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When Harry met ‘Hava Nagila.’ Belafonte’s lifelong love affair with Jewish culture
When Harry Belafonte let loose the word ”Day-O” in Webster Hall in 1955, it echoed a storied past.
He was in the ballroom recording “The Banana Boat Song,” a working man’s cry for reprieve, taken from the Caribbean’s banana loaders, who worked nights to escape the scorching heat, for his album Calypso.
Decades earlier, in the same, acoustically-blessed venue founded by a Jewish immigrant named Charles Goldstein, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America formed in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Emma Goldman, who encouraged a young Communist named Paul Robeson, later to become Belafonte’s mentor in politics and performance, gave speeches about anarchism and women’s rights there.
Belafonte’s song was a kind of call-and-response with history, and a Jewish one at that. He was no stranger to Jewish culture and would come to evangelize it. When he was a struggling actor, operating a burger joint in the Village at the height of the folk era, a local cantor wandered in and taught him a tune he’d make world famous: “Hava Nagila.”
“Harry’s affinity toward Jewish culture and for Jews was a huge part of his life,” said Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, the author of Daylight Come, a new biography on Belafonte.
Jelly-Schapiro first interviewed the late singer, actor and activist when he was a grad student writing his dissertation on the influence of Caribbean culture. He didn’t have a book in mind, but over the years he’d catch up with Belafonte at events around the globe. Jelly-Schapiro even scored invites to his birthday parties. An earlier book proposal was scuppered by news of Belafonte’s memoirs, but in the years since his death in 2022, Jelly-Schapiro wanted to tell the larger story of how he reshaped American culture, in the pre-Civil Rights era and in the dead center of the movement.
Daylight Come is a fascinating look at Belafonte’s extracurriculars. Outside of his tenure as a matinee idol, and the first solo act to crack 1 million LPs sold, Belafonte’s best friend was Martin Luther King, Jr., for whom his West End Avenue apartment served as a kind of New York headquarters for the Civil Rights leader. He had the ear of John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby. He mobilized movie stars for the 1963 March on Washington and bankrolled much of the campaign to desegregate the South. Among his other contributions was an early break he gave to a young Jewish Minnesotan looking to make it in the music industry (Bob Dylan’s first professional recording was as a harmonica player on the title track of Belafonte’s 1962 album Midnight Special).
I spoke with Jelly-Schapiro about Belafonte’s enduring connection to Yiddishkeit and the exceedingly strange film where he plays a Jewish angel on work probation. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The way you put it in the book is that Harold Bellanfanti, Harry’s dad, “said his father was a Dutch Jew from Martinique.” That makes me think it hasn’t been verified.
There’s no way to confirm it empirically, but that’s certainly the family story. Many family trees in the Caribbean are very mixed and hard to track because they involve mixtures of enslaved people from Africa and traders and others from the edges of Europe. He had this very mixed sort of family, but probably even more important is his growing up in New York around lots of Jews.
His mother worked as a domestic and a tailor. This Jewish tailor was kind to her and would give her these cheap suits that she dyed blue. But he also said in an interview once “I came to know the Irishman by knowing the culture of the Irish. I came to know the Jew by knowing the culture of the Jew.” He was quite literally around synagogues. He heard cantors sing. He was really taken as a young man with the stories of Sholem Aleichem and traditions of Yiddish storytelling and drama. That was a big part of his formation, and he talked about it.
He served in the Navy during World War II. Like many people of this generation, of all backgrounds, he was really shaped by this understanding of the Shoah and of the fight against Hitler.
I didn’t realize that he sang “Hava Nagila” in Berlin in 1958, so soon after the war; obviously the significance couldn’t have been lost on him there.
And “Hinei Ma Tov.” He made them a part of his repertoire. Germany is a fascinating moment. Here’s this Black Caribbean entertainer landing in Germany and singing “Hava Nagila” and really impressing on German folks who loved him — they absolutely adored Harry. He was a huge star in Germany, an even bigger star there than he was here — really conveying the sense of Jewishness as a culture and not just an identity. It’s an incredible fact that he was the conveyor of Jewish humanity and culture.
He took a break from making movies, but then right after MLK and Bobby Kennedy were shot, he comes back with this movie The Angel Levine, based on a Bernard Malamud story and co-starring Zero Mostel. Why do you think the material spoke to him at that moment?
In the late 1950s, he’d essentially turned his back on Hollywood. He had really scaled the heights of fame, and he appeared in some very big movies, but made this one called Island in the Sun in particular, which is a big blockbuster. But he hated the edit because basically they sort of neutered the interracial love affair that was at the center of it. They just had him drink out of the same coconut with Joan Fontaine. He was really soured on Hollywood. Did not want to take on roles or projects that, to his mind, were just designed to make whites comfortable, or that didn’t fit his politics. He was also hugely involved in the Civil Rights movement — I mean, he was making records, and he was still incredibly busy, but he was not making movies.
In this very dark, interesting time after the assassination of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, he was a little bit adrift personally and politically, but he decided to re-enter — make another movie, but on his own terms. The impetus for it was that he was really interested in the relationship between Blacks and Jews. He was interested in these old ideas about the human family and who gets to count as human, and mutual recognition of humanity of humans recognizing humans. But then you have this angel, so it adds this odd other element that’s really kind of interesting and strange. To me it’s an amazing thing that they just made that movie and it had national distribution because it’s so New York and so ethnic, for lack of a better term. This is way before Seinfeld made New York Jewishness hit the heartland. It was an experiment in trying to make movies that followed his politics, also in the sense of who was involved in the production.
He had all these interns of color; he wanted to integrate the entertainment industry and the film business. He also hired Bill Gunn, a very quirky Black screenwriter who’s kind of a genius. And Zero Mostel, who was blacklisted and then gave this memorable testimony in the House. An amazing character and a fellow denizen of the Upper West Side, he was a friend and a political ally of Harry’s. It’s a flawed and strange film, but it’s also a deeply touching one because it really gives it some of the complexities of the kind of deeply intimate and intertwined relationship between Blacks and Jews in New York, and also memorably features the Commandment Keepers up in Harlem, which is a synagogue of Black Jews of whose existence many people are ignorant outside New York or outside Harlem.
Belafonte was critical of the U.S. not participating in the 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa. This was the summit where a number of delegates declared Zionism as racism and singled out Israel for rebuke. He was asked about it on the Today Show the morning of 9/11, before the first tower was hit. I know that Harry had a relationship with Israel. He obviously was very supportive of the boycott of South Africa. People are pushing to boycott Israel. What do you think he’d think of Israel now?
His identification with Israel and with the cause of protecting Jewry and Jewish people was hugely important to him, and so he absolutely identified with Israel through much of his life in that way. I think certainly his politics were deeply anti-imperial, deeply anti-colonial, deeply skeptical of American foreign policy, and I think it, as evinced by that interview he gave on the morning of 9/11, he was developing a serious critique of American foreign policy and support for certain aspects of Israeli policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians. Like many American lefties of his generation, as his life went on, I think his critiques of Israel grew. By the time the current catastrophes unfolded in that part of the world, he was leaving public life. He didn’t speak concretely on them.
But he had very close relationships with the activists and the lefties and the causes that he really identified with in the last couple decades of his life — people involved with the prison abolition movement, certainly Black Lives Matter, but people like Angela Davis, Cornel West, these people who have obviously become extremely critical of Israel, and he was very close to many of these people in political formations. I think that was a journey for him.
The American Jewish Historical Society has an exhibit up now and it’s 75 objects about Jews in U.S. history, and one of them is a picture of Harry and Julie Robinson, his Jewish wife, at a march in the section on Civil Rights. The text says he was part Jewish.
He would joke he was the most popular Jew in America. It was not lost on him that many of the most important allies and backers of the Civil Rights movement were Jewish, and he was extremely close with Stan Levison, who was really kind of King’s chief strategist. His involvement, both in show business but also really vitally in the Civil Rights movement, involved a deep identification with a tradition of Jewish political engagement with progressive causes, and certainly his wife Julie, who was sort of a red diaper baby raised by Jewish Marxists, was part of that as well.
In the same way we talk about how he popularized a folk tune like “Day-O,” he introduced a lot of the country and the world to “Hava Nagila.” I don’t think someone who looks like an Old World cantor could have made quite the same impression with it
He gave a platform to Jewishness also being a deep well of folk culture. And he did the same for the Caribbean.
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A synagogue and Jewish-owned shops damaged in French riots
(JTA) — PARIS – Jewish-owned shops in Marseille were set ablaze and a synagogue in Paris was vandalized as part of widespread property damage caused by riots across France Saturday and Sunday, according to the Jewish Community Protection Service.
It is too early to assess the full extent of the riots protesting the rising cost of living and the damage they’ve caused, but various elements in the media have described them as civil unrest and chaos.
From Lille in the north to Marseille in the south and in the major cities in between, media estimate that nearly 800,000 people took to the streets and some 2,000 shops were vandalized or looted. Public buildings were set on fire, and hundreds of people or more were injured, including 150 police officers, with thousands arrested.
The riots followed a student uprising that blocked entrances to high schools across the country in recent weeks. Palestinian flags and keffiyas have been a recurring motif in most of the violent protests, acts of vandalism and looting.
But according to SPCJ, known as the Service de Protection de la Communaute Juive in French, there was no evidence that Jewish institutions or businesses were deliberately targeted.
Vandals broke into the Ohalei Yaakov synagogue in Paris’ 19th district overnight between Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday morning, members of the Jewish community discovered that their temporary place of worship had been broken into. The permanent synagogue building is currently undergoing renovations.
Inside the sanctuary, prayer books, tefillin, and various objects — taken from boxes and cupboards — were found scattered on the floor. The rabbi’s office was also searched. Despite the mess, the Torah scrolls appeared to be unharmed.
According to a member of the synagogue committee, the incident primarily points to an attempted theft. The suspects may have been looking for money, but nothing was believed to be missing.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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How much will Trump’s endorsement help Netanyahu?
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Within minutes of President Donald Trump endorsing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a post on Truth Social Sunday, Netanyahu’s campaign team had released a 30-second clip showing all the times Trump has lavished praise on the Israeli leader over the past few years.
With polls showing that Netanyahu and his governing coalition are slipping in their struggle to retain power in the upcoming Oct. 27 election and lag behind the opposition bloc, an endorsement from the president of the United States is a powerful statement.
But is it enough to tip the scales?
“I don’t think it will change anything,” said Ilana Shpaizman, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
Of course, she said, “Netanyahu will say this is the proof that I’m a leader and all that, and I can speak to Trump … But so what? His followers already know that and they believe in him. They don’t need the endorsement.”
Those who oppose him, Shpaizman continued, “know that Trump forced him (Netanyahu) to accept the ceasefire in Gaza and accept the hostage deal, and that Trump runs the show around Iran. So they also don’t need the endorsement either,” Shpaizman said.
Some pundits speaking on Israeli news outlets criticized Trump for “interfering” in Israel’s election, while others put it down to the fact that Trump does not want America to return to fighting Iran alone if Netanyahu, who is hawkish on Iran, is replaced by someone less willing to act militarily. If Netanyahu loses, that is a scenario that could play out.
“This is the first time ever that the president, at least publicly, endorses a candidate in Israel’s election,” Bushinsky, a political commentator and former adviser to Netanyahu, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Bushinsky said he remembered Netanyahu complaining about U.S. intervention in previous elections in 1999 and 2001, when presidents less enamored of him were in office. He even pushed for an initiative that would block foreign funding for election campaigns.
Now, Bushinsky said, “I guess he is not complaining,” adding that the endorsement serves Netanyahu in two ways.
First, it signals that Trump thinks that Netanyahu is the most suitable guy for the job. Second, it puts Netanyahu’s election campaign back on track, refocusing attention on an issue where Netanyahu is strong – Iran.
“It lets him say ‘I can now finish a job, and I can finish a job with Trump,’ and ‘without Trump or without me, the job will not be finished,’” said Bushinsky.
He said that in the last few days, the political debate had pivoted to other issues such as Ashkenazim vs Sephardim, the draft law and the contentious efforts by the outgoing government to overhaul the judiciary.
“This [endorsement] is the ultimate campaign boost for Netanyahu,” Bushinsky said.
But that boost might not be enough.
Most of the polls taken in recent days show the opposition bloc led by former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot pulling ahead of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, but give neither bloc enough seats to gain the necessary 61 of 120 seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to form the next government.
“I think this might give Netanyahu one more seat, one more mandate, but not more than that,” said Bushinsky.
Prof. Tamar Hermann, director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Viterbi Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research, said that the timing of Trump’s support for Netanyahu in this election race had come both “too late and too early.”
“It’s too late because people have already decided electoral preferences. They may shift within each bloc, but will not move between the blocs because of this,” she said. “And it’s too early because there are nine days to go to the elections, and we can already see other American leaders spilling some cold water over what he said, even on the Republican side of the aisle.”
This criticism, Hermann continued, will be transmitted to Israeli voters, and they will see that Trump is facing a huge battle in the upcoming midterm elections.
“The image of President Trump has deteriorated significantly since April 26, when he started the negotiations with Iran,” she said, pointing to one of the IDI’s recent public opinion surveys that found the president’s popularity had plummeted after he stopped the war with Iran without totally removing the threats against the State of Israel.
According to that poll, the Israeli public’s confidence in Trump as someone dedicated to Israel’s security fell from around 70% to just 42%.
“In my view, the endorsement will not make a big change,” Hermann added. “It will just strengthen Netanyahu’s political supporters, who will see it as a sign that he is still the internationally known figure that even the president of the United States is endorsing.”
She concluded, “The meaning of endorsement in Israel is totally different than in the United States … we are not that used to this kind of move, and it will not make people change their minds.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Trump endorses Netanyahu for reelection, warning Israelis against choosing another leader
President Donald Trump endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for reelection, giving his longtime ally a major boost just nine days before Israel’s Oct. 27 election, which polls indicate could end without a clear winner.
“Please let this letter serve to represent my complete and total endorsement of Bibi Netanyahu in his upcoming race for re-election as Prime Minister of Israel,” Trump wrote Sunday in a lengthy post on Truth Social, praising Netanyahu as a strong leader and trusted partner in confronting Iran.
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is seeking a seventh term after surviving political crises that repeatedly appeared likely to end his career — most significantly after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. Recent polls suggest neither Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition nor the opposition is sure to win the 61 seats needed to form a government in the 120-member Knesset.
In his endorsement, echoing the sentiment of Netanyahu’s campaign, Trump warned Israeli voters that choosing anyone else as prime minister could put more pressure on the United States to deal with threats in the Middle East alone. “If Israel has the wrong leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so,” Trump wrote. “Bibi Netanyahu has been strong, brave, and brilliant in the face of tremendous opposition, including that coming from even Israel, itself.”
Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff whose son was killed in the Gaza war, has emerged as Netanyahu’s chief rival. Eisenkot has floated a path to a government that does not require a majority in the Knesset. However, one of his partners in the anti-Netanyahu bloc, Avigdor Lieberman, has said in recent days he would oppose such a move. Recent polling puts Lieberman’s party at an average of eight or nine seats — enough to give Lieberman leverage in who leads the government.
Trump’s endorsement came hours after Netanyahu appeared on another program, the Fox News show Life, Liberty & Levin hosted by journalist and commentator Mark Levin. Netanyahu spoke glowingly of Trump and the importance of his battle to destroy the Iranian threat, as the American public prepares to head to the polls for midterm elections on Nov. 3. In that race, Republicans are fighting to maintain control of the House and Senate.
The U.S. war with Iran, which has slowed the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz causing gasoline prices to rise, has been unpopular with American voters and is often cited as one of the reasons Republican politicians could lose their races to Democrats.
Netanyahu made the case on Fox that the defeat of the Islamic Republic and the elimination of its nuclear program was critical to ensuring a safe American future. In the U.S., some lawmakers have insisted that the war was unnecessary.
If Iran can destroy Israel, it will conquer the Middle East, control world waterways and oil supplies and proceed to Europe and proceed “to the next target, which is you,” Netanyahu said, addressing a U.S. audience in his Fox News appearance.
A boost for Netanyahu in the final stretch
Trump has taken a personal interest in Israel’s election, but he held off on endorsing Netanyahu for months, raising questions about whether he was keeping his options open in case the longtime Israeli leader lost. “I’m not involved in [Israeli] politics anymore,” Trump told Time magazine in September. In an interview with Newsmax on Thursday, when asked whether he trusted Netanyahu, Trump said he did not trust anybody.
Sunday’s endorsement comes as Netanyahu steps up his campaign to rally his base and convince undecided voters that his close relationship with Trump is essential to Israel’s security. Trump remains popular in Israel, though his approval has declined in recent months following the ceasefire agreement with Iran. But the move could also complicate the president’s ability to influence what happens after the election, if neither political bloc wins a majority.
Trump has previously shown a willingness to pressure Israeli political leaders, including his public campaign last year for President Isaac Herzog to pardon Netanyahu of corruption charges.
Nonetheless, by declaring that Netanyahu is the only acceptable leader for the U.S. administration, Trump may have made it harder to persuade opposition parties to join a unity government led by Netanyahu if the election produces a political stalemate. It also gives Netanyahu another reason to resist stepping aside in post-election negotiations, knowing that the American president has publicly declared him the only alternative.
Netanyahu has already begun sharpening that message, arguing that he and Trump have unfinished business and only two more years to accomplish their shared goals before Trump’s term ends in January 2029. The messaging carries an implicit warning about Israel’s relationship with Washington after Trump leaves office. Whether the next president is Republican or Democrat, any Israeli leader may find it harder to maintain the same level of personal access and cooperation.
The election also carries broader consequences for American Jewry. Netanyahu has become increasingly unpopular among American Jews and Democrats, many of whom oppose his alliance with far-right and religious parties. A change in leadership could allow Israel to rebuild ties with Democrats and reconnect with parts of the American Jewish community — even without bringing nearly as much change in Israeli policy as some might hope.
Rep. Dan Goldman, a Jewish Democrat from New York who was defeated earlier this year in a primary that focused on his support for Israel, posted on X that the U.S.-Israel alliance “will suffer permanent damage if this Israeli government continues to hold power after the election on October 27.”
Polls point to another deadlock
The latest polls show that Netanyahu faces a difficult path to reelection.
Surveys published over the weekend show Eisenkot’s Yashar party ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud, with the opposition parties holding a combined 55 seats. The two Arab lists — the United List, a coalition of three Arab Israeli parties, and Ra’am led by Mansour Abbas — are generally counted outside either bloc.
Those numbers help explain why Trump’s endorsement matters.
A few additional seats could change the balance of power and determine who gets the first opportunity to form a government. And even if Netanyahu fails to secure a majority, he could still benefit from a political deadlock if his bloc wins enough seats to prevent the opposition from forming a government.
In that scenario, Netanyahu would remain prime minister until a new government is sworn in, potentially setting the stage for another election.
JTA contributed to this report.
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