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I was there when the lights went out and New York was plunged into darkness
I’m the lifelong resident of a vast and complicated metropolis that smugly prides itself on never stopping. Subways, buses and cabs running day and night, bodegas and diners open 24/7, hundreds of thousands of people at work or out partying somewhere, bike couriers and truck drivers making deliveries — all in a town with a million moving parts, where the show always goes on — until, suddenly, it doesn’t.
I was reminded of that one evening not long ago in a drab Chinese restaurant uptown on Broadway, clutching a pair of wooden chopsticks poised to shovel another mound of chicken and walnuts into my mouth.
Music was playing softly over the house PA system. The melody suddenly sounded strangely familiar, but oddly out of place in those surroundings. I froze mid-bite, trying to place what I was hearing. Then it hit me. I glanced at my dinner companion Ann Aptaker, author of the Cantor Gold noir crime novels.
“Wow,” I said. “Do you hear that?”
She paused, tilted her head slightly, then raised an eyebrow.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s Threepenny Opera!”
Sure enough, the song drifting through the room was Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s wickedly jaunty tango, “Ballad of Immoral Earnings.” Even stranger, it was a track from my favorite production of the show: the Lincoln Center revival from decades ago, starring the late, great Raul Julia as Mack the Knife and Ellen Greene as his favorite prostitute, Jenny Diver.
“Of all things! What a weird song to play while people are eating,” I mused.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard it in a restaurant before,” she agreed. “And certainly not a Chinese place.”
“They must have good taste in musicals.”
Shrugging, we resumed picking away at our dinner. A minute later another song from the same show began to play. We gaped at each other.
“They’re playing the whole album!” I sputtered. “What are the odds?”
Ann frowned and paused. then suddenly whirled to reach into the pocket of her denim jacket hanging behind her chair. She pulled out her phone, and the music instantly grew louder. We both laughed. She must have leaned back against her jacket and set off her music app. Whew — mystery solved!
But hearing those distinctive strains of Weill’s score transported me back to one of the hottest summers New York City had ever endured.
It was 1977, the year I attended an outdoor performance of Threepenny Opera at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. My mother and a roommate from Pratt had joined me that night.
The Delacorte sits beneath the stone towers of Belvedere Castle, lit by floodlamps like a fairytale illustration, open to the sky and the sounds of the city beyond the trees. On a good night it can feel magical. On this particularly sweltering night, the air hung over us in the audience like a damp blanket as Philip Bosco, who had replaced Raul Julia for this summer staging, swaggered across the stage as Mack the Knife, and Ellen Greene reprised her role as Jenny.
And then — just as she was belting out her furious solo number, Pirate Jenny — all the lights shut off. Greene’s mic abruptly went dead, and the band lurched sourly out of tune before grinding to a halt.
We were plunged into pitch darkness. For a moment, there was silence.
Then the crowd began to buzz nervously. Was this part of the show? I’d seen the play several times before, and knew that it most definitely was not.
A few awkward minutes later, some of the cast reappeared wielding flashlights. While the tech crew worked on the electricity, the band filled the darkness with some lively jazz. Rubber-limbed dancer Tony Azito pranced around jovially in the flickering beams, easing the mood for a spell. But that age-old theater adage, the show must go on, was about to bite the dust.
The house manager finally stepped up on stage to make an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we just learned that there’s been a massive power failure at Con Edison. It’s not just us; the whole city is dark!”
We didn’t know it yet, but this was the Big Blackout of July 13, 1977, and there we were, thousands of us stranded smack in the middle of Central Park. There wasn’t even much of a moon out that night, so it was really, really dark.
“Well, this is some pickle,” Mom said.
We wondered how the hell we were going to get out of there.
I vividly recalled the last big blackout in New York City, the one in 1965. I was just a young kid back then and safely at home, so it had actually been fun. While my mother lit a few Sabbath candles, my little sister and I roamed from room to room pretending we were in a haunted house. Meanwhile, our poor Dad had to trudge back to Brooklyn from midtown Manhattan — a five-hour hike in hot leather shoes.
But this time felt very different. I was far from the safety of home, trapped in the middle of what might as well have been a forest at night. Central Park is beautiful when you can see it. In pitch darkness it’s downright hazardous.
“Guess we’ll all just have to sleep in the park tonight,” I cracked. Neither Mom nor my Pratt roomie were laughing.
Thankfully, a phalanx of city cops eventually arrived to help guide us out. Audience members, cast and crew all joined hands as we carefully made our way along the park’s winding paths, stepping over roots and curbs, catching one another when someone stumbled. Our only illumination came from a few scattered police car headlights.
A walk that normally takes ten minutes took forever, but eventually we emerged onto Central Park West.
The scene was eerie. Streetlamps were dark. Traffic lights were out. Cars sat frozen in the intersections. Not a single apartment window was lit. For a city that never sleeps, it felt as if someone had suddenly flipped off the master switch.
Then I spotted something: “Look, the buses are still running!”
A city bus was rumbling slowly toward us, brightly lit inside. With the subways dead, getting back to my dorm in Brooklyn would have been impossible, so Mom’s place on the Upper East Side looked like the safest destination. She had temporarily split with my Dad and was living there with a roommate at the time.
The three of us squeezed aboard along with what felt like half the audience, and somehow made it across town to First Avenue. As we approached my mother’s high-rise, a dreadful thought suddenly hit me.
“Mom, what floor are you on again?”
“Twenty-five,” she replied grimly.
Of course both elevators were dead. We trudged up 25 flights of stairs in complete darkness, arriving exhausted and panting. My mother fumbled with her key, finally opening the door to reveal Sylvia, her gravel-voiced, seen-it-all Long Island roommate, standing there with her ever-present cigarette tip glowing in the dark.
“Come on in, darlings,” she rasped dryly. “Join the party.”
Sylvia had lit a few candles around the apartment, the only light we’d see that night.
Outside, the city was far from peaceful. While we tried to sleep on sofa cushions on the floor, one of the worst nights of unrest in New York history was unfolding in the streets below. Store windows were smashed. Shops were looted. Garbage cans were set on fire.
Lying there in the dim glow of flickering candlelight, hearing distant sirens punctuated by the sudden crash of breaking glass somewhere in the darkness below, I felt a growing sense of dread. An evening that had begun with music and theater had improbably ended with Manhattan plunged into darkness, its fragile machinery suddenly exposed.
By morning the city looked as though it had survived a world war.
This resilient burg has been battered and bruised over the years, enduring terrorist attacks, blackouts, blizzards, hurricanes, floods, garbage strikes, transit strikes, and the occasional collapse of its aging infrastructure. Yet somehow it manages to reset and lurch forward each time, improvising solutions the way Tony Azito danced in the dark that night at the Delacorte.
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What Muhammad Ali taught me from his Jerusalem hotel
The one time I got to talk to Muhammad Ali was a summer evening when I was working at one of my favorite college internships — in the McClurg Court newsroom of WBBM Newsradio 78, the Chicago affiliate of CBS Radio.
The scene came to mind earlier this week when I released a new audio documentary called Broken Hologram about Ali and his brief stint as a Broadway star. But back then, I was one of a quartet of interns who included a cool girl from Hyde Park named Gwen Billings with whom I occasionally took lunch at a nearby hot dog stand and discussed important news figures like, say, Depeche Mode and The Smiths. There was also Linda, a hard-nosed news reporter in the mold of Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. Sometimes she came around to my cubicle and took sips of my Dr. Pepper. Not in a flirtatious way, more in a proto-Daniel Day-Lewis “I drink your milkshake” kind of way. There was a fratty guy named Scott who wore a class ring from (redacted). He went on to a lucrative career, just not in journalism. There was one other dude; he was from Crown Point, Indiana, but that’s just about all I remember.
My job consisted of answering phones, ripping wire copy from the AP and UPI machines, getting sources on the phone and calling every major fire and police station every night to see if there was a story to be reported (“Hi, Sergeant Kupka, it’s Adam from WBBM: Do you have anything working in your area?”).
Even though every sergeant told me the same thing every night, I kept calling because that’s what journalists do: You keep making the calls. In fact, I did pretty much whatever was asked of me, and turned feisty only when one of the few asshole reporters tried to get me to run downstairs to the loading area to fetch him a “Green Streak” edition of the Tribune so he could check on his stocks or intimated that my job description should include making him coffee.
“Sure could do with a cup o’ coffee right now, Adam.”
“Cool, why don’t you make yourself one?”
Note: The individual referred to is decidedly not John Cody, a truly great man who remains a friend to this day. (Fun fact: During Vietnam, John worked for Stars & Stripes alongside Seth Lipsky, founder of the English language edition of the Forward)
Nor am I referring to sports reporter Rich King, a prince of a man who always offered to get people sandwiches from the White Hen Pantry (“Anyone need anything from ‘The Hen?’”).
Sometimes, when the news day got super-slow — for example, when Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz was in the studio doing a live call-in show — I passed the time by trying to guess the usually ridiculously easy passwords for the WBBM staff’s new computers and snooping in the reporters’ early version of email in a futile effort to find anything interesting. Apologies to the late Dale McCarren (DMC123).
I was working the evening shift when the top news story was about Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, a Catholic priest from Joliet, Illinois, who had been taken hostage in Beirut while he was working for a relief agency. Muhammad Ali was part of a delegation that had flown to the Middle East to try to arrange his release.
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My supervisor was a terrific guy named Duane Gray, an African-American Conservative who was big on conspiracy theories (“You should read this book. It’s called The Terror Network.”). He was a great manager and colleague who made sure that we kept to the schedule and that traffic, weather, sports and news headlines always came right when they were supposed to. On this particular night, Duane gave me a mission: “Get ‘The Champ’ on the phone.”
“Uh, how do I do that, Duane?”
“Call every hotel,” he said.
He scrawled a list of hotels in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on a legal pad and I started calling Information to get their numbers. Advantage of working for a CBS affiliate: You got to make all the long-distance calls you wanted.
How many calls did I make? What were the names of all the hotels? I have no idea. But I do remember that one of them was the King David Hotel in Jerusalem because this time, when I asked to be transferred to Ali’s room, no one said, “Sorry, no one here by that name.”
Ali picked up. His voice had that raspy quality it got after he retired from boxing. “Hullo?”
“Hi, I’m calling from Newsradio 78. I was hoping one of our anchors could speak with you.”
“You’re calling from Chicago?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Man,” Ali told me, sounding weary but amiable. “It sounds like you’re calling from right next door.”
Duane could be a wise-ass and a cynic, but now he was star-struck. He sprang to his feet. “Is that the Champ?”
I nodded.
Duane grabbed the phone. “How’re you doin, Champ? You’re gonna be on with Dale McCarren. I’m gonna patch you through, Champ.” He gave me a hearty high-five.
Some time later — perhaps after a week, perhaps after two — when Madonna was in town for some concert, movie junket or photo shoot and Duane told me he wanted to get her on the air, I knew exactly what to do.
After I got her on the phone at her hotel and transferred the call to Duane, he shouted: “This kid,” he said, complimenting both me and his own managerial talent, “has the best news instincts of anyone in this newsroom!”
“Hello, Madonna?” Duane said into the phone. “You’re gonna be on with Dale; let me patch you through.”
The post What Muhammad Ali taught me from his Jerusalem hotel appeared first on The Forward.
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Rock legend Steven Van Zandt’s new gig: Holocaust education
(JTA) — Steven Van Zandt is worried about the Jews.
“There is that pre-Holocaust vibe,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently about what he sees on social media, where he is a prolific user. “They spread lies around year after year after year, and if you say something often enough, people start to believe it.
“And that’s what happened that led to the Holocaust in the first place, and that’s what’s going on now.”
For a man equally beloved for his longtime work with Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band and his role as Silvio on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” such a detour might seem unusual. But Van Zandt is looking to make his own mark in the world of Holocaust education, via his education initiative TeachRock, which since 2013 has provided K-12 lesson plans on a range of subjects built around popular music.
Titled “Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust: Exploring an Enduring Culture Through Music,” the initiative’s four-day lesson plan, launched this week, includes the onset of antisemitism in prewar Europe, survivor testimony and Jewish values. Anchoring the lessons are rock songs from the likes of KISS, the half-Jewish glam metal band, beloved Jewish folk singer Leonard Cohen and contemporary New York pop band Lawrence, which is fronted by two Jewish siblings.
It’s a departure from the somber tone of most Holocaust education programs, a space that the Jewish community has heavily invested in despite mounting questions about the effectiveness of such lessons in curbing antisemitism. Other contemporary Holocaust learning initiatives have employed video games, artificial intelligence and similarly novel approaches as educators struggle to adapt to a near future without living survivors to share their testimonies.
For Van Zandt, the lessons aren’t just teaching about the Holocaust, but also about highlighting positive Jewish influence in the world of popular culture. He rattled off a list of Jewish artists he admires, including Bob Dylan and the pop songwriting team Lieber and Stoller.
“I have a lot of gratitude for what they have contributed to my life, just in terms of enjoyment,” he said. “Show business doesn’t exist without the Jewish contributions.”
The guitarist founded TeachRock in 2013 alongside other big names from the world of music and the arts, including Springsteen, U2 frontman Bono, Jackson Browne and the director Martin Scorsese. On Thursday, the organization piloted its new Holocaust education lesson plan to 50 high school students at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, timed to the state’s Holocaust Education Week. Florida’s Holocaust education task force is promoting the material to districts across the state.
“We always want to be educating in a way that feels like you’re not being taught. And I think this captures that,” Michael Igel, a contributing author on the TeachRock lesson plan who also chairs the statewide task force, told JTA.
For Igel, a descendant of survivors, the project fits neatly into his own efforts to bring Holocaust education into unconventional spaces. He’s planning future courses that incorporate food and theater.
“It’s still standards-based Holocaust education. But it’s being delivered to students in these different portals,” he said.
It was through Igel’s promotion of such nontraditional methods that he was approached by a member of TeachRock’s leadership council a year ago. TeachRock had recently been looking to offer lessons on Jewish heritage, and saw an opportunity to broach the subject of the Holocaust through Igel.
A huge E Street Band fan, Igel laughed as he recalled how the council member asked him if he had ever heard of Van Zandt.
The first of the curriculum’s four days opens with students listening to “Rock and Roll All Nite,” the 1975 hit by rock band KISS, before segueing into Jewish life in prewar Europe and the rise of antisemitism.
Igel noted the unique nature of the lesson. “When Gene Simmons with his tongue out is the first thing you see, you’re wondering, ‘What the heck happened to Holocaust education?’” he said.
Gradually the link becomes clear: The lesson explains that KISS frontman Gene Simmons is the son of a Holocaust survivor. Much of the curriculum is built around similar ideas of Jewish survival and resilience, as students are asked to contemplate how Simmons’ family background may have informed his outré stage persona. (Co-founder Paul Stanley is also Jewish.)
Such concepts, he said, help expand the idea of a Holocaust lesson beyond Jews as “victims in a snapshot of time.” In teacher training sessions, educators have responded well to the musical framing and excitedly discussed which songs they would want to pass down to future generations — a positive sign for Igel, who hopes to convince teachers to use the curriculum even outside of the state-mandated Holocaust Education Week lessons.
While Van Zandt, who is not Jewish, doesn’t craft the curriculum himself, he is friends with Simmons and the two have spoken before about wanting to use music to teach Jewish history. Max Weinberg, the E Street Band’s longtime drummer, is also Jewish.
The initiative comes at a moment when the world of popular music, like many other cultural sectors, has become engulfed in controversy over Israel. A recent dustup involved Ed Sheeran and Macklemore, in which Jewish venue owner Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran to drop the rapper from his tour over his onstage pro-Palestinian activism. That prompted many artists to support Macklemore, including Jewish actor Ilana Glazer, who spoke at one of his “Free Palestine” tour stops. Several leading musicians, including Lorde, Paramore and Björk, have also signed pledges to boycott Israel over its conduct in Gaza, while others including Pink and Boy George have taken opposite tracks.
All of this discourages Van Zandt, who famously led an international artist boycott of the South African resort venue Sun City in 1985 to protest Apartheid. The artists now backing the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement targeting Israel have cited the Sun City protests as a direct inspiration. (Sun City itself was founded by Sol Kerzner, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants.)
But Van Zandt says the two causes are different.
“Yes, I am known as the boycott king of the world,” he said. “It’s not the same situation. Trying to deny weapons for Israel to defend itself is obscene. It’s ridiculous. It’s terrible.”
He has feuded with Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist, over BDS.
“I wrote him a very nice, detailed letter saying that it was misconceived, it’s a mistake, it’s not going to accomplish anything,” Van Zandt recalled. “I was very nice to him. Very diplomatic, very respectful. And then he starts just calling me names in the press.” (Waters has directed expletives at Van Zandt and other contemporaries who disagree with him about Israel in interviews.)
Igel, too, is thinking about how TeachRock’s lessons can address contemporary discourse over Israel, a subject that many Holocaust educators often are reluctant to bring up in the classroom even when students press the topic. His curriculum defines what a genocide is — “for a generation that needs to know what that word means, and what it doesn’t mean,” he said.
Following this week’s pilot program, both Igel and Van Zandt hope states beyond Florida will take an interest in their lessons. The rock star has ambitious goals for the initiative: to try to change the national conversation around Jews and Israel that has filled his social media feeds, which he describes as “lies on top of lies.”
“Eventually there’s got to be a national public conversation about this, which is not taking place,” he said. “So eventually it’s going to have to be. At that point, all bets are off.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Were Leopold and Loeb inspired by Nietzsche, or Jewish self-loathing?
Any production of Patrick Hamilton’s popular thriller Rope, like any game of Clue, can be reduced to props, setting and culprits.
The central prop is a large chest, containing a freshly-murdered body. The setting can vary: Mayfair in Hamilton’s 1929 original, Manhattan in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 screen adaptation starring Jimmy Stewart. The names of the players are sometimes different, but there are always two students in their finely-appointed apartment with the titular murder weapon.
Gordon Greenberg’s new adaptation, now playing off-Broadway at the New Group’s space at St. Clement’s, presents a novel clue as to what prompted the crime: a Christmas tree upstage right. In his take on this “well-made play,” which Greenberg believes has its deficiencies, the central characters, inspired by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, are once again Jewish, but doing their best to conceal that fact.
Hamilton, who wrote his play shortly after Leopold and Loeb’s conviction, was struck by the men’s alleged lack of motive, beyond a desire to pull off the perfect crime based on their nihilistic misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Greenberg doesn’t buy that the killing was dispassionate, and believes a crisis of identity was at play.
“What drew me to it was thinking about what the factors might have been that went into this murder that I personally find hard to believe was just theoretical,” said Greenberg, a director and playwright, who recently revived Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife off-Broadway. “I don’t think anyone does anything for purely theoretical reasons. We can extrapolate them later, but in the moment we are going on gut impulses and human needs and sexuality and jealousy and all of these fiery emotional poles that make us human.”
Greenberg, who is gay and Jewish, had long been fascinated by the Leopold and Loeb case, wondering what led two well-bred, cerebral Jews to commit a supposedly “motiveless” murder. (In the real crime, notably fictionalized in Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killed a 14-year-old boy, Robert Franks; in Rope, they kill a wealthy classmate.)
Hamilton’s play, which Greenberg found to be “antiseptic,” de-Judaized and stripped of queerness, is not concerned with the “why” of the killing.
His murderers, Brandon, described as “tall, finely and athletically built, and blonde” and Granillo, “a Spaniard” with the “shrug of the shoulders characteristic of his race,” are in it for the thrill. They convene a dinner party and serve the meal on the chest containing their victim, certain they won’t be caught.
In Greenberg’s version, set in 1957 Manhattan, Brandon is Garret Stern (Cameron Monahan), a working-class striver who declaims, in a break of the fourth wall, that he “wants to be mistaken for the son of assimilated German Jews, not the shtetl Jews with bent vowels and calloused hands from whom he actually descends.” (As part of the ruse, he’s abandoned his given name of Gary.)
Granillo is now Nate Singer (Corey Fogelmanis), the Yekke scion of a garment district macher who, to his upwardly-mobile mother’s delight, “can almost pass for gentile.” Both are students at Princeton and plan to drop the body back in Jersey after their macabre dinner party.
Like the real Leopold and Loeb, they are also involved sexually and sadomasochistically. Greenberg says he was partially inspired by Tom Kalin’s 1992 film Swoon, which revisited the killers through a queer lens.
Nate’s instilled self-hatred likely feeds into his desire to be dominated by Garret, whose rough upbringing as a Jew in postwar Skokie taught him the utility of violence. (His school principal praised him for breaking a boy’s nose, saying “your people aren’t exactly known for defending themselves.”)
Greenberg, who said that, as an actor he played “every Herb Gardner and Neil Simon play around,” chose to move the action up to the era Lavender Scare and a resurgence of casual, clubby antisemitism following the “chemotherapy of World War II” that briefly put it into remission.
Nate and Garret’s guests, for their post-Christmas shindig, whose centerpiece is a chest containing a corpse, include a polished, pedigreed classmate; a droll Sarah Lawrence student; their closeted professor, who will catch them in the lie; and a Mayflower-descendant judge who happens to be the father of Ronald Kentley, the deceased.
Driving the boys’ motive and cue for passion is Nate’s tormented attraction to Ronald, who he fears might out him and land him on McCarthy’s list. Garret is jealous, but sees an opportunity: In bumping Ronald off, he hopes to take his place as the judge’s surrogate son, gaining entry to the patrician world to which he aspires.
But their guests’ routine macroaggressions show the futility of trying to overcome their backgrounds. The Christmas tree is fooling no one. Greenberg is similarly unconvinced that Leopold and Loeb’s murder was merely a Nietzschean performance, undertaken to prove that morality need not apply to superior intellects.
“No one really knows what was going through their mind, and no one ever will,” Greenberg said of Leopold and Loeb’s crime. “But taking one of these fascinating true crime stories and positing what the humanity is behind it, what’s all the flesh on the bone, is to me the fascination and the fun exercise.”
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