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This rabbi and singer-songwriter is in a New York state of mind
(New York Jewish Week) — Rabbi Steven Blane is nothing if not an innovator: Way back in 2010, a full decade before the pandemic made Zoom services a regular part of Jewish life, Blane launched an exclusively virtual synagogue, Sim Shalom.
Among the many hats he’s worn throughout his professional life, Blane has also launched the Jewish Spiritual Leadership Institute, an online “trans-denominational” rabbinical and cantorial school. Prior to his virtual pursuits, he was a congregational rabbi — and before that, a cantor — and for many years he was also an audio producer, running one of the first companies to record audio books.
Now, at 66, Blane is pursuing yet another career: that of a professional musician. A dedicated singer and songwriter, Blane just released his tenth album, “Songs for New York Lovers,” a collection of 13 jazzy songs, many of which are inspired by the city. These days, in addition to his online Jewish ventures, Blane can be found performing live just about weekly, particularly at Silvana, an Israeli cafe and music venue in Harlem, which is run by “the greatest people on the planet,” he said.
When it comes to performing, “I can’t get enough,” Blane told the New York Jewish Week via a Zoom interview, in which he had both his guitar and a keyboard close at hand. (Ed. note: If you’re a journalist and have never had a source serenade you, I suggest you call up Blane and remedy this immediately!) “I always wanted to be a songwriter, that was my passion right out of college,” he said.
Many of Blane’s original songs reference famous New York City locations, such as “Central Park,” “The Ramble” and “Bleecker Street,” and one tune is even called “New York Is My Girlfriend.” Fittingly, Blane’s virtual background, as we spoke, depicted Central Park in the snow.
As a young man, however, Blane — who counts Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Billy Joel and Elvis Presley among his musical influences — thought his future lay in Nashville. In his early 20s, Blane packed up his car and started driving to Music City, where he hoped to make it as a songwriter. Along the way, however, he got cold feet and turned around. “I have slight regrets about not fulfilling that dream then,” Blane admits. “But don’t get me wrong: I’m very grateful. We’ve had a great, great life.”
Upon his return to New York, Blane gigged around the city, and even landed a role in the 1979 Broadway adaptation of a Leo Tolstoy story, “Strider: The Story of a Horse,” where he played a “gypsy.” At 30, he launched his audio production business and, from there, fell into the professional Jewish world by accident because, in synagogues, he could get paid to sing. “I was making money as a cantor,” he said. “I wasn’t selling religion, I was singing at a high level for a few alter kockers [old people] who appreciated it.”
In the ensuing years, Blane held various cantorial and rabbinic positions in the tri-state area (he was ordained by Rabbinical Seminary International in 2001) but regularly butted heads with more traditional factions in Conservative Judaism that felt playing music on Shabbat was taboo.
Eventually, Blane realized he needed to forge his own path — which led him to launch his online shul and rabbinical school, as well as his concept of “Universalist Judaism,” which, according to Blane, “is just an innate concept within its DNA that there are no barriers to Jewish worship, that there are no barriers to relationships in Jewish universalism.” All are welcome in Jewish Universalist spaces, said Blane — who, upon noticing my son’s budgerigar flying behind me during our conversation, stressed that parrots are welcome, too.
“I’m here for your Jewishness, to support you, to educate you, to be there for life cycles,” he said.
Blane began to pursue songwriting again in earnest in 2014, when he and his wife of 36 years, Carol, left the Bergen County, New Jersey home where they raised their three grown daughters and returned to New York City.
Here, Blane finds inspiration everywhere he looks. “I love the vibe, I love the energy,” he said of the city. “I walk around the city every day. My exercise now is to walk about five or six miles a day.” His favorite haunt, he said, is the Lower East Side — which is certainly a shlep from the Upper West Side one-bedroom where he and Carol live. He particularly likes the corner of Grand and Essex Streets, where his aunt used to reside.
For Passover this year, on Wednesday evening, Blane will perform at the Knickerbocker Bar and Grill on University Place. He’ll lead a group of celebrants through a 45-minute seder before a festive meal that includes braised brisket of beef and apple walnut strudel. “It’s the funnest seder — you have all these people from the neighborhood, and a few kids,” Blane said. “Before COVID, [it was] packed to the gills. So they’ve been trying to build it up again.”
Pre-COVID, Blane was also known for his High Holiday shows at the classic Bleecker Street rock club, The Bitter End.
Usually, however, Blane keeps his rabbinic identity separate from his singer-songwriter identity — at least officially. Though he may not introduce himself onstage as a rabbi, he sees his current dual careers as informing one another. “Performing for me is davening,” he said, using the Yiddish word for prayer. “It’s a spiritual event. Everything comes together.”
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She claims she saw Hitler’s ashes and danced with Goering. But is any of it true?
Hitler and My Mother-in-Law
By Terese Svoboda
O/R Books, 416 pages, $23.00
Patricia Hartwell had many stories from her time as a correspondent for the US Office of War Information. Once, she said, she took a picture with Adolf Hitler’s ashes so American citizens would see that the war was over. It’s a thrilling tale, but nobody knows if it’s true.
The mystery surrounding this photo — where it is, if the ashes were actually Hitler’s, whether there even was a picture — takes center stage in Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, a lengthy memoir by author Terese Svoboda.
As a correspondent for the US Office of War Information during World War II, Hartwell was the first female reporter to arrive at Dachau and Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. She also pocketed several of Hermann Goering’s medals. Well-researched, engaging, and occasionally cringe-inducing in its depiction of awkward interactions between Svoboda and Hartwell, the book paints Hartwell as a woman who was both morally dubious and undeniably impressive.
Svoboda, author of the novels Cannibal and Dog on Fire, has plenty of reasons not to believe her mother-in-law, who died in 1998 at age 82. She lied in an oral history of Hawaii’s State Foundation on Culture and the Arts about being accepted into Harvard Law School in 1936, even though women weren’t admitted there until 1950. She claimed several times to have been close friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and that she was invited to stay in the White House on occasion. No records of such a relationship with the former-First Lady exist.
While Svoboda doesn’t hold back her criticisms of her mother-in-law — and she has plenty — the memoir does not demonize her. Instead, Svoboda attempts to understand her mother-in-law’s penchant for embellishment in the context of the patriarchal society in which she lived, one that forced impressive women to be quiet about their achievements. Maybe struggling so long for recognition led Hartwell to feel the need to exaggerate her life story.
The book does not just explore the lies Hartwell told others but also the ones she told herself, such as refusing to believe that her second husband, Dickson Hartwell, a World War II veteran and fellow journalist, beat her children.
And yet among all the falsehoods, there are known facts about Hartwell’s life that seem stranger than the ones she invented. During the Allied occupation of Germany, Hartwell served briefly as the mayor of Berchtesgaden, a resort town where Hitler and other Nazi leaders vacationed. She got to see a collection of looted art recovered from Goering — and picked out a painting to take home. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for members of the American press and military to take souvenirs, no matter how heinous their origin story.
The piece, one of Lucas Cranach’s many versions of “Cupid Complaining to Venus,” was one of Hitler’s favorites. Nearly two decades after Hartwell brought it back to New York, Dickson sold the painting, apparently without her permission, to E. A. Silberman Galleries in order to purchase a small newspaper in Arizona. The Jewish-owned art firm then sold the painting to the National Gallery of London for over a hundred times more than what they bought it for.
Hartwell also claimed to have danced with Goering at a party that the American soldiers held the night of his arrest. According to some reports, rather than punishing Goering, the military fraternized with him. Based on her own archival research, Svoboda determines this claim to be plausible.
Why, Svoboda wonders, would Hartwell “want to boast of not only meeting the second most evil Nazi, but dancing with him?” If it’s a lie, it’s one that seems to work against its teller. If it’s the truth, it’s one most people would probably like to keep hidden. To some, whether it’s fiction or not may not be important. But Svoboda contends that to those who want to understand the type of person Hartwell was, the truth behind this story is crucial.
Although Svoboda remembers seeing the photo of Hartwell with Hitler’s ashes, it never resurfaced after the woman’s death. According to Svoboda’s husband, Hartwell’s oldest son, the ashes were not Hitler’s, just a random pile picked for a posed photo to mark the end of the war. No matter who — or what — the ashes belonged to, it’s the power behind the story, one of a fallen dictatorship, that mattered. And Hartwell clearly understood the power of stories.
The post She claims she saw Hitler’s ashes and danced with Goering. But is any of it true? appeared first on The Forward.
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How ‘Spiritually Israeli’ became a slur that isn’t really about Israel
Once upon a time — which is to say, not recently — Israel had a reputation in the West as an underdog. This, combined with its gold-star management of its international image, a practice known as hasbara, led to a perception of the Jewish nation as a scrappy fighter that triumphed over its bullies, the Arab nations that flank each of its borders. Later, Israeli PR successfully marketed Tel Aviv as a gay mecca to prove its character as a progressive leader, and its success in technology to paint the country as the “Start-up Nation.”
Since Oct. 7, this has changed entirely. Now, Israel, not its Arab neighbors, is widely portrayed as the bully. And this association goes so deep that posters online have begun to bring up Israel outside of any context relating to the war, international politics or anything Jewish. In the current parlance, “spiritually Israeli” has taken hold as a catch-all pejorative.
Take, for example, the World Series. The Los Angeles Dodgers — if you’re not a baseball fan, they just won the World Series — are, this year, the spendiest team in the game, known for hoarding wealth and amassing the best players. Other sports impose salary caps to try to keep the playing field relatively equal, and the games more compelling. Not baseball. (It does levy luxury taxes on teams that spend a lot — but, if you’re already paying your star player $700 million, you just pay the tax, too.)
Which means that the Dodgers’ win was not exactly widely celebrated outside of Los Angeles. “Never forget it’s fuck the Dodgers, fuck Israel and fuck ICE forever,” reads one popular tweet on the game. The Dodgers, as several posts put it, are “spiritually Israeli.” Yet another post referred to the team as the “Tel Aviv Dodgers.”
To be clear: The team has no Israelis. The posters don’t mean the team has a partnership with Tel Aviv, or that any of the players are Jewish. They partially mean the team is punching down. And they mostly mean it’s lame to support a team that seemed nearly guaranteed to win.
“Spiritually Israeli” and its ilk are far from the first anti-Israel slang to pop up in the past two years. Various pejoratives like “Isn’treal” and “Israhell” have been common for years, and gained traction after Oct. 7. Long before the “Hot Girls for Cuomo” and “Hot Girls for Zohran” battle arose in the New York City mayoral battle, there were influencers posting thirst traps captioned: “#freepalestine.” In short, Israel is becoming deeply uncool.
This is all, of course, just the internet. Israel still has the support of the vast majority of U.S. political leaders, for example, who probably don’t keep track of which influencer is posting what about Israel, much less what outfit they were wearing when they did so.
On the other hand, the internet is where much of culture is manufactured today. And however intangible they may be, language and slang do matter reveals societal currents.
Meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme says “spiritually Israeli” is used to call things “culturally empty.” It’s possible to see this as a rebrand of “rootless cosmopolitanism,” an antisemitic idea used to condemn Jews as a corrupting influence on European society. And that is part of the term’s meaning. But really, in practice, it’s used to describe things that are extremely corporate, too big to fail.
Israel is no longer seen as the underdog. And support for Israel in mainstream arenas — politics, government, some media — is why it has become increasingly, well, unsexy to support the nation. Are you excited about your bank? Or your local Safeway? Just like it’s lame for Starbucks to be your favorite coffee shop instead of somewhere local, or it’s basic to love Taylor Swift instead of a niche musician, it has become cringe to love Israel.
But only among a certain crowd; the people using “spiritually Israeli” are, generally, cultivating an aesthetic of hipsterdom. In practice, though, most people love corporate things; that’s how they got so big. At least one major TikToker built her entire brand on being excited about drinking her daily Starbucks. And Taylor Swift is, of course, one of the most successful pop singers of our time. Israel doesn’t need to be cool to thrive.
So however “spiritually Israeli” it might be, people will continue to like what they like — even if it’s the L.A. Dodgers.
The post How ‘Spiritually Israeli’ became a slur that isn’t really about Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump takes aim at Jews who vote for Zohran Mamdani, calling them ‘stupid’
As voters took to the polls across New York City on Tuesday, President Donald Trump renewed his attacks on mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and the Jewish voters backing him.
“Any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person!!!,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social Tuesday morning.
Trump’s critical comments about Jewish voters casting their ballots for Mamdani, who has drawn sharp criticism from Jewish leaders for his rhetoric about Israel, were not his first.
Last month, Trump told reporters at a press conference with Argentinian President Javier Milei that Mamdani was a “communist” who “hates Jewish people and yet he’s got Jewish people supporting him.”
Recent polls have suggested that more Jews in the city are planning to vote for Gov. Andrew Cuomo than Mamdani. But Mamdani has significant support from Jewish voters, too, including some who have campaigned hard for him.
Trump’s comments echo those he made about Jews who were voting against him in last year’s presidential election, when he said any Jew who votes for Democrats “hates their religion.”
Trump also took to Truth Social Monday night to endorse Cuomo and suggest that he would retaliate against a Mamdani-run New York. “If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required,” he wrote.
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