Amit Peled, a faculty member of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore and a world-class cellist, says he was ejected from a restaurant in Austria for speaking Hebrew with two fellow musicians.
Peled, who is Israeli-American, was in a “cozy little Italian restaurant” in Vienna last week with Hagai Shaham, an Israeli violinist, and Julia Gurvitch, a pianist, for a meal before a concert.
“Naturally, we were speaking Hebrew among ourselves,” Peled reported on Instagram. “After taking our order, the waiter returned and suddenly asked what language we were speaking. I replied casually, ‘English and German.’
“‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘What were you just speaking now?’
“I answered, ‘Hebrew, of course.’”
With that, Peled reported, the waiter “looked me directly in the eye and said, ‘In that case, leave. I’m not serving you food.’ Just like that.”
Peled is founder and artistic director of Mount Vernon Virtuosi in Baltimore, a chamber orchestra of recently graduated music students. He has plans to establish a “music house” in Baltimore where young musicians will reside, teach and perform. In addition to teaching at Peabody, Peled conducts master classes and frequent travels abroad.
He said he was shocked and profoundly humiliated by what happened in Vienna.
“But what struck us even more deeply,” his Instagram note says, “was what came next — or rather, what didn’t. The people around us were clearly startled, some offered sympathetic glances… and then, quietly, they went back to their dinners, their conversations, their wine — as though nothing had happened. Welcome to Europe, 2025.”
Peled added: “Still shaken, we stepped onto the stage that evening, hearts heavy, and sought refuge in the music we love. Performing Dvořák’s ‘Dumky Trio’ to a completely sold-out hall offered us a rare kind of healing — a fleeting but powerful moment of grace amid the dissonance.”
In reporting on the incident, the Jerusalem Post noted that Austria has seen a “spate of antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents” this summer.”
The Jewish News Syndicate identified the restaurant that expelled Peled as Pizzeria Ristorante Ramazzotti and described its location as “a quiet street in Vienna’s 2nd district, or Leopoldstadt, which is the city’s most heavily Jewish quarter.”
Two days ago, Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker condemned antisemitism in a social media post, saying, “Antisemitism has no place in our country – neither in words nor in deeds. Jewish life is part of Austria and our fundamental democratic values. Anyone who rejects people because of their Jewish identity is opposing the foundations of our society.”
After Peled reported the incident on social media, he was interviewed by international journalists. Contacted by Fishbowl, the cellist said: “We live in a crazy world and it was a scary, shocking and humiliating situation… Anyway, music will prevail and we will never give that up along with our identity.”
I am not surprised (disgusted, but not surprised) by human bigotry anywhere. During my graduate studies a long time ago I took a year away from school in the US to work for renowned Viennese architect, Hans Hollein, who had been a visiting design professor at my architecture school. One day, while living in Vienna, and on a lunch break in a cafe, I heard a table of Austrian men singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in German (posthumously) to Adolf Hitler. No one there was asked to leave the cafe. I was appalled, and that evening I told my landlady about my experience. She was equally appalled. While I do not tar all Austrians with the same brush, I am sure that Mr. Peled’s experience will have left a lasting mark on him, which his musical prowess will not completely erase. Sadly, bigotry is also a pandemic for which there appears to be no vaccine.
Social media should be able to take care of that restaurants future marketing