For several years now, Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian intellectual Edward Said have been using their personal friendship to search for larger methods of bridging the gap between their two fundamentally opposed peoples. But perhaps more powerful than Barenboim’s music or Said’s words is their joint realization that these things alone are not enough to change the course of the Middle East. Instead, they believe in humanizing each other, for all the world to see. “What is striking about these two friends… is how different they are. Not because one is an Israeli, one a Palestinian – they are, as individuals, temperamentally opposed: one, easy, expansive, the other, Said, more cautious, despite his outspokenness.”