A man of many works

What sort of Israeli man would contribute to a resurgence of music and literary salons? Dan Shorer.

By CARL HOFFMAN
Updated: MAY 4, 2017 13:11
Dan Shorer (photo credit: PR)
Dan Shorer
(photo credit: PR)
In Europe, once upon a time, there was something called a “salon.” Wikipedia, our ever- growing repository of knowledge on the Internet, tells us that a salon was “a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine the taste and increase the knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace’s definition of the aims of poetry, ‘either to please or to educate.’”
Invented in Italy in the 16th century – where they were often held in bedrooms in which the hostess reclined on her bed – salons soon found a home in France, where they flourished as forums for literature and philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Salons continued to be elite gatherings of intellectuals, artists, musicians, and literati in 19th century France, as well as in Germany, where the hostesses were often Jewish ladies. While the salon phenomenon achieved its greatest expression during these centuries before the prevalence of mass communication, a few salons managed to struggle well into the 20th century – most notably that of Gertrude Stein, whose Paris salon hosted the likes of Pablo Picasso and Alice B. Toklas.
So here are three things that may surprise you: Salons are coming back, it is the Internet that is bringing them back, and some of the most popular of these Internet salons have been organized and hosted not by a French, German or Italian woman, but rather by an Israeli man. What sort of Israeli man would contribute to a resurgence of music and literary salons? Well, his name is Dan Shorer, and the more we learn about his unusual life, the more we realize that creating online art salons is precisely the sort of thing one would expect him to do.
Born in Romania 70 years ago, Dan Shorer made aliya to the fledgling State of Israel in May 1950, at the age of three. “Without asking me, my parents took me on the boat to Israel,” he recalls.
“On the road next to Kibbutz Ma’barot there were a lot of red flags on the ground. My father took one look, turned the car around and said, ‘We’re going somewhere else.’ He was a capitalist, and he had his own factory in Romania.”
The family moved into an apartment in Tel Aviv.
“I also remember the first day I went out to play with the kids. I was dressed the way kids dressed in Europe, my mother making sure I had my little bow tie, but I didn’t understand the kids and the kids didn’t understand where I had landed from. I don’t remember the procedure of becoming Israeli. Because the next thing I remember is being chased by other kids, all in Hebrew.”
The Shorers stayed in Tel Aviv until 1956, and then moved to Haifa, where Dan started school. Although he claims to have “hated every minute of being in Haifa,” it was Haifa that set him on the road to becoming who he is today.
“I finished school when I was 16. I didn’t know what to do, so I taught bowling for a time, ten-pin bowling. I got to know several people from the Haifa Theater who said I had a good voice and told me about some auditions. So I went, and I started working at the Haifa Theater when I was 16½. Then one day I saw posted on a wall a notice about a scholarship from the American Embassy to go study in the States. I didn’t think twice. I filled out the forms, and two months later I got a phone call – very mysterious – from a guy who mentioned my application and said he wanted to talk to me. Four hours later I had a full scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley.”
Shorer was at Berkeley at just the right time – the days of the free-speech movement, the first campus demonstrations in the US, and the early stirrings of the counterculture ferment that became iconic of the 1960s in America.
“I reached heaven. I couldn’t believe that this was a place where people were supposed to be learning anything. All the kids sitting around on the grass with guitars. I took philosophy and the history of art. It was a fantastic period of time.”
Among his memories of that period is being teargassed by the National Guard during a campus demonstration, and hearing concerts by Joan Baez and a then barely known folk singer named Bob Dylan.
Shorer finished his studies at Berkeley, bought a car and spent six months slowly wending his way across the US to see the “real America.” He returned to a somewhat different Israel than the country he had left, and, he says, “started to feel that this may not have been a very wise move to come back. I started doing a lot of things. I went back to theater. I started teaching. It was fun, but everything around started to be more and more oppressive. At Haifa University there were a lot of people from Kach [extreme right-wing movement], and they were very violent with everybody.”
Thus, before long, Shorer was off again, this time to open and manage a restaurant on the Greek island of Spetses.
“Then I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go back to school and study something that is real.’” That moment of epiphany led him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and an MBA degree. This was followed by a rather lengthy stint as CEO of a consulting firm called The Profit People.
“It was a very boring period in my life and it took me 30 years to understand how boring it was. I opened up 12 offices around the world and had a staff of 600 people.”
Along the way, however, Shorer found time to touch base occasionally with his inner self. Possessing what might be called a “radiophonic” voice, he lent his skills as a voice-over artist, actor, theater director and writer. He was also first assistant director for several films, notably Moses the Lawgiver and The Sorcerer.
Asked what exactly a “first assistant director” does, Shorer explains.
“He’s the one who makes sure that everyone does what he’s supposed to do. He makes sure that the scene for tomorrow is all prepared, you have all the cars at the place, everyone knows his lines, and sometimes he’ll also direct all of the actors that aren’t the main role actors – the extras, the bit-part players, and so on. Also, the assistant director is the guy who gets the script and breaks it down. He’ll say that for this scene, we’ll need so many cars, so many guns, so many soldiers, etc. You have to prepare all of this so the producer will know how much it’s going to cost.”
THEN ALONG came another life-changing moment, this time in the form of the worst terrorist attack in US history, the September 11, 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.
“I sold the company just after 9/11,” he says. “That’s when I said to myself, ‘No more.’ I sold out everything I had. At the time I was living outside of Barcelona in Spain. I went on the Internet and found myself buying a ticket to Israel. I never thought I would return to Israel. Never.”
Yet return he did, and soon established a small niche publishing house called Pandora Boox. While publishing several books that focused on the rise of political and religious extremism, Shorer began to moderate a series of literary encounters, titled “The Books You Always Wanted to Read but Never Dared.”
“People are scared of literature,” he explains. “Let’s take Ulysses by James Joyce. If more people would allow Ulysses to talk to them, it would change their lives.
It tells us that you don’t have to be a protagonist to make a difference. Leopold Bloom is anything but a protagonist. He never takes a leading role.
“Some books should be read in a creative way. Not all books should be read from beginning to end. Not all books work like that. Some books you just want to open up wherever, see what it does to you, and then go in one direction or the other direction. The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil is one of those. Ulysses is definitely another.”
Driven by his belief that “art, especially literature, allows us to take life to a different level, following a different rhythm,” and determined to bring the benefits of art to the broadest possible audience, Shorer opened his laptop and went online.
“I was very surprised to see that one of the sessions I did on Marcel Proust had close to 30,000 views.” Thus began U-Sophia, or “Universum Sophia, the universe of wisdom and insight. Where minds meet online.”
Shorer explains, “U-Sophia started by being an online literary salon – a salon littéraire, as the French used to call it. We didn’t do it in the bedroom, we didn’t do it run by a beautiful courtesan. It was run by poor me.
The idea was to invite people to the boudoir – the personal intimate room – where the artist lives. So we held conversations with close to 300 artists.
“I tried to conduct those conversations in a most unconstructed way, allowing them to go in any direction they wanted to go. The people in the conversations with me were very free. Some of them were more like ‘professional interviewees,’ used to being interviewed a lot. There was Andreas Scholl, the famous countertenor, for example. He was very nice and straightforward.
But he was waiting for my questions to answer.
He wasn’t really in the conversation.
We had an online platform that allowed up to 400 people to be with us in the conversation. And then one guy said something like, ‘I’ve been following your concerts now for a month and the concert you gave in London was so much better than the same concert you gave a week later in Paris. What happened?’ Andreas froze for a moment, and then became the real Andreas Scholl.
“The main thing about U-Sophia was to bring the best in music to the couch adventurers, those people who take the couch anyplace they want to go. They don’t physically go anywhere, but that’s no reason for them not to be able to enjoy music from Denmark, Kathmandu or wherever. So we started live-streaming from different parts of the world to see how a musical event is created. There were about 100 of those, from all over Europe, some from the States.”
Shorer now says he wants to turn most of his attention and energy to the written word.
“I’ve decided to go back to writing. I want to write all the books I’ve written in the shower that never made it to paper. The opening line of the book I’m writing now is, ‘If the paper refused my thoughts, there is nothing I can do about.’ That should give you an idea where it’s going. I feel the time is right. I want to focus on the question of how we, who have basically the same IQ as the ancient Greeks and Romans, are supposed to live in the world today.”
Behind every face in Israel is a story. Behind the face of Dan Shorer is a story perhaps more interesting than most, and one certainly worth following.