Features
The real story behind Sammy Davis Jr.’s conversion to Judaism
Jewish comedians made racist jokes about him. Some Black audiences booed him. But his faith was genuine
By Beth Harpaz February 23, 2023
(This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.)
Sammy Davis Jr. was a short and skinny Black man with one eye. His wife was white, his mother was Puerto Rican and he was a convert to Judaism. In the crass and racist world of mid-20th century comedy, he was a walking punchline, even in his own routines.
“When I move into a neighborhood, I wipe it out,” was his standard self-deprecating gag. The line received knowing laughs in the 1950s and ’60s when many towns forbade property sales to Blacks and Jews, and whites often fled when Black families moved into their neighborhoods.
Jokes by his fellow entertainers were crude. In a live skit at the Sands in Las Vegas in 1963, Dean Martin physically lifted Davis up (he weighed a mere 120 pounds) and said, “I’d like to thank the NAACP for this wonderful trophy.” At a Friars Club roast, comedian Pat Buttram said that if Davis showed up in Buttram’s home state of Alabama, folks “wouldn’t know what to burn on the lawn.”
Jewish comedians got their licks in, too. Milton Berle cross-dressed as Davis’ white wife, May Britt, and sang, to the tune of “My Yiddishe Mama,” “My Yiddish Mau-Mau,” a reference to an anti-British rebellion in Kenya.
At another roast, Joey Bishop said he’d “never been so embarrassed” in his life as when he met Davis in synagogue. When the rabbi came in, Bishop said, “Sammy jumped up and hollered, ‘Here come the judge!’”
This cringeworthy line was delivered by Davis himself in a show at the Copa: “I don’t know whether to be shiftless and lazy, or smart and stingy.”
Some of these jokes implied that it was preposterous for a Black man to convert to Judaism. But for Sammy Davis Jr., being Jewish “was the most logical thing in the world,” historian Rebecca L. Davis told me. “Over and over again, he made this analogy between being Jewish and African American. He was very admiring of the Jewish millennia-long struggle against oppressors and overcoming all kinds of obstacles.” He saw himself as “an outsider and very marginalized, and he could see in the Jewish experience a similarity that really drew him in emotionally.”
Davis, a history professor at the University of Delaware (and no relation to Sammy), has done extensive research on the entertainer’s conversion, his career and how he was perceived. Her article, “‘These Are a Swinging Bunch of People’: Sammy Davis, Jr., Religious Conversion, and the Color of Jewish Ethnicity,” appeared in the American Jewish History journal in 2016, and she included a chapter about him in her 2021 book, Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics. Her take is that Davis was not only one of the most successful entertainers of the 20th century despite the many racist barriers in his way, but that his Jewish faith was utterly genuine.
The fateful accident
Davis lost his eye when he crashed his car driving home to California from Las Vegas in November 1954. One of several stories about what sparked Davis’ path to conversion originates with the aftermath of the accident. He wrote in his 1965 autobiography, Yes I Can, that his friends Tony Curtis, who was Jewish, and Janet Leigh, who was not, arrived at the hospital and Leigh gave him a religious medal with St. Christopher on one side and a Star of David on the other. “Hold tight and pray and everything will be all right,” Leigh told him.
Davis later told Alex Haley in a Playboy interview that he gripped the object so tightly that the Star of David left a scar on his hand, “like a stigmata.” He took it as a sign that he should convert.
Davis also felt that he owed his career to a Jewish man, Eddie Cantor, who ironically had been one of vaudeville’s best-known blackface performers; Cantor’s act earned him a spot with the Ziegfeld Follies. Decades later, Cantor gave Davis his first big break, a solo televised appearance on the Colgate Comedy Hour in 1952, and became a father figure to him. “He saw Cantor’s Jewishness as part of what made Cantor a good person,” said Rebecca Davis.
In another version of how his car accident led to his conversion, Sammy Davis said that a mezuzah Cantor gave him had mistakenly been left behind in a hotel room the day of the crash. That story transformed the mezuzah “into a talisman,” Rebecca Davis observed, another signpost on the road to his conversion.
Identifying as a Jew
In his memoir, Sammy Davis recalled Rabbi Max Nussbaum, of Temple Israel in Hollywood, telling him, “We cherish converts, but we neither seek nor rush them.” But he began to publicly identify as Jewish before formally converting. In 1959 he refused to film scenes for the movie Porgy and Bess on Yom Kippur, while Ebony ran a photo of him holding Everyman’s Talmud.
He also repeatedly compared the oppression of Jews to that of African Americans. In his 1989 book, Why Me?, he wrote that he was “attracted by the affinity between the Jew and the Negro. The Jews had been oppressed for three thousand years instead of three hundred but the rest was very much the same.” When he visited the Wailing Wall in 1969, he said Israel was his “religious home.”
The reception from Black audiences
American Jews by and large loved him, and his reception in the Jewish press, including the Forward, was also positive, Rebecca Davis said. But it was more complicated for Black media. On the one hand, she said, he was “this exemplar of Black success, very wealthy, very famous, very successful” in an era of rampant racism.
On the other hand, there was “confusion and anger” about why — as a prominent Black activist who joined marches, raised money and was the United Negro College Fund’s largest donor — Sammy Davis so often connected the civil rights cause to Judaism. While there were a “disproportionate number of Jews who were passionate about civil rights and were willing to put their personal safety on the line to stand up for civil rights,” at the same time, Jews were part of a “broader American culture that saw African Americans as inferiors. That was the prevailing cultural norm among white people in the 1950s,” Rebecca Davis said. Other critics felt that he had converted to ingratiate himself with whites as a way to get ahead.
And when he “let himself be the joke” as part of the Rat Pack — a loose ensemble of performers that included Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford — that “really angered a lot of African Americans who saw him more as performing for white audiences than for Black audiences.”
He formally converted with Britt shortly before their wedding in 1960. She was as serious about it as he was, making sure, even after they were divorced, that their children went to Hebrew school and that their son was bar mitzvahed.
Disinvited from JFK’s inauguration
But their marriage also resulted in one of the most painful episodes of his life, when he was disinvited from John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration. The Democratic coalition that elected JFK included Southern white Democrats, and they did not want a Black man married to a white woman performing at the celebration. “They forced Davis out,” Rebecca Davis said. “He was so stung by that. Here he was on stage and on film with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and the biggest stars of the day, and they all got to go to the inauguration, but he didn’t.”
That rejection helps explain Davis’ subsequent embrace of Richard Nixon. “Nixon, who was politically very devious, figured he could use Sammy Davis as a token African American supporter by overdoing it and inviting him to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom,” Rebecca Davis said. That made him the first Black man to spend the night as a guest in the White House.
Some African Americans saw Davis’ alignment with Nixon and the Republicans as a betrayal. Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier stopped returning his phone calls, Rebecca Davis wrote, and a year or two after he performed at the 1972 Republican National Convention, he was booed at an event organized by Jesse Jackson.
He responded to the boos by saying, “I get it. I understand. But I need you to know, I always did it my way. It’s the only way I’ve got,” Rebecca Davis said. “Then he sang ‘I’ve Gotta Be Me,’ and they gave him a standing ovation.”
A steadfast Jew until the end
His third wife, Altovise, was a churchgoer, but Sammy Davis remained a steadfast Jew until the day he died. Everything he said about Judaism “was said with the utmost sincerity,” Rebecca Davis said. “He never once looked back and said, ‘Oh, that was just a phase I was going through.’ And he never talked about it in terms of his career. He only talked about it as something that spoke to him on a deep level.”
Davis died of throat cancer in 1990 at age 64. Sinatra, Berle, Liza Minnelli, Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick and many other celebrities were among thousands of mourners who backed up traffic for 8 miles en route to the funeral at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in LA. Rabbi Allen Freehling presided at the service, but the eulogy was given by Jesse Jackson.
“To love Sammy was to love Black and white, Black and Jew,” he said, “and to embrace the human family.”
The service also included one last standing ovation for Davis, when they played a recording of – what else? – “I’ve Gotta Be Me.”
Beth Harpaz is a reporter for the Forward. She previously worked for The Associated Press, first covering breaking news and politics, then as AP Travel editor. Email: harpaz@forward.com.
This article was originally published on the Forward
Features
I know exactly why leftists aren’t celebrating this ceasefire
Relief that the fighting may be at an end is one thing. Joy — after all this suffering — is another
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
“We can’t hear you, Zohran,” read one New York Post headline this week: “Pro-Hamas crowd goes quiet on Trump’s Gaza peace deal.”
“It seems awfully curious that the people who have made Gazans a central political cause do not seem at all relieved that there’s at least a temporary cessation of violence … Why aren’t there widespread celebrations across Western cities and college campuses today?” the article asked.
The Post wasn’t alone in voicing that question. A spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition posted on X that “The silence from the ‘ceasefire now’ crowd is shameful and deafening.” Others went so far as to imply that the protesters had been lying and never actually wanted a ceasefire — because what they really wanted wasn’t freedom and security for Palestinians, but the ability to blame Israel. If pro-Palestinian voices had really wanted a ceasefire, the thinking went, they would be celebrating.
I read these various posts and articles and thought of Rania Abu Anza.
I have thought of her every day since I first read her story in early March 2024. Anza spent a decade trying to have a child through in vitro fertilization. When her twins, a boy and a girl, were five months old, an Israeli strike killed them. It also killed her husband and 11 other members of her family.
A year and a half later, a ceasefire cannot bring her children, her husband, or her 11 family members back. They were killed. They will stay dead. What is there to celebrate?
This does not mean that the ceasefire is not welcome, or that it is not a relief. On the contrary: It is both. Of course it’s a relief that the families of hostages don’t need to live one more day in torment and anguish. Of course it’s a relief that more bombs will not fall on Gaza.
But celebration implies, to me anyway, that this is a positive without caveats. And in this situation, there are so many caveats.
The families of the surviving hostages will still have spent years apart from their loved ones, in no small part because their own government did not treat the hostages’ return as the single highest priority. The families of those hostages who were killed in the war will never again sit down to dinner with their loved ones, who could have been saved. And it is difficult to fathom what’s been taken from the hostages themselves: time spent out exploring the world, or with family and friends, or at home doing nothing much at all but sitting safely in quiet contemplation.
And a ceasefire alone will not heal Israeli society, or return trust to the people in their government. It will not fix some of the deep societal problems this war uncovered. A Chatham House report this August found that: “Israeli television ignores the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, while the rhetoric is often aggressive. Critical voices, from inside Israel or abroad, are attacked or silenced.” If the country is ever going to find its way back from Oct. 7 and this war, a ceasefire is a necessary precondition, but not a route in and of itself.
In Gaza, Palestinian health authorities have said that about 67,000 people — not distinguishing between combatants and civilians — have been killed by Israel’s campaign in response to Oct. 7. A full third of those killed were under the age of 18. The ceasefire cannot bring those children back to life.
It cannot turn back time and make it such that Israel admitted more than minimal aid to the embattled strip. It will not undo the damage that has been done to the people of Gaza who were denied enough to eat and drink and proper medical care. It will not give children back their parents, or parents back their children. It will not heal the disabled, or make it so that they were never wounded.
It will not change that all of this happened with the backing of the United States government. (This is to say nothing of the West Bank, which has seen a dramatic expansion of Israeli settlements and escalation of settler violence over the course of the war). And as American Jewish groups put out statements cheering the ceasefire, we should also remember that it does not reverse the reality that too many American Jews were cheerleaders for all this death.
Protesters calling for a ceasefire have regularly been denounced as hateful toward Jews or callous toward the plight of Israelis; American Jews who called for one were called somehow un-Jewish. (Yes, some pro-Palestinian protesters also shared hate toward Jews; the much greater majority did not.) The charge of antisemitism — toward those calling for a ceasefire, those calling for a free Palestine, and those who called attention to Israel’s abuses during this war — was used to silence criticism of Israel and of U.S. foreign policy. Some American Jews went so far as to call for the deportation of students protesting the war.
A ceasefire doesn’t change any of that. It can’t.
I have hopes for this ceasefire. At best, it will allow people — Israelis and Palestinians and, yes, diaspora Jews — to chart a new, better course going forward. But it almost certainly will not do that if we delude ourselves into thinking of this as a victory or a kind of tabula rasa, as though the lives lost and hate spewed are all behind us, forgotten, atoned for. The last two years will never not have happened. What happens next depends on all of us fully appreciating that.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
Features
New book about a man who helped to save the lives of 200,000 Hungarian Jews
Reviewed by BERNIE BELLAN I have to admit that, as much as I consider myself reasonably informed about the history of the Holocaust, I had never heard of Rudolf Vrba.
Further, when it comes to an understanding of what happened to Hungary’s Jewish population, it’s the story of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg that comes foremost to mind.
But now, after having read a new book by Canadian journalist Alan Twigg, titled “Holocaust Hero – The Life & Times of Rudolf Vrba,” I have a much better understanding of what happened to Hungarian Jewry.
There were approximately 800,000 Jews alive in Hungary at the beginning of World War II and, even though 63,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered by their fellow Hungarians prior to Germany’s entry into Hungary in March 1944 (with the willing cooperation of Hungarian authorities), by the end of World War II only about 200,000 Hungarian Jews remained alive. Of the Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, 424,000 were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau – in a relatively short period of time: between April and July, 1944.
There would have been many more Hungarian Jews who would have been sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, however, were it not for the heroism of two individuals who actually managed to escape from Auschwitz in April 1944: Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler.
While there have been many books written describing how those two brave men managed to escape Auschwitz (and there were only six individuals who managed to do that the entire time Auschwitz was in existence as the largest death camp in the history of the world), Rudolf Vrba’s story is one that should be of particular interest to Canadians because Vrba actually lived in Canada for 31 years of this life, when he was a very well respected professor of biochemistry at the University of British Columbia.
Now, with a recently released book by a well known Canadian historian and journalist by the name of Alan Twigg, a much more complete account of Vrba’s story, beginning with his childhood in Slovakia and ending with a long interview with Vrba’s second wife, Robin Vrba, is available.
Here are the first two paragraphs taken from Twigg’s introduction to the book, which describe in a nutshell why Vrba deserves to be celebrated: “This first volume of a two-volume biography asserts there was much more to Rudolf Vrba than his escape from Auschwitz and his subsequent report that saved 200,000 lives. An outstanding medical researcher, Vrba submitted testimony at the Eichmann trial, pursued war criminals, served globally as a riveting public speaker and combatted Holocaust denialists.
“Under his birth name Walter Rosenberg, he survived…24 near-death experiences over a three-year period as a teenager… At 20, he fought in ten life-threatening battles as a Partisan in the mountains of Slovakia and became a decorated war hero. Rudolf Vrba was a Jew who fought back.”
Twigg explains that this book deals mostly with Vrba’s life up to 1946 and that a second volume will explore his quite successful career as a biochemist.
What emerges though, from Twigg’s account of Vrba’s life is unbridled admiration for Vrba’s brilliance – as someone who could make instant assessments of life or death situations and, no matter how fraught with danger the wrong choice could entail, retained his composure and thought his way through to survival.
Born Walter Rosenberg, Vrba was eventually given the alias Rudolf Vrba by Jewish authorities in Slovakia, which is to where he escaped from Auschwitz with Wetzler in April 1944. Rather than reverting to Walter Rosenberg following the war he kept the name Rudolf Vrba.
Twigg provides a great deal of information about Vrba’s early life throughout the book, but what is sure to grab the reader’s attention and want to make even someone who might not be all that interested in reading something about a Holocaust survivor is the introduction in which Twigg lists the 24 different experiences that Vrba survived as a teenager, each of which – had they gone the wrong way, could very well have ended with his death.
The fact that Vrba was one of only six Jews to have escaped Auschwitz is amazing in itself, but it is what he – along with Wetzler, did after escaping that makes one wonder why he hasn’t received greater recognition in Canada – and which leads Twigg to want to correct that grave injustice.
Vrba and Wetzler wrote down what they had witnessed happening in Auschwitz-Birkenau in a 20-page report that was given to Slovakian Jewish authorities and which became known as the “Vrba-Wetzler Report.” It provided detailed information about the large scale extermination of what the report calculated were 1,765,000 Jews between April 1942 and April 1944, all of whom had been murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Vrba had an incredible memory for detail and it was the figures that he entered into the report that came to be accepted as quite accurate when they were later corroborated by the testimony of others, including the most notorious commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss (or Hoess).
Although Vrba only arrived in Auschwitz in June 1942, he based his calculations on what he saw transpiring every day that he was there, when he witnessed the number of trains arriving daily, how many boxcars were part of each train (45 on average), and how many people were stuffed into each boxcar (60 on average).
While the report did receive dissemination among various Western European and American authorities, Twigg argues that it was deliberately suppressed by leaders of the Hungarian Jewish community – who had been well aware of the report around the same time mass deportations of Hungarian Jews began in April 1944. Germany had not entered into Hungary until March 1944 and the Hungarian Jewish community was the last Jewish community to be largely extinguished during the war.
A major part of Twigg’s book deals with Vrba’s contention that one man in particular, Rudolf Kastner, who was head of what was known as the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, and who was well aware of the Vrba-Wetzler Report, could have used his influence to warn Hungarian Jews about their impending fate at the hands of the Nazis but, for whatever reasons he may have had, chose not to do so. (Twigg does describe though, a deal Kastner made with Adolph Eichmann, who was in charge of Germany’s extermination program in Hungary, to save the lives of 1600 Hungarian Jews, many of whom were either friends or relatives of Kastner.) The contempt with which Vrba and, in turn, Twigg, held for Kastner and those who came to his defense – including one of Israel’s most respected historians, Yehuda Bauer, emerges clearly in the book.
Eventually, however, and in no small part, due to the failure of leaders of Hungary’s Jewish community to warn their fellow Jews what fate awaited them if they followed orders to board the trains, over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to their slaughter. With the total cooperation of Hungarian authorities, Jews – as they were in every other jurisdiction where they were ordered on to trains, were misled into thinking that they were simply being deported, not headed for extermination.
It was only after the Vrba-Wetzler Report gained wide dissemination, a process which Twigg describes in some detail, that pressure began to mount on Miklos Horthy, the “Regent” of Hungary, to stop assisting the Germans in the deportation of Hungarian Jews. (After reading other information about Horthy, however, it is not clear the extent to which Horthy was aware Jews were being sent to their deaths prior to the publication of the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Twigg does not enter into that debate.)
While “Holocaust Hero – The Life & Times of Rudolf Vrba” does tell a fascinating story, at times it does lose momentum. Perhaps because Twigg makes quite clear from the outset that he is a journalist and a historian, not a novelist, he relies upon previously written accounts, including Vrba’s own autobiography, to cobble together a narrative from a variety of different sources. What results is a book that will probably be of great interest to students of history, but not as much to those who might prefer to read a story laden with graphic imagery.
There are many instances throughout the book where Twigg takes great pains to offer substantiation for what he says happened to Vrba during the Second World War – which was undoubtedly horrifying, but because the author is so dispassionate in his writing, what Vrba endured does not come across as chillingly as one might expect.
Reading about stacking bodies in advance of their being taken to a crematorium or of sorting through the possessions of the victims – all of which Vrba did, doesn’t quite deliver the gut punch that we’ve come to expect when we see actual visual representations of the same experiences – whether it be through documentary footage or dramatizations in such films as “Schindler’s List” or , to my mind, the most riveting film ever made about what life in Auschwitz was truly like – “Son of Saul,” a Hungarian film that won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 2015.
The book contains quite a bit more information than perhaps the average reader might need to know, including a very lengthy transcript of an interview Twigg had with Vrba’s widow, Robin Vrba. While it’s somewhat interesting to read about their life together, it’s hardly germane to the story how important a role Vrba ultimately played in saving the lives of 200,000 Hungarian Jews.
Still, as we approach the anniversary of Kristallnacht, which happened 87 years ago, and which was the harbinger of what was to come for European Jewry, reading a book that describes how one individual in particular, Rudolf Vrba, not only survived the Holocaust when almost anyone else in the same situations he repeatedly encountered would have succumbed to the easy way out and accepted death, it reminds us that stories of heroism on an unimaginable level can make us realize that whatever hardships we may face in our own lives pale in comparison to what someone like Vrba endured.
“Holocaust Hero – The Life & Times of Rudolf Vrba”
By Alan Twigg
153 pages
Published by Firefly Books, September 2025
Features
Bitcoin Price Volatility: WOA Crypto – Why Cloud Mining Becomes a Safe Haven for Investors
(Posted Oct. 10, 2025) Bitcoin once again attracted market attention today, with the price around $122,259, with an intraday high of $124,138 and a low of $121,141. Driven by capital flows, ETF inflows, and macroeconomic factors, Bitcoin recently hit a new high, but encountered retracement pressure today and fluctuated widely between $121,000 and $124,000 during the initial decline.
There have been no major structural changes in capital flows. For most investors, the best way to deal with volatility is not to try to precisely time peaks and troughs, but to let assets generate returns both in the ups and downs.
Cloud Mining: A New Approach Beyond “Observing the Charts”
In a constantly volatile market, checking charts, chasing peaks (and then cutting losses) is routine—actions that often lead to emotional exhaustion and poor decision-making. Cloud mining offers a solid, rules-based revenue model.
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During periods of high prices and volatility, cloud mining (due to its daily payouts and weak correlation with price fluctuations) attracts more rational investors.
WOA Crypto Mining: Making Cloud Mining Practical
Among the many cloud mining services, WOA Crypto positions itself as a simple, secure, and transparent service—allowing investors to focus on more than just price monitoring.
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While the price of Bitcoin has fluctuated between $121,000 and $124,000, the winners haven’t been those who perfectly timed the tops and bottoms, but rather those who consistently let the asset perform.
Cloud mining eliminates most of the emotional fluctuations in trading and provides a strategy that is easy to accumulate over the long term, which can continue to accumulate capital even in uncertain times. In times of market volatility, letting assets grow in value is undoubtedly the most resilient investment strategy.
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