ambassador for Israel, making this a joint project between allied states. Ryan Fleur, interim co-president of the orchestra at the time, described the overt state propaganda function of the trip: “…it's almost as much about the interactions that happen before the [main] musical ones that are as powerful, and it's the work that we use alongside cultural diplomacy in leveraging soft power. The Philadelphia Orchestra in many ways is a stronger advocate for the United States than the United States government is, because we can go anywhere and convey anything through music." [source]
Protestors demonstrating against the planned Philadelphia Orchestra trip
Philadelphians conducted a vigorous local pressure campaign to try and stop the orchestra from traveling and playing there which included long time members cancelling their membership, letters to the editor, disrupting concerts and regular pickets. The pickets were met with aggression as well as a suppression campaign led by the ADL and several Philadelphia Zionist organizations, prominent donors, and members of the media. After failing to block the publication of an op-ed by Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa, Zionist organizers successfully pressured the Inquirer to publish a rebuttal by the local head of the ADL and several other pieces smearing the organizers and BDS followed. In her piece about the event, Susan wrote:
Among the strategies Israel has launched to combat BDS is “Brand Israel," a propaganda initiative that seeks to exploit culture to divert attention from Israeli crimes. Arye Mekel, Israeli deputy director general for cultural affairs, explained it as the "way you show Israel's prettier face.” The Philadelphia Orchestra's trip to Israel is part of this strategy…The orchestra's tour is ultimately a collaboration with an apartheid state that oppresses millions through the use of color-coded IDs denoting one's ethnicity, color-coded license plates, segregated roads, segregated buses, and a two-tiered legal system (harsh military orders and courts for occupied Palestinians and a civilian justice system for Israelis). It is morally indefensible for Philadelphia's world-renowned orchestra to participate in Israel's propaganda, particularly as Israel is murdering and maiming thousands of defenseless human beings now before our eyes.
The Orchestra chose to proceed with the event anyway, and they were accompanied on their trip by representatives of Philly media and culture, as well as Zionist organizations.
“I’m glad they hung in there,” said Debbie Fleischman, a classical music fan who accompanied the Philadelphia Orchestra on the Israel leg of its 2018 tour, which ended Tuesday and had faced pro-Palestinian protests in Philadelphia and Europe — including disrupted concerts in Philadelphia and Brussels. Fleischman, a well-known public relations maven in Philadelphia, is also a classically trained musician. She was one of 55 travelers on a seven-day, $7,500 patron tour organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia that included the orchestra’s concerts in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem, and a tourist itinerary that extended two days beyond Tuesday’s last concert, including a stop at the Ella Valley Vineyards here.
Among attendees were the head of the board of directors of the media property that owns the Inquirer (which sent a reporter to cover the event and which published op-eds smearing BDS organizers before it):
Other patrons on the tour, not all of whom were Jewish, included orchestra board members Richard Worley, Mark Dichter, Joseph Manko, Ken Davis, Sandy Marshall, Connie Smukler, Ramona Vosbikian, and Ronald Kaiserman. Worley also serves on the board of directors of Philadelphia Media Network, which operates the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com.
The trip was ludicrously framed as an equity exercise to make up for past exclusion of Jewish people from the Orchestra board of directors. This conflates responsiveness to and inclusion of Philadelphia’s Jewish population with support and endorsement of a foreign apartheid state oppressing and killing Palestinians.
“We have had a spotty history, if you go back far enough — it was 35 years before we allowed a Jewish board member, that sort of thing,” he said, “and I think we’ve overcome that… But there are still some trailing remnants of, ‘Are we truly responsive to the Jewish community?’”
Guests seated at Zahav chef Michael Solomonov's “Dinner in the Desert”
Similar to the Mann Center event, Solomonov provided a “capstone experience” blending travel with food and musical culture. Like the Nova festival, his dinner was originally meant to take place immediately outside of Gaza, where the occupation had long been maintaining an illegal blockade that restricted access to food, medicine and the free movement of the population, but it was then moved to a winery on a kibbutz closer to Jerusalem. The information the Inquirer deliberately conceals—with only brief mention of concerns for the safety of elite visitors wining and dining just beyond the militarized border of an open air concentration camp—was that this event took place several months into the border protests that made up the Great March of Return. These were protests against the blockade and for the right of Palestinians to return to the villages they were ethnically cleansed from. By June, the month this event was held, there were 13,000 Palestinians recorded injured by sniper fire, rubber bullets and tear gas and 127 had been killed. Several days before this dinner was held Israeli snipers murdered Razan Ashraf al-Najjar a clearly marked paramedic, while firing on her group as they attempted to administer aid to injured protestors.
One of the marquee events was a “Dinner in the Desert” Wednesday with the Israeli-born, Philadelphia-based star chef Michael Solomonov of Zahav fame. A constantly-in-motion presence, Solomonov talked of “our wonderful day together" and used the word epic to describe the undertaking of creating the dinner. It was originally planned as an event under the stars in the Netivot area, near the Gaza border, but was relocated to the inland rolling hills and more contained circumstances of the Ella Valley winery, a kibbutz located near Bet Shemesh. There was just enough room for a series of long, semi-outdoor tables — family-style dining — and an Israeli band. “If there’s one iota of concern, we make different plans.” said Melissa Greenberg, development director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.
Like the narrative surrounding Polyphony, this event served a clear normalizating function, inviting guests to imagine “Israel” as site of complex cultural exchange that could overcome the clear political implications of apartheid and occupation and the violence needed to sustain it. It was also meant to build connections between Philadelphia and the Zionist project specifically in the artistic and cultural sphere during a time when the occupation was waging an international PR battle.
Before departing early from the dinner, the Neubauers pronounced themselves very satisfied with the Philadelphia Orchestra tour. The palpable dialogue between music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and pianist Helene Grimaud during the Haifa performance of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, said Jeanette Neubauer, was an example of the kind of communication that makes music “a bridge builder…in a time that’s very complicated.” Susanna Lachs Adler, board chair of the Jewish Federation, shared hopes to expand the cultural exchange between Philadelphia and Israel to other areas of the arts. [source]
What are these projects meant to obscure?
Like the broader project CookNSolo undertakes with their food empire, each of these endeavors means to entirely erase the reality faced by Palestinians. Palestinian musicians and artists in Gaza have not been able to easily travel the world or welcome visitors to share their work and culture, because for decades they have lived under a stifling blockade making travel to and from Gaza difficult and now almost entirely impossible. Palestinians who do participate in cultural events abroad—like the Palestine Writes Festival— are often met with aggressive and racist suppression and cancellation campaigns orchestrated by some of the very same people who champion these normalization projects.
In occupied Palestine and here on the occupied Lenape lands known as Philadelphia, arts organizations that claim to expand “access” to the arts without ever addressing the structural impediments that make participation difficult to impossible for children and broader communities experiencing systematic oppression are engaging in deliberate obfuscation. Palestine has diverse musical traditions and innovative artists creating groundbreaking work. They are making music and art under apartheid, under bombs, while starving in rubble, while their cultural institutions and museums are destroyed by bulldozers and munitions and while deprived of schools and teachers who held knowledge of deep cultural traditions, many of whom have been murdered or lived shortened and difficult lives because of the occupation and its unceasing violence.
Elham Farah, beloved music teacher from Gaza
On November 12th, 2023, an Israeli sniper deliberately shot Elham Farah, a retired 84 year old music teacher from Gaza’s ancient Christian community. Elham was returning with warm clothes to the church she sheltered in. For hours, snipers rained bullets at anyone who tried to reach her to administer aid and she eventually bled out and died on November 13th. Farah was the daughter of Palestinian poet Hanna Dahdah Farah and a multi-instrumentalist who deeply touched the lives of her students and the broader community, Muslim and Christian alike, who referred to her as “always smiling Mrs Umm al-Orange ("Mother Orange" – a reference to her shock of ginger hair).” “She would participate in everyone's special occasions – she would play for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, and she'd play during Ramadan. She always wanted to make the children happy by playing all the traditional songs and nasheeds (a type of Islamic song or chant played with or without instrumental accompaniment) associated with Ramadan.” “We have lost a beautiful soul," said Rand [her niece], adding, "She was born in Gaza, and may she rest there eternally. We will never forget the sound of her playing the accordion. She would play it with so much love. She loved Gaza and gave so much to everyone. She used to play in church on religious occasions, and she looked after herself in her little apartment until the end of her days." A former student mourning her said “Israel killed my beautiful teacher. Maybe many of her students are no longer in Gaza, but her love is a bond between us." (source)
All across the diaspora, in historic Palestine and particularly in Gaza, Palestinians are using music to preserve stories, express what they’re experiencing, and to try to heal and connect with each other and the international community. They do so under impossible conditions, intentionally inflicted on them by the same occupation these normalizing events try to whitewash. The Sameer Project, a mutual aid endeavor with multiple campaigns includes music programs through their Refaat Alareer Camp Hassan school, which you can donate directly to. An article from July of this year documents the difficult process and importance of rebuilding the Gaza branch of the Palestinian national conservatory after the occupation destroyed their facility, instruments, and archives.
Yousuf Awadallah, an oud player in Gaza, describes saving his instruments while undergoing displacement, having to sell one to buy a tent for his family, and the meaning his playing has for himself and his community.
Philadelphia must refuse the culturewashing of Occupation, apartheid and genocide!
Solomonov and Polyphony’s Highmark Mann Center event exists to culturewash genocide and apartheid. Palestinians cannot simply, to quote Polyphony’s mission statement “transcend entrenched cultural and social barriers.” In fact, they contend regularly with settler and military violence, constant surveillance and physical checkpoints. They have been forced to live in an open-air prison under the brutal occupation blockade of Gaza for decades. Palestinians in Gaza right now cannot simply “enjoy a family-style multi-course meal.” Most struggle to get enough food daily to not starve to death. While projects like Solomonov and Polyphony’s espouse a global multi-cultural exchange, the fact is that Palestinian musicians contend with militarized borders that impede their movement and violence that threatens to destroy their very lives.
This event is one of many of its kind that have taken place and will take place in our city until we address the supremacist ideology of Zionism, refuse to normalize it and address the false and dehumanizing narratives presented by local media. Arts organizations that preach about expanding access to the arts without addressing the structural oppression that makes participation difficult to impossible for Palestinians are evading crucial questions: Who is allowed access? Who is allowed to live? Culture washing attempts to normalize genocide. We must refuse it.
BOYCOTT COOKNSOLO! SHAME ON THE MANN CENTER!