Uncategorized
For ill and for good, this ‘Wicked’ song has become ubiquitous
In the final minutes of the second act of the Broadway musical Wicked, Glinda and Elphaba sing together one last time. They have reached their ultimate, iconic forms: Glinda is the Good Witch, ringletted and resplendent. Elphaba is the Wicked Witch of the West, caped and glittering. They suspect they will never see each other again. And so the two women sing a duet that is part yearbook note, part deathbed confession.
“Because I knew you,” Glinda sings, “I have been changed for good.”
Jenna and her husband watched from their orchestra seats. It was 2005, Wicked was the toast of Broadway, and the tickets were a splurge. When the actress playing Elphaba sang, “It well may be that we will never meet again in this lifetime, so let me say before we part: so much of me is made of what I learned from you. You’ll be with me, like a handprint on my heart,” Jenna’s eyes filled with tears. Her husband reached over and took her hand.
Four months later, they separated. On her birthday that year, Jenna’s ex-husband sent her a card. “Because I knew you,” he wrote, “I have been changed for good.”
“I love the double meaning of that,” said Jenna, now 57 and a volunteer manager at a nonprofit in Maryland. “I have been changed to be a better person, but I have also been changed permanently, for good. There’s no going back.”
The second life of ‘For Good’
Amidst cheers and ballyhoo — to borrow a phrase from Glinda — a second Wicked movie is now hitting theaters. To mark the distinction between this movie and its predecessor, the 2025 edition is called Wicked: For Good.
“For Good,” the song, has attained an unusual second life outside of the musical. In Wicked, Jewish composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz launched a number of forever entries into the musical theater book of standards — “Defying Gravity,” “Popular,” “The Wizard and I” — but “For Good” belongs to an exclusive category: songs that have become staples at graduations, retirement celebrations and funerals. If you see a cap and gown, you are not safe from a heartfelt rendition of “For Good.” If there is a casket on a table, these days you may be as likely to hear “For Good” as you are to hear “Wind Beneath My Wings” or “Candle in the Wind.”
“As a cantor, it’s impossible to hear ‘For Good’ from Wicked without sensing that the song is doing something deeply Jewish, whether or not its creators intended it,” said Neil Michaels of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. “It has become, in many sanctuaries and life-cycle moments, a kind of contemporary niggun, carrying emotional truth where spoken liturgy might fall short.”
“I’ve played it for a funeral,” said Joe Wicht, who has accompanied singers for 18 years at the San Francisco piano bar Martuni’s. “I’ve played it for singers at wedding receptions, too.” But most often, he said, the song is sung “by two best friends.” Duos who request “For Good” are often about to be separated by a move, or redefined by one person getting married, he said. Sometimes, the singers are a parent and a child.
“This isn’t the kind of song where people just willy-nilly decide to sing it in a bar, a la karaoke,” he said. “It’s always sung with intent.”
“It’s always the same scenario — best friends,” he added. “I’ve never heard this song performed between two people in love.”
An anthem of friendship for this generation
Few songs aim to articulate the way that two people can alter each other’s lives and edit each other’s characters, sans romantic love. Schwartz has said in interviews that he wrote the song after sitting down with his daughter and asking her about her best friend. “If you could never see Sarah again and you had one chance to tell her what she’s meant to you,” he asked, “what would you say?”
The song, which lifts some of Schwartz’s daughter’s words directly, literalizes the way two people can blend without losing their own specificity. It begins with a solo for each woman, then they sing in counterpoint, then harmony. “For Good” is sometimes derided as schmaltzy and overearnest. But its impact is indelible: it is a song people rely on to express a kind of love that often goes unsung.
“For those of us who have lost someone,” wrote vocal coach and therapist Petra Borzynski in a recent essay, ‘For Good’ is “the song that speaks the unspeakable: that the person who is gone still lives in every choice we make, every kindness we extend, every moment we choose differently because they existed (for better, for worse).”
Borzynski sang the song for years. Then her mother died, at 59, of ovarian cancer. When Borzynski attempted to sing the song, she recalled, “my voice literally broke.”
When 75-year-old Melbourne resident Des Flannery was in his late 60s, he got into a fight with his best friend, Max. They made up when Des sent Max a written apology, Des’ daughter, Breanna, told me. In his note, Des quoted the opening lyrics from “For Good.” When Max died several years later, Des eulogized him, reciting the lyrics that had helped bring him and his friend back together.
“He wasn’t confident he could get through it without becoming a wailing mess,” his daughter, Breanna Flannery, said. “So reading it seemed the best way to get it out.” (Afterwards, women mourners crowded around Des to praise his bold, emotional writing, unaware that he had been quoting Wicked.)
Drew Wutke, a pianist at Marie’s Crisis, the famed Broadway musical singalong bar in the West Village, is used to looking up from the piano during “For Good” and seeing drinkers crying into their tequila sodas.
“It is the friendship anthem of the last 25 years,” he said.
“I don’t know another way to say it other than: it is a heaven-blessed song,” he said. “The hope that soul-friendship exists, that chosen family exists — those are the wires that get tripped when that introduction starts,” he said, humming the song’s opening notes. “Even though it is lyrically nonsensical at times.” One lyric often maligned even by fans is, “Like a seed dropped by a sky bird, in a distant wood.”
“A skybird! Please!” said Wutke. “We could have workshopped that lyric.”
I’ve heard it said…but what does it mean?
As with the rest of the musical, the universality of “For Good” is both a strength and weakness. Wicked is a musical about a woman who faces cruelty and discrimination because of her skin color. It has been called a parable about fascism, and an allegory for racism and ableism. But no Black actress played Elphaba full-time on Broadway for the musical’s first 22 years. And though one character in Wicked uses a wheelchair, the first time a wheelchair user ever played Nessarose was in last year’s movie.
Though the Wicked movies have been released during a time of rising authoritarianism, the movie’s stars and creators have limited themselves to comments like the joint statement Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande made recently, which spoke of “times like these that feel so divided, as if we’re reading from different pages and different books.”
Though the song is deeply meaningful to listeners, the meaning those listeners derive is not consistent. “At its core, ‘For Good’ is about hineni — ‘here I am’: standing fully present in relationship,” said the cantor, Michaels. “It is the musical embodiment of the Jewish belief that who we become is inextricably shaped by the people who walk beside us.” The song, he argued, “echoes the teaching that every person you encounter teaches you something, that chevruta (sacred partnership) shapes the soul, and that human connection is one of Judaism’s most powerful agents of transformation.”
No one religion or perspective has a monopoly on interpreting Schwartz’s message. Ali, a friend of mine, and a 31-year-old interior designer from Los Angeles, grew up singing songs from Wicked with her friend Brittany. “She would always be Elphaba and I would always be Glinda, even though I secretly wanted to sing the Elphaba part,” Ali said.
Ali was active in the Catholic church, and the girls were often asked to perform at fundraisers and other events. They reserved “For Good” for the finale. “It’s about connection and sisterhood, and friendship,” Ali said. “It was a tearjerker.”
As 14 year olds, the two girls were summoned to perform in a hotel ballroom for a group of about “200 nuns and other women,” Ali remembered. After the song, the nuns thanked them profusely for lending their voices to their cause. The two girls exited the stage to wild applause, then sat down to eat lunch and when they looked back up, “they were literally showing fetuses on the screen and just spewing anti-abortion rhetoric,” Ali remembered. The shift was shocking, she said. “From sisterhood and friendship to hating other women for having abortions.”
Changed for good? Or just good at singing?
“For Good” is usually performed in the context of honoring another person. No matter how tragic or poignant an event is, though, for a theater kid it’s also an opportunity to perform “For Good.” If that sounds cynical, it comes from personal experience: Your author performed the Elphaba part at her high school graduation. I knew that it was my job to move the audience to tears, but my thoughts were largely about how to achieve vocal clarity and resonance. Also, my ankle was broken, and my secular high school had rented out a synagogue for graduation, so I sang the song on the steps of the bima, mindful of the fact that my cast was wider than the steps and if I gestured emotionally during the “like a comet pulled from orbit” harmony I could roll forward and crash to the ground.
But Victoria, 21, who sang the song just a few years ago at her high school graduation in Port Richey, Florida, begs to differ. “I think that vocally, it is not an extremely challenging song,” she said. The real challenge, she said, is allowing yourself to feel the meaning of the song, and conveying that depth of feeling to the audience. “I couldn’t help but really internalize the lyrics I was singing,” she said.
“I was reflecting on all of the relationships I had made with my fellow students, as well as my teachers,” Victoria said. “And I knew then that they had changed and helped create the person I am today, because I knew them.” Among masses who will see Wicked: For Good in the coming weeks, there will be many who weep throughout the title song, and many who call the song saccharine and sentimental. The second group is missing the point. “For Good” is meant to be saccharine. It takes on the most cringe-inducing, embarrassing topic in the world: human connection. If you love it, it probably came into your life for a reason.
The post For ill and for good, this ‘Wicked’ song has become ubiquitous appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
There’s something missing from John Fetterman’s memoir: Israel
There may be no senator who has committed more fervently to supporting Israel, at a greater personal cost, than Sen. John Fetterman.
In the weeks following the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the Pennsylvania Democrat began taping hostage posters to the wall outside his office and wearing a symbolic dogtag necklace. He embraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a pariah to many Democrats. As the civilian death toll in Gaza mounted, he posted constantly on social media to defend the war.
The position has cost him followers, friends, staff and perhaps in the future his seat. But it has also made him a hero in parts of the Jewish community. He received awards from Yeshiva University and the Zionist Organization of America and he was brought onstage as a panelist at the national Jewish Federations of North America convention.
Given the centrality of Israel to his focus in office — he was sworn in only 9 months before Oct. 7 — and how often he posts about it on social media, one might anticipate Fetterman giving it a lengthy treatment in his newly released memoir, Unfettered. The title of the memoir, too, seems to promise candor.
Instead, Fetterman dedicates all of three paragraphs to Israel in a book that largely rehashes lore from before his time in the Senate and discusses his struggles with mental health. These paragraphs — which even pro-Israel readers will read as boilerplate — appear in the book’s penultimate chapter, which is about his declining popularity since taking office.
Some have suggested that the reason some of the media and former staffers turned on me was because of my stance on Israel. Others imply that my support of Israel has to do with impaired mental health, which isn’t true. My support for Israel is not new. I was quoted in the 2022 primary as unequivocally stating that “I will always lean in on Israel.”
There’s a paragraph here about sticking to his morals even if it means defying his party, then:
There was no choice for me but to support Israel. I remembered the country’s history — how it was formed in 1948 in the wake of the murder of six million Jews. Since then, the rest of the Middle East, harboring resentments going back thousands of years, has only looked for ways to eradicate Israel. It took less than a day after the formation of the Jewish state was announced for Egypt to attack it. Every day in Israel is a struggle for existence, just as every day is an homage to the memory of the Jews shot and gassed and tortured.
It’s also clear that war in Gaza [sic] has been a humanitarian disaster. At the time of this writing, roughly sixty thousand people have been killed in Israel’s air and ground campaign, over half of them women, children, and the elderly. I grieve the tragedy, the death, and the misery.
Satisfied with this examination of the hypothesis for his growing unpopularity, Fetterman then moves on to another possible reason: his votes on immigration.
It’s strange to read the Israel passages in light of Fetterman’s full-throated advocacy on any number of issues related or connected to the Israel-Hamas war, including the hostages, campus protests, and rising antisemitism. Even if he did not reckon more deeply with his support for a war that brought about a “humanitarian disaster,” he might have talked about meeting the hostage families, or visiting Israel, or his disappointment that some voices within his party have turned against it.
The production of Unfettered was itself a story earlier this year, and may explain the book’s failure to grapple with a central priority.
Fetterman reportedly received a $1.2 million advance for it, roughly a third of which went to Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger to ghostwrite it. But the two apparently had a falling out at some point, according to the sports blog Defector, which wrote in June that “in the process of having to work with Fetterman, Bissinger went from believing the Pennsylvania senator was a legitimate presidential candidate to believing he should no longer be in office at all.”
Bissinger is not credited anywhere in the book, and does not appear to have contributed. (He refused to discuss the book when a reporter called him earlier this year.)
But the mystifying section about Israel may have nothing to do with a ghostwriter or lack thereof. It may instead be explained by a letter his then-chief of staff wrote in May 2024, in which he said Fetterman “claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos.”
The post There’s something missing from John Fetterman’s memoir: Israel appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
How a Russian samovar connects me to the old country — and my black market dealing great-great-grandmother
For as long as I can remember, the golden samovar — a Russian teapot of sorts — has rested somewhere high in our home. In our first house, it sat imposingly on a shelf above the staircase. In our current home, it tops the boudoir in our guestroom. When I was growing up, I didn’t actually know what it was and, until a few years ago, I didn’t think to ask.
Spurred by some unknown impulse — possibly a quarter-life crisis or my mom and dad entering their 60s — I decided to interview my parents on the origin of every object and piece of furniture displayed in our home, gathering information that would otherwise die with them. Some of my questions yielded three-word answers (“It’s a lamp”); others evoked longer stories, like that of my black market-dealing great-great-grandmother.
Rivka Silberberg brought the samovar with her when she and her family — including my great-grandfather — immigrated to the United States from the Pale of Settlement sometime before World War I. According to my grandfather, while Rivka’s neighbors were fleeing religious persecution, she was evading authorities after a neighbor ratted her out for illegally selling items — some say tea, others tobacco — without the proper taxation. My mom thinks it was probably a combination of antisemitism and legal peril that motivated Rivka to leave.
Samovars were an important part of Russian social life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jenna Weissman Joselit, a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University and former Forward columnist, wrote, “The samovar loomed large in Jewish immigrant culture” and “a hefty proportion of Russian Jewish immigrants … lugged the heavy and bulky contraption to the New World.”
They acted both as a comforting, familiar sight and as something that could be pawned when money was tight, Joselit wrote. Clearly, my great-great-grandmother valued her samovar enough to drag it across the Atlantic.
Learning about the items in my house has given me a new appreciation for the objects that were always just a part of my background. Since the samovar is one of the only pieces of my family’s old world life we still have, it’s imbued with a certain sacredness. This samovar is not simply a vessel for brewing tea; It is a symbol of my ancestors’ forced migration, a testament to their ability to make the hard choices necessary for survival.
I am the only grandchild on my mother’s side. My grandfather was also an only child, meaning I am the only great-grandchild of his parents. I alone carry this history. Like the samovar, I am a physical testament to my family’s survival.
It’s a lot of weight to have on your shoulders — or on your shelf.
Being an only child is what made me feel such an urgent responsibility to capture my parents’ stories; if I didn’t save them, no one else would.
But objects are impermanent. They tarnish (as our samovar has). They shatter. They get lost.
As these sacred objects become more enchanted, we also become more vulnerable to their loss. Any damage to them would feel like a devastating blow.
Since my grandmother passed away in 2020, I have been the owner of her wedding band. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve worn it, primarily on occasions when I want to feel like she’s near, whether on Rosh Hashanah or my college graduation. Otherwise, I keep it in my jewelry box where it can stay safe.
My mom takes a much more relaxed approach. One Passover, a friend set down one of our dessert plates with too much force, and it cracked. My mom, in an effort to reassure the friend, said probably the last thing one wants to hear after breaking someone else’s belongings: “It was my grandmother’s.”
After the friend panicked for a moment, my mom realized how the words had sounded.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I mean that it’s so old.”
Old things break. It’s part of their natural course of existence. For my mom, this was just an inevitable fact of life. Even without the dessert plate, she has memories of her grandmother to hold onto.
It’s taken me longer to accept the impermanence of objects. Only recently has the loss of a cheap earring not felt like the end of the world.
Luckily, because of its size and shape, the samovar would be a hard thing to misplace. In the future, if it needs to be moved, I’ll make sure I do so with care. But if for some reason something should happen to it, I am comforted to know that the story of Rivka and her smuggling ways lives on within me.
The post How a Russian samovar connects me to the old country — and my black market dealing great-great-grandmother appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Mark Mellman, pollster who championed Democrats and Israel, dies
(JTA) — The talk was timed just ahead of the Ninth of Av, one of the most mournful dates in the Jewish year, so Mark Mellman came prepared with a drash — a Torah commentary — and delivered it to a rapt room.
That the room at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston was packed with political operatives, not all of them Jewish, did not seem to matter to Mellman, the veteran pollster pro-Israel voice within the Democratic Party whose death was announced Friday by his family.
For Mellman, Jewish values and Democratic values went hand in hand. As soon as he heard the appreciative murmurs of “yashar koach” (roughly, “well done”) marking the end of his drash, he launched into an endorsement of party presidential nominee John Kerry.
“Mark possessed a profound understanding for American and Jewish history.” the Democratic Majority for Israel, the group he founded in 2019, said in a statement. “His unwavering commitment to Democratic values will continue to guide and inspire us.”
Mellman died after a long illness, his family said in announcing his funeral, which will take place on Sunday in Maryland. They did not give a cause of death or mention his age, although some sources indicate he was born in 1955.
Mellman joined his first political campaign in 1981, three years after graduating from Princeton and while he was a graduate student at Yale. He successfully managed the congressional campaign of Bruce Morrison, a Connecticut Democrat who unseated a Republican, Larry DeNardis, in the 1982 election.
The upset made Mellman’s reputation and, still in his 20s, he launched a career in Washington as a pollster and a consultant. His company was eventually known as The Mellman Group.
Within a couple of decades he was the go-to pollster, not just for Democrats but for a wide variety of firms, including the NBA’s Washington Wizards, United Airlines and both Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
He never let it get to his head: “The truth is we know damn little about what works in campaigns,” he wrote in The Hill, the insidery Washington newspaper, in 2006. “Most of what passes for evidence in this business is nothing more than dimly remembered anecdote or thinly disguised salesmanship.”
His self-deprecation came through after Kerry lost in 2004. Mellman was the campaign’s pollster.
“You can’t imagine how much time it takes to lie on the floor in a fetal position, it really takes a lot out of me,” he told a conference a week after the election.
Mellman made himself accessible to Jewish groups, frequently appearing at events organized by the Jewish Federations of North America and at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and often opposite a Republican counterpart.
The debate was always friendly, with the understanding on both sides that ensuring the full-throated participation of Jewish Americans in the political process outweighed partisan differences.
“I always respected him and the fact that he was committed to fighting the rise of antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the Democratic Party,” Matt Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA. “Mark put principle over politics. He and his voice will be missed.”
He was sought-after mentor to younger Jewish operatives. “When I started working in Jewish Dem politics and needed a poll, we looked to Mark. When I first spoke at a JCC, I spoke alongside Mark,” Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said on X. “I learned from and appreciated Mark, and he’ll be deeply missed.”
William Daroff, now the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, recalled that Mellman’s mentorship crossed party lines, when Daroff was the RJC’s deputy director.
“During my own partisan youth, when I was loudly advocating for President George W. Bush and Mark was working just as energetically on the other side, he never treated me as an adversary,” Daroff told JTA. “He cared more about the Jewish community than about partisan labels and made a point of saying that pro-Israel voices in the GOP mattered.”
When Daroff a couple of years later sought to transition to nonpartisan work, applying for the top Washington job at JFNA, Mellman was one of his fiercest advocates.
“He backed me, he vouched for me, and he helped open doors that I could not have opened alone,” Daroff said. “Mark believed deeply in communal unity, and he acted on that belief.”
Mellman was one of the first to warn fellow Democrats that the obituarywas a trend, not an anomaly.
“It is a small problem that could get bigger,” he told The Forward in 2013. The numbers then of progressive Democrats holding negative views of Israel were not large, he said, “but you need to address problems when they are small.”
He was proved correct after the 2018 election, which swept into office four Democrats, known as “The Squad,” who made criticizing Israel their brand. A year later he launched DMFI.
“Our mission at Democratic Majority for Israel is to strengthen the pro-Israel tradition of the Democratic Party, fight for Democratic values and work within the progressive movement to advance policies that ensure a strong U.S.-Israel relationship,” Mellman said then.
DMFI occupied a unique place in the Democratic firmament: Other partisan groups tread lightly in countering adversaries within the party. Mellman and his group did not.
“We’ve got two words in our name that are important,” he told JTA in 2024, when DMFI helped lead the successful effort to oust New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman in a primary challenge. “One is ‘Israel.’ The other is ‘Democratic.’ We believe in the Democratic Party, we believe in a Democratic agenda. We find fault with Jamaal Bowman because he’s anti-Israel, but also because he’s not supportive of a Democratic agenda.”
It was a statement typical of Mellman, who was not afraid to smash taboos. He freely aligned himself with opponents to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, crossing a red line for many in the pro-Israel community, who prefer to stay out of Israeli politics. He consuklted with opposition leader Yair Lapid.
“He was one of the architects of the 2013 election success,” when Lapid’s party, Yesh Atid, barely a year old, earned 19 seats and a place in the governing coalition, “and of the campaign that led to us forming the government in 2021,” Lapid said on X.
“Mark embodied a love of the strong, successful, democratic Israel we believe in and worked tirelessly to secure the strategic relationship between Israel and the United States,” Lapid said. “His contribution to the Jewish people is far greater than most people will ever know.”
“A world class pollster and advocate for Israel, but a world class mensch, too,” Steve Rabinowitz, a longtime Washington PR maven told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “His loss is stunning.”
The post Mark Mellman, pollster who championed Democrats and Israel, dies appeared first on The Forward.