Itzhak Perlman is featured on the cover of Brain & Life Magazine

Itzhak Perlman uses his fame as a world-class violinist to advocate for accessibility. (Photo credit: Drew Gurian)

Violinist Itzhak Perlman Champions Accessibility for People with Disabilities
By Gina Shaw
Brain & Life Magazine
April, 2023

Perlman, who had polio as a child, has worked diligently to improve access to various spaces for people with disabilities.

When renowned musician and conductor Itzhak Perlman checks in at an airport—something he does frequently with his busy international touring schedule—he often has the same frustrating experience. “I’ll go up to the counter and they won't talk to me,” he says. “Instead, they’ll talk to my assistant. ‘Where is he going? What's the weight of his scooter?’ I always have to say, loudly, ‘I’m right here.’ It’s quite incredible.”

Perlman, who contracted polio when he was 4 years old, has walked with leg braces and canes for most of his life. Now 77, he primarily uses a motorized scooter to get around. Although he never sought the role of advocate for other people with disabilities, his fame has provided visibility, and his frequent travels have given him insight into the stigma and obstacles to accessibility people with disabilities face when they want to do something as simple as eat in a restaurant, go to a concert, stay in a hotel, or fly in an airplane.

“I haven’t really taken on any formal advocacy positions recently, but I’ve done a lot of talking,” says Perlman, who performed at a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth II during George W. Bush’s presidency and at the inauguration of President Barack Obama. He also has received 16 Grammy Awards, four Emmy Awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Kennedy Center Honor. For decades, even before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in 1990, Perlman would meet with architects and designers of performance venues to advise them on accessibility. “When they built the new David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center in New York, I sat down with the architects, and we discussed all the things that would improve access to bathrooms, the box office, seats in the hall, and so forth,” he says.

In December 2022, Perlman returned to perform at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, which with its companion space Massey Hall is often called the “Carnegie Hall of Canada.” When Roy Thomson Hall was built in the early 1980s, Perlman consulted on the blueprints to ensure that it was accessible. “I hadn’t been back since they renovated these spaces in the early 2000s, and I was delighted to see that they’ve changed the configuration of the hall and the seating to be even better than it was when I made my suggestions.”

Expectations at Hotels

Concert halls may be increasingly accessible—some more so than others—but Perlman is less delighted with the approach that many hotels and restaurants take to accommodate people with disabilities. “When I go on tour, I find the hotel situation really quite horrible. I can count on the fingers of one hand the hotels I’ve visited that are truly accessible,” he says. “And the ADA sometimes is just used as a cover by architects who don't really understand what accessibility means. They put grab bars next to the toilet and in the shower and call it accessible. I’ve been in so-called accessible rooms where they have a bench in the shower for you to sit on, but the faucet is on the opposite wall. Who thought of that?”

He’s also frustrated by the “luxury” touches in hotel rooms that end up making them less accessible. “In the fancy hotels, they have the beds very high and the toilets very low,” he says. “Between the high bed and the low toilet, forget about it. It’s like climbing Mount Everest just to go to sleep. It’s these little things that give you the feeling that people don’t really care about what makes our lives easier.”

Perlman has learned to ask for photographs of the specific “ADA-compliant” rooms he will be staying in whenever he makes a hotel reservation. “I didn’t used to do that, but now I do it all the time,” he says. “I don’t want any surprises where I get into a room and can’t reach something. And then there are certain restaurants that I don’t go to because they have three steps to go down to the main floor or something like that. Shops also often have steps.”

Notable Exceptions

Some places do accessibility well, he says. He cites a tactile paved pathway he saw in a shopping mall in Japan several years ago. “It’s narrow, like a footpath, with raised dots so that your cane or even your feet can feel it and you can go straight. It’s also yellow so that people with low vision can see it,” he says.

“London’s black cabs all have ramps that fold out so a wheelchair user can roll right in, with passenger spaces big enough to fit the chair,” he adds as another example of good accessibility. “But that’s rare. Whenever I go someplace and I have a free day, I want to get out and move, but it is very unusual to find ramp cars for rent like the one I have at home.”

Perlman’s dream is to bring architects, interior designers, and decorators together with people who have a wide range of disabilities to discuss meaningful accommodations. “A summit like that would be fantastic, to discuss what it really means to have interior spaces that are truly accessible,” he says.

Embracing Acceptance

Growing up in Tel Aviv, Israel, Perlman never really thought of himself as having a disability. “It was something I accepted without much bitterness, perhaps because it happened when I was so young,” he says. “When I went to school and they told me that gym was out of the question, it was not a big deal. I never thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I wish I could run like everybody else.’ In our neighborhood I had a lot of friends who played soccer, and I’d be the goalie and stop the ball from going through the goal because I had an extra set of legs—my braces. As a teenager, I played Ping-Pong and got pretty good at it. I’d hold my paddle with one hand and use the other hand to hold myself up.”

Itzhak Perlman, wearing braces as a result of polio, often played violin for his parents, Chaim and Shoshana, as a young boy in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Photo Courtesy Itzhak Perlman)

Although Perlman accepted his disability with equanimity, his parents tried to find some sort of remedy. “They didn’t realize that my situation was not reversible, and they believed everything that came their way. A lot of people would visit the house with different ideas to make me walk,” he recalls. “One guy, who was very religious, brought in some parchment with a lot of holy words, and my parents would burn it and I would have to smell the smoke. And I went through all sorts of different diets. I remember having to eat a raw egg yolk every morning. Someone even told them that mercury would help, and I remember there was a green jar full of mercury, and every morning I had to take a drop. Sometimes when I act funny, I think that explains it,” he says jokingly.

Perlman’s parents also took him to see Moshe Feldenkrais, an engineer and a physicist who had developed a form of alternative exercise therapy involving slow, gentle, repetitive guided movements that aim to improve mobility. (The Feldenkrais Method cannot restore function in paralyzed limbs, according to a study published in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine in 2011, although it may boost balance in older adults.) “[Feldenkrais] was talking to me about how the brain operates. I had no idea what he was talking about,” says Perlman.

“My parents would judge whether I was making progress by studying the big toe on one of my feet,” he says. “One time when I started to move it a little bit, they thought it was the greatest thing. I suppose they were devastated by what was going on with me, and I was not, really. It was just one of those things.”

Perlman always wanted to play the violin, but at first his age, not his disability, stood in his way. “It kind of went by the wayside for a while because people thought it was too early,” he says. “These days it’s so different—you'll see 2-year-old kids playing the violin. But after I had polio, I still wanted to play, so my parents found a teacher.

“Did that help distract my mind from the things I couldn’t do?” he wonders, reflecting on how the violin affected his attitude about his condition. “Possibly. My friends always thought I was a little weird, not because I couldn’t walk properly but because I practiced violin two or three hours a day. If you want to do anything well, you have to make that commitment.”

Soon after moving to the United States in 1958, at the age of 13, Perlman performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1963 and then began to tour widely. “The only thing about having a disability while playing the violin is that I had to prove that my music was on a level that had nothing to do with my having had polio,” he says. “You could see it in the reviews. At the very beginning, they would always mention the fact that I was disabled and say things like ‘Despite the disability, it wasn’t bad.’ Now they’re used to me, so they don't mention it.”

Vaccine Advocate

Perlman is deeply concerned by the antivaccination movement that has led to declining rates of immunization against polio and other vaccine-preventable diseases in some communities. In June 2022, an unvaccinated young man in a New York City suburb was diagnosed with paralytic polio after experiencing weakness in his lower legs. It was the second known case of the disease in the U.S. since 1979.

As part of the Perlman School of Music in New York City and Shelter Island, Perlman helps nurture gifted string players under the age of 20. (Photo Courtesy Itzhak Perlman)

“We have a safe and effective vaccine that has been proven over years and years. It's a real shame for anyone to catch polio these days. When I think about it, I get livid,” Perlman says. “A lot of people died before we had the vaccine. When you have a serious case of polio, everything about your life changes.”

Some polio survivors experience postpolio syndrome—a new onset of weakness in muscles that were affected by the polio infection—years after the original illness (typically anywhere between 15 and 40 years). Perlman says he’s fortunate to have avoided that outcome. “I can handle time changes, traveling, a hectic rehearsal and performance schedule, all without much difficulty,” he says.

Perlman has more than 15 performances throughout the U.S. scheduled for the first half of 2023. “The only thing that's changed recently is I need to practice more. I used to not really practice that much and just go play something. But now I say to my wife, ‘You know, practicing really helps,’ and she says, ‘I’ve been telling you that all your life. You need to practice!’”

Read the full article here.