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A Jewish expert on monuments on what Philly’s famous Rocky Balboa statue can teach us about memory
(JTA) — Paul Farber was shocked when he first watched “Rocky” and saw a Star of David on the grave of Rocky Balboa’s coach, Mickey Goldmill.
As a Jew and as the founder of the Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, which has explored collective memory through art installations across the country for over a decade, Farber was well positioned to think about the deeper meaning of that brief shot.
“Anytime I see a Jewish funeral in a film, there’s some kind of call to attention. And I always want to know what that means, especially for a Hollywood production, especially when it may not be branded as a Jewish story,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“We’re not there in a prolonged series of mourning, but in a split second, seeing a Jewish site of a memory is really fascinating,” he added.
That outlook lies behind Farber’s work as the host of the new NPR podcast “The Statue,” a deep dive into Philadelphia’s famed statue of Rocky Balboa, the fictional prizefighter at the center of “Rocky.” The series delves into what sports and society can convey about memory, and in his research, Farber discovered a few Jewish nuggets found in the film series — including the fact that Rocky’s love interest was originally supposed to be Jewish.
“They made an actual gravestone [for her character] and it’s in Philadelphia’s most famous cemetery, Laurel Hill. And you can go there and see this gravestone where a movie character is ‘buried,’” he said. “People leave offerings on the gravestone, including small pebbles as if it’s a Jewish site of memory.”
In an interview with JTA, Farber shared his inspiration for the series, how his Jewish upbringing informed his life’s work and the role statues — such as that of Jewish baseball legend Sandy Koufax — do, and should, play.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: To start off, I’d love to hear about how you first got interested in studying monuments.
Paul Farber: I’m really interested in the ways that, in cities, we innovate toward the future, and also come to terms with our past, and it happens often in the same exact places. That could be a statue, a street, a corner store. And so that’s a big part for me.
What really inspired this project is a conversation I had with my mother, quite a few years ago. My mother is a lifelong Philadelphian. Her parents were Jewish immigrants in South Philadelphia. And when I told her I was teaching a class at the University of Pennsylvania about Philly neighborhoods, she asked me if I was covering Rocky. When I said, “Oh, it’s not on the syllabus” — and I may have said it in a way that felt dismissive — she gave me this look that I think a lot of us know: “How could you.” So for her birthday, we watched “Rocky” and we went to see “Creed.” My grandfather went to South Philly High and was in the boxing club. He shared stories in our family about what it meant to have sport and culture and belonging go together in South Philly. I started to see that across generations, from long before “Rocky” to this moment now, almost 50 years after the release of the film, many people’s family stories could be channeled through this statue, including my own, and that was enough of a prompt to go dive in.
“Rocky” is obviously not a Jewish story, but there are some nuggets. There’s the funeral scene, and you mentioned something about Adrian almost being Jewish. I’m curious what you think about the little Jewish pieces you can pull out of this famous story, and what those mean to you as a Philly sports fan.
It blew me away that Rocky’s coach, Mick, passes away and the character Rocky goes to his funeral, and you see a Star of David. Anytime I see a Jewish funeral in a film, there’s some kind of call to attention. And I always want to know what that means, especially for a Hollywood production, especially when it may not be branded as a Jewish story. And it just opened up a whole set of questions for me that blurred between art and life, between the film series and the city of Philadelphia.
In episode two, we showcase this monumental art book that Sylvester Stallone [who played Rocky] created. There was this passage in it that just blew me away, about the first draft of “Rocky,” where he says, “As for Adrian, she was Jewish in the first draft.” And he got feedback and cut that character. We never hear about Mickey’s Judaism. We never hear about Rocky’s bond across culture. But the fact that the first scene in the “Rocky” series is in a place called Resurrection Gym — that is obvious Christian iconography — and to put Jewish characters in is really fascinating to me.
There is another famous grave that is involved in the series. The character Adrian eventually passes away, and like the statue, which was made as a bronze sculpture, for the “Rocky” film series they made an actual gravestone and it’s in Philadelphia’s most famous cemetery, Laurel Hill. And you can go there and see this gravestone where a movie character is “buried.” People leave offerings on the gravestone, including small pebbles as if it’s a Jewish site of memory.
People talk about representation on screen, and I’m not sure a Jewish funeral necessarily does that, but I would imagine for some people, seeing Rocky Balboa say the “Mourner’s Kaddish“ was maybe their first interaction with Judaism in some way. What do you make of that?
Every shot is deliberate. And it’s actually that kind of attitude and outlook that created the Rocky statue, because Sylvester Stallone was the director of that film, and they could have made a styrofoam version or a temporary one, but they spent over a year making a bronze version so that when the camera faced it, it would make contact. I think very similarly, this is part of the artistry of Stallone that plays out in our podcast series. We’re not with him when he sits shiva. We’re not there in a prolonged series of mourning, but in a split second, seeing a Jewish site of a memory is really fascinating. And to see the coach Mickey, to have his Wikipedia page say he’s Jewish, all that we have is mourning.
I think about how for immigrant Jewish communities, there are gaps in our narratives. Throughout the series, and one of the reasons I wanted to share my perspective as a queer Jewish person who grew up loving sports in Philly, I’ve been informed by my own family’s history, and what we’re able to recall and what gaps there are. And I see that being echoed for so many people in the Rocky story.
It’s clearly a very personal story for you. Why did you think it was important to start the podcast with your own identity, and to include your Jewish mother?
I think it’s important that when we talk about sites of memory, we understand that there are shared and collective ways that we bring the past forward, and there are others that are incredibly personal. My hope was to find, in this case, to spotlight, a significant site of memory in the city, but ask questions about it. And I think it was important to note what position I would take, because I don’t believe there’s one story to the Rocky statue. To tell a biography of a statue, you actually have to tell it of the people who make meaning from it. So in the series, we do a lot of work where we want to know other people’s stories and backgrounds, whether they are refugees from Afghanistan, or community organizers in Kensington [a neighborhood of Philadelphia]. My hope was by positioning this from my perspective, almost as a memoir in a way, that it opened up space for others to have their experiences be valued and made meaning of.
The official artwork for Farber’s podcast. (Courtesy)
Both with the podcast and in your work with the Monument Lab, how do you feel that your Jewish identity informs what you do? Do you see overlap between your Jewish values and the values you work on in your organization?
I absolutely think so. I grew up in a Jewish community in Philadelphia, and tikkun olam was a constant refrain. The work of tikkun olam meant a worldview that necessitated building coalitions and understanding across divides, to not diminish or under-emphasize them, but to appreciate how we work in solidarity, whether that’s around racial justice, gender justice, in various struggles. I am a co-founder and director of an organization that focuses on memory, and that I really get from the stories of growing up in a Jewish household, in a Jewish community, where memory lived in different ways. We were always aware of the stories of trauma and loss, as well as reconciliation and transformation, and how you work with the gaps that you have, and you listen, and you learn and you carry the story with you. Because that is the way to bond generations. Jewish memory really grounds what I do, and I seek to use it as a tool to learn more and to feed connection across divides.
Rocky takes on this almost mythical, godlike status, and his statue in Philadelphia is a bit of a pilgrimage site. Do you see any tension there as a Jew, given the prohibition against idol worship?
I think about the importance of memory, against forces of violence and erasure. I also understand that, in a world that is full of pain and difficulty and loss, we seek places to release that. And so I understand the pull to monuments. What I would like to see, and what we try to do through this series, “The Statue,” and also with the work of Monument Lab, is to look on and off the pedestal, and really think about how history lives with us. As we say in the series and other places, history doesn’t live inside of statues, it lives with people who steward them, who create other kinds of sites of memory, who are vigilant in their modes of commemoration. What I try to do in this work is understand the ambivalence around monuments, the pull to try to remember and be enduring through time, and just that constant reminder that whenever you try to freeze the past, or freeze an image of power, you cut out the potential to find connection and empowerment, and thus forms of survival.
In sports, there are so many ways to honor people, especially different ways that, like a statue, take on the idea of permanence. When Bill Russell died, the NBA retired his number 6 across the league. On Jackie Robinson Day, every April 15, the whole MLB honors Jackie Robinson by wearing his uniform number. But statues just have a different level of oomph. Sandy Koufax has a new statue in Los Angeles that was unveiled last year; Hank Greenberg has one. What do you think it should take for an athlete to reach that status?
The pinnacle in sports is to have a statue dedicated to you outside of the stadium. And I do believe the cultures of social media have amplified that, because we grew up with the story of Sandy Koufax not pitching in the World Series during the High Holy Days, and that wasn’t because we learned it from a statue or a plaque. We learned it because it was carried forward and put into different forms of remembering and recalling its importance. I went to several Maccabi Games in the U.S. — I used to be a sprinter. And the culture of memory and sport, they were one in the same.
In professional sports, the pinnacle is the statue, but I think you brought up other really important ways of remembering that operate in non-statue forms that feel like they are living memorials. The idea of retiring someone’s number, and keeping their number up, is a way to acknowledge, in this really public of all public spaces, an intimacy and a care, and especially when an athlete passes away, how that transcends the lines of city geography. Jackie Robinson Day is something that did not occur immediately after Jackie Robinson was the first Black player to play in the major leagues, but was a product of a later moment when people around Major League Baseball sought to activate his memory. So yes, a statue outside of a stadium is like a particular kind of professional accolade. But the other forms are really meaningful.
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Dangerous denialism about the realities of Hamas points to an American moral collapse
A terrible mutation afflicts American politics. What began as fury over Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war has evolved, in significant parts of the progressive left, into a pathological hostility toward Israel that has become a driver of political identity and debate. The genocide accusation is increasingly treated not as a contested claim but as settled truth; opposition to Zionism as evidence of virtue; and even Hamas and “armed resistance” can be romanticized or excused.
This week’s victory by Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the Senate, alongside the popularity of voices such as Hasan Piker, suggests this is no longer simply the rhetoric of campus radicals. Israel is being cast as such a singular evil that opposing it can seem almost a prerequisite for occupying the moral high ground.
Which is why what happened to Douglas Murray’s recent book is so interesting. On Democracies and Death Cults confronts precisely this mutation: the extraordinary difficulty much of the Western left now seems to have in distinguishing between a deeply flawed democracy and a murderous Islamist movement committed to its destruction. Yet despite Murray’s prominence and the book’s commercial success, much of the mainstream review culture simply ignored it. In the political climate of August 2026, that silence looks less like an oversight than part of the story.
Douglas Murray has never lacked critics. That is the inevitable consequence of writing about immigration, identity politics and the West’s growing loss of confidence in itself. His earlier books, The Strange Death of Europe and The War on the West, provoked fierce disagreement, but they were treated as books that demanded engagement — reviewed, debated and rebutted.
On Democracies and Death Cults, published last year, received something different.
I believe the reason is plain. This was the first Murray book whose principal purpose was not simply to criticize fashionable ideas in the West but to defend Israel during the most contentious conflict of our time.
Had he written 250 pages arguing that Israel’s campaign in Gaza was criminal, reviews would almost certainly have followed. Instead, he argued that Hamas is a death cult, that Israel is confronting an enemy unlike any conventional military adversary, and that much of the Western left has become morally incapable of distinguishing between a liberal democracy from an organization that celebrates the murder of civilians, including on its own side.
The media appears to prefer to ignore those arguments. And I consider that unfortunate, because I believe Murray is substantially right. If I were still with the mainstream media, where I spent decades of my career, I’m pretty sure I would be swimming against the tide on this, and getting called nasty names.
The most remarkable thing about this book is that it exists at all. Its central proposition ought to be among the least controversial statements in modern politics: Hamas is evil. The fact that an accomplished writer felt compelled to devote an entire book to persuading educated Western readers of that proposition — and that this is controversial — says volumes about what our society has mutated into.
Murray’s achievement is not merely to condemn Hamas but to explain it. He rejects the comforting fiction that it is simply another national liberation movement employing regrettable tactics. Barbarism, he argues, is not incidental to Hamas. It is intrinsic to its worldview.
Hamas does not merely accept death as the price of war. It glorifies death, sanctifies martyrdom and exploits the deaths of its own people as readily as those of its enemies. Its objective is not a negotiated peace or a two-state solution. It has repeatedly opposed such outcomes because it does not seek coexistence with Israel but Israel’s destruction. Unless one regards Israel’s very existence as an occupation to be liberated, Hamas’s own stated aims are impossible to misunderstand.
Murray demonstrates this not through slogans but through reporting.
He describes an organization that — together with its fellow traveler and Iran proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon — systematically embeds itself within civilian life: storing weapons in homes, schools and places of worship, digging tunnels beneath residential neighborhoods and turning civilian suffering into a strategic asset. He recounts Hamas gunmen hiding behind civilians apparently attempting to surrender before opening fire, the abuse of ambulances that inevitably casts suspicion on legitimate ones, and the recruitment of fake journalists and even teachers employed by UN schools. None of this is an aberration. It is the strategy itself.
Murray also describes in excruciatingly graphic detail the evidence he collected of the cruel, vicious murders on Oct. 7, in the rural communities invaded by Hamas and at the Nova music festivals — girls shot in the head as they begged for mercy, boys’ heads bashed in with hammers, grenades lobbed at people cowering. It is unbearable and leaves no doubt about the evil at work.
Nor is Hamas’s contempt for life reserved for Israelis.
One of Murray’s most chilling stories concerns Yahya Sinwar during his years in Israeli prison. Discovering that the sister of a fellow prisoner had allegedly dishonored the family through an affair, Sinwar arranged from prison for her murder in the name of family honor. The anecdote is horrifying not simply because of its brutality but because it reveals a worldview in which individual human life carries almost no value beside ideological or tribal imperatives. The same mentality that celebrates the murder of Israeli civilians is perfectly capable of consuming its own.
Murray’s point is not that Israel is morally perfect. Israel has extremists of its own, including some whose politics deserve unequivocal criticism. But there remains an immense moral gulf between a democracy whose institutions regard civilian deaths as tragedies and an organization that celebrates death itself.
The distinction is visible not merely in military conduct but in culture. When General Gadi Eisenkot, now running for prime minister, lost his son fighting in Gaza, Israel mourned with him. When Ismail Haniyeh’s sons were killed, Haniyeh publicly celebrated their martyrdom. One response grieved the loss of life. The other glorified it. That is not merely a political distinction. It is a civilizational one.
Power of observation
Murray also did something that commentators often do not — he went. He entered Gaza. He entered southern Lebanon. He documented Hezbollah’s tunnel systems intended to facilitate an invasion of northern Israel. He described children’s bedrooms converted into weapons depots and the suffocating grip Hezbollah exerts over the Shiite communities it claims to defend. One may dispute some of his conclusions. It is considerably harder to dismiss his observations.
Yet the most unsettling chapters are not really about Hamas or Hezbollah.
They are about us. Murray argues that large parts of the contemporary Western left have become incapable of recognizing jihadist movements for what they are because they increasingly interpret every conflict through a single moral framework: oppressor and oppressed. Once Israelis are cast as oppressors and Palestinians as oppressed, every other moral consideration recedes. Terrorism becomes “resistance,” massacres become contextual, and universal moral standards give way to political tribalism.
That, he argues, explains not only why so much of the world glosses over Hamas’s obvious evil, but why so many people seemed incapable of extending even the most basic sympathy to the victims of Oct. 7. Why were posters of kidnapped children, elderly civilians and Holocaust survivors torn down on Western campuses? Why was the instinct not to mourn, but to explain away, relativize or even celebrate?
He also asks why the outrage is so selective.
Do those denouncing Israel know that while more than half a million Arabs were displaced during the 1948-49 war, an even greater number of Jews were driven from or compelled to flee Arab countries, most of them finding refuge in Israel as citizens? Do they know that Palestinian refugee status — in neighboring Arab countries culturally and ethnically practically indistinguishable from the Palestinians! — has been uniquely preserved and inherited across generations, while other refugee crises have generally been resolved through resettlement and integration?
Do they know how many Muslims are dying today in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa with scarcely a fraction of the attention devoted to Israel? Do they know that, at roughly the same time as the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Partition of India uprooted many millions of people — Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs — in one of history’s largest and bloodiest population exchanges?
Why does none of this provoke anything resembling the same moral fervor?
Israel is a tiny country, scarcely larger than New Jersey even including the Negev Desert, and closer in populated area to Rhode Island. It is fighting organizations openly committed to its destruction. Yet it has become the singular obsession of the activist left.
Is this extraordinary fixation simply the product of ignorance? Do many of those chanting Hamas slogans know little of the history they claim to invoke? Or is something darker at work? Is Israel judged by standards applied to no other nation because it is the world’s only Jewish state? Is it actually antisemitism??
One need not answer that question categorically to recognize that it cannot simply be dismissed. The sheer selectivity of the outrage demands an explanation. Pretending it does not is no answer at all. And yet the world’s media has ignored the main and probably only book written by an outsider that tries to set the record straight, despite his status as a celebrity public intellectual.
An uncomfortable place
Admiration for Murray does not require agreement with all of his conclusions. Indeed, it is here that I part company with him. His diagnosis of the contemporary progressive left is penetrating and absolutely correct. His political prescription is considerably less persuasive, to me.
Somewhere along the way, Murray’s entirely justified alarm at progressive illiberalism appears to have led him into an accommodation with a populist right that embodies many of the very habits he has spent years criticizing. His tolerance of Benjamin Netanyahu sits uneasily beside his insistence that democracies should be held to the highest standards. More troubling still is his increasing willingness to excuse or support Donald Trump.
I cannot follow him there.
Donald Trump is no defender of the civilization Murray wishes to preserve. Contempt for expertise, hostility toward science, casual and colossal corruption, attacks on independent institutions and the elevation of personal loyalty above constitutional principle are not expressions of the Western tradition. They are threats to it.
Many of us now occupy an uncomfortable place. We believe Hamas is evil and that Israel has every right to defend itself against organizations committed to its destruction. We believe Western civilization, for all its undeniable failures, deserves defending because it produced constitutional government, scientific inquiry, individual liberty and the very tradition of self-criticism that allows us to acknowledge its mistakes.
At the same time, we believe in climate science, vaccination, expertise, the rule of law, sensible gun regulation and a robust social safety net. We reject identity politics that reduces history to oppression, but we reject populism that dismisses knowledge, institutions and liberal norms just as firmly.
And we know Netanyahu is a vile and venal schemer who cannot be trusted. We also know the West Bank occupation is not sustainable and plain wrong – even if the Palestinians twice rejected fair offers for a partition and a state.
Twenty years ago, those views would have described a fairly conventional liberal. Today they seem to describe almost no political constituency at all.
You do not have to agree with everything Murray says or believes or does to understand that On Democracies and Death Cults deserves engagement.
The lack of engagement with On Democracies and Death Cults is almost more revealing than the book itself. Murray’s central claim, that Hamas is a murderous, nihilistic organization whose ideology glorifies death, and which helps the Palestinians not at all, ought not to require elaborate demonstration. It should be self-evident to anyone with any information and minimal intelligence.
Yet much of the mainstream intellectual and media establishment simply chose not to grapple with the argument. That silence reflects a profound unseriousness. Institutions that pride themselves on intellectual openness inadvertently reinforced Murray’s broader thesis: that important parts of the Western intellectual establishment have become unable — or unwilling — to make moral distinctions that once lay at the heart of liberal civilization.
If that diagnosis is even partly correct, we face a genuine crisis. The populist right, with its contempt for expertise, institutions and often for truth itself, cannot be the answer. But neither can a left that increasingly struggles to recognize reality.
I am not prepared to believe that this battle for liberalism has already been lost. Perhaps liberals can beat back the progressive challenge. But it is a battle that must be fought. If the political right continues its descent into populist illiberalism while important parts of the left continue to abandon the moral clarity that once defined liberal democracy, then we are in very deep trouble indeed.
The post Dangerous denialism about the realities of Hamas points to an American moral collapse appeared first on The Forward.
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A Minnesota reggae band gave this Midwestern Jewish teenager the greatest gift of all
It’s late summer. Twelfth grade is starting in two weeks, and I — moody guy that I am — am in a particularly foul one when my friend Blair, who I’ve known since our mothers toted us around in strollers, calls me and tells me there’s a reggae band playing at the Lake Harriet bandshell in a few hours.
“Get your lazy butt outta bed,” he says.
Blair isn’t moody by nature. In fact, he’s happy most of the time, which is one of the reasons I’ve stayed friends with him so long. Seeing a reggae band does sound mildly appealing, even if it means I’ll have to get up and get dressed. An hour later, we’re at the bandshell, and my bad mood is threatening to become a thing of the past.
The sun is dropping fast, and the lake is exhaling mosquitoes, dark clouds of them lifting off the surface and drifting into a sky of pale green. There’s been a tornado watch all afternoon, the radio has been issuing steady warnings, but nobody seems to care. When Shangoya takes the stage, the world narrows to rhythm alone. When the band kicks in, the bass lands in my chest like a second heart. A brake shoe clangs, metal on metal, time being hammered into place. The singer, Aldrich Peter Nelson moves as if nothing in the world has ever resisted him. The music lifts me upward, presses me back down, pins me to the ground, then sends me into the air again.
For a moment, something in me lines up. Not control. Attention. A sense that if I don’t look away, I might be allowed to remain inside the feeling a little longer.
I could do that, I think. I should be up there blowing people away.
After the show, Blair tells me he needs to hightail it home before his 10:30 curfew. “Gimme a couple minutes,” I say. I spot the bass player, a fit-looking dude, around 35, rolling up his cables and wiping down a black Fender jazz bass.
“Hey, how ya doin’?” I say as I walk up to him. “I had a great time listening to you guys. I’m a guitarist, and I think you’d be a lot better with me up there. I could kick some ass, actually.”
He laughs. “How old are you den?”
“I’m seventeen,” I say.
“Me name’s Lloyd. And if ya tink you dat good, maybe I outta take ya numbah jus’ now. Shangoya’s been tinkin’ ’bout a second guitarist.”
I give him my number. I already had it written out.
Six months later, there’s a note on our kitchen table:
Babe, a guy named Roy with an accent called this afternoon and wants you to try out for his band.
Love, Mom
Given the malaise I’d been experiencing since my early graduation and my sentence working in the warehouse at Pickwick, the distribution center for every Musicland record store in the U.S., this news felt like manna from heaven. I wasn’t particularly concerned about the audition either. Since that night I saw Shangoya playing at the bandshell, the image of me up there on stage with them had stayed vivid in my mind. Becoming part of the band felt like a technicality.
On the night of the audition, there are at least a dozen players waiting in the living room of Aldrich Peter Nelson’s small house in South Minneapolis. Most of these guys are in their mid- to late 20s; a couple look like they might be pushing 40. They’re holding expensive guitars and sitting on first-rate amplifiers.
I’m here with the solid-state Kustom Challenger I bought four years earlier with my bar mitzvah money. It’s not exactly a youth model, but it’s certainly no first choice for any pro.
The sound is coming up from the basement. I can hear each player as he auditions.
The first guy is using the same Mu-Tron funk box Andre Cymone was killing me with last year, playing bass with Prince, at the New Year’s Eve show downtown — except this guy’s overusing it. He has no sense of perspective, and instead of adding color, it sounds murky and redundant.
The next player has incredible dexterity. No doubt he’s been woodshedding. For a second, I get a little concerned. After a minute, I relax. What he’s accomplished in speed and fluency, he fucks up with a complete lack of regard for the music itself. He’s stepping all over everything, coming in when he should lay out, drowning out Aldrich Peter Nelson when he’s in the middle of a verse. Instead of making music, this chump is just auditioning his chops.
Shangoya may not be made up of the best studio cats in the world, but they’re way too sensitive and soulful to fall for this.
The next guy heads downstairs. No worries here either. He seems nice enough, but he’s a prog-rocker. His stuff might work for a Genesis cover band, but it makes no sense in reggae or calypso.
Then someone calls up from the basement: “Petah, you ready?”
I pick up my Les Paul and my Challenger and head down.
It’s hot and cramped. The band is clearly in need of a break. Aldrich Peter Nelson smiles, but he’s tired.
“Can you play reggae, mon?” he asks.
“Hell yeah I can,” I say.
Carlos Roque, the drummer, counts off with four clicks of his sticks.
They start a slow groove in A minor. Good tempo. Just right for me.
I’ve never been a shredder. I like to make each note count. I don’t come in right away. I give myself space. I need air around the notes I’m about to release.
When I need some heat, I flick the Les Paul’s toggle to the rear pickup — that fat sound. Then I turn around and twist the Challenger’s volume knob all the way up. I won’t use all that gas, not yet, but I want it in reserve.
I start in with a stream of long Santana-esque notes, let them hang, then travel the neck.
I’m not messing around this evening, not making slick noise. I’m playing things that mean something — sounds that tell the story of a soul in exile. I feel like I’m homing in on an echo, a burgeoning need to return to center, to find bliss, to fly. I want out of the past months, out of the emptiness weighing me down. I’m not auditioning anymore. I’m doing this for myself.
When I need more volume, I take it. The Challenger wasn’t built for this. It sounds like it’s about to blow apart. I hope it does. Right here in this basement, while I imagine the other guys upstairs are quivering, helpless in fear.
When the music stops, Aldrich Peter Nelson smiles — and this time the smile stays.
“What ya tink you can bring to de band if we hire you all jus’ now?” he asks.
I grab a paper towel and wipe my face.
“You see that little amplifier?” I say, pointing to the Challenger. “When I’m onstage with you guys — and I will be — it’s gonna shoot flames.”
The whole band laughs.
I’m not offended. I know what they’re thinking. I’d think the same thing. Who is this 17-year-old white Jewish prick? They can’t control themselves. I get it. It’s overwhelming to witness a true believer.
I played with Shangoya for a little over a year. At that age, a year felt like a long time. The Challenger didn’t shoot flames, not exactly. But it amplified a lot of my guitar playing on stages across Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa. I even got to perform a few of my original reggae songs, “Get a Grip” being one of them. It became the B-side of Shangoya’s first single.
To this day, that experience — not just the musical one, but the experience of being accepted into a culture far from my own — remains an incredible gift. Aside from being one of the few Americans, a Jew no less, invited to feel in my bones the rhythms of the Caribbean, I was also, as a young man, embraced warmly by these people, these lifelong friends.
This has meant everything to me.
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WATCH: Yiddish and German — old relatives, new neighbors
במשך פֿון הונדערטער יאָרן איז מיזרח־אייראָפּע געווען דער צענטער פֿון ייִדיש־לעבן. הײַנט, נאָך דעם חורבן, האָט זיך די מאַפּע אַריבערגערוקט: אַחוץ ענגלאַנד, קלינגט ייִדיש הײַנט בעיקר אין מערבֿ־ און מיטל־אייראָפּע, דווקא אין לענדער וווּ דײַטש איז אַן אָפֿיציעלע שפּראַך — אין אַנטווערפּן, בערלין, ווין, ווײַמאַר, ציריך און אַנדערע ערטער.
אין דעם ווידעאָ, געפֿירט אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש, רעדט אלי בענעדיקט מיט די ייִדיש־אַקטיוויסטן דזשייק שנײַדער, איידל מלובֿיצקי, מענדי קאַהן, אסתּר סאַנדרוי און אַנדרעאַס שמיטגעס וועגן דעם וויכטיקן פֿענאָמען.
דער ווידעאָ ווערט געשטיצט פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע.
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