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‘Can You Dig It?’: New podcast traces how a Puerto Rican-Jewish gang leader helped create hip-hop in the Bronx
(New York Jewish Week) — In the late 1960s, the Bronx was at war. Rival gangs were fighting over territory in neighborhoods that had been devastated by drugs, poverty and the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway.
Benjamin “Yellow Benjy” Melendez was the son of Puerto Rican Jewish immigrants and the leader of a multicultural gang called the Ghetto Brothers that promoted peace. After his comrade Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin was beaten to death in 1971 while trying to break up a fight, Melendez brokered a truce among 50 gangs that led to safer streets, a flourishing of public art and, ultimately, the birth of hip-hop.
Julian Voloj, an occasional Jewish Telegraphic Agency contributor who is married to New York Jewish Week managing editor Lisa Keys, published a graphic novel about Melendez in 2015. Now he has co-written and co-produced a five-part podcast about the Ghetto Brothers that debuted on Audible last month in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of hip-hop.
“Can You Dig It?” includes interviews with former gang members and historians, dramatic reenactments of key moments in the Ghetto Brothers’ history and recordings of Melendez, who died in 2017. Chuck D of the legendary rap group Public Enemy narrates the series, and Coke La Rock — who rapped at what is considered to be the first hip-hop party, on Aug. 11, 1973 — spits a few bars and shares some memories.
Melendez’s ancestors were crypto-Jews from Spain who practiced Judaism in secret to avoid persecution during the Inquisition and afterward. Likewise, he kept his faith under wraps during his gang years. While he forbade members of the Ghetto Brothers from wearing swastikas to appear tough, he never explained why the symbol offended him. Later in life, he embraced his Jewish roots and prayed at the Bronx’s Intervale Jewish Center.
RELATED: From Rick Rubin to Doja Cat, Jews have helped shape the first 50 years of hip-hop
Voloj, who lives in Queens, spoke with the New York Jewish Week this week about hip-hop history and how Melendez’s Jewishness has inspired his own projects on the genre.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited.
JTA: When did you first hear about Benjamin Melendez?
JV: I started a photo series on Jewish diversity in 2005, and I always was looking for interesting characters to photograph. Someone recommended Yellow Benjy. He got his nickname because the mother of his first two kids was Chinese, and there were a lot of other Benjamins in the neighborhood. So I called him up and we met up in the Bronx in 2010 at the stairs where Cornell Benjamin was murdered.
That first meeting was really meant to be just one photograph, but he had this fascinating story and we hit it off. I guess it had to do with my own Latinx, Jewish identity — my parents are Colombian — so we really had a lot in common. When Yellow Benjy died, my kids thought that he was a real relative because they had seen him so many times. He was Uncle Benjy to them.
Benjamin Melendez in 2010. (Julian Voloj)
At its heart, “Can You Dig It?” is a story about gangs of disenfranchised youth fighting over turf. What’s the connection between gangs and hip-hop?
Every culture is part of a certain environment in which it was created. The realities of the 1970s Bronx, there were no youth activities, so the gangs in a way filled this void. Obviously “gang” is a term that’s not one size fits all.
After the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, the Ghetto Brothers invited other gangs into their territory for street parties. There is a direct connection to the early hip-hop parties. The philosophy of early hip-hop was about peace, love, unity and having fun. Only later on did you have gangsta rap with its glorification of violence.
Scholar Joe Schloss says on the podcast that people were always surprised to learn Melendez was Jewish and calls him “a perfect example of what it means to be Jewish in the world in a way that was very different from sort of stereotypical notions of what Jewish is.” Do you agree?
It was one of my main motivations to tell Yellow Benjy’s story in the graphic novel “Ghetto Brother.” He was a proud Puerto Rican Sephardic Jew, and it was a story that was missing from the overall canon on Jewish identity. It was also important that his children have Jewish names, and so his kids have names like Judah, Zipporah, Sarah, Rebecca, Joshua. And with them, his legacy lives on.
Several Jewish personalities are mentioned in the podcast. Can you share a little bit about them?
You have all different aspects of Jewish identity in the story. There’s Benjamin Melendez, who’s a Puerto Rican crypto-Jew. Then you have Robert Moses who comes from a German-Jewish family. The Cross Bronx Expressway is the legacy that he’s most associated with, which really accelerated urban decay and white flight.
Then you have Rita Fecher, whose father was a rabbi. She grew up Orthodox, then divorced her husband and lived as a single mom in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. Fecher was an art teacher at a school in the South Bronx, and she was such a positive influence on all these kids who had never met any Jews. She really cared about them. She allowed them to find their own voice and helped them to think about art. She’s the kind of teacher you wish would exist more.
From left: Pete Chelala, Angelique Lenox, Julian Voloj and Bryan Master at the Cornell Benjamin street renaming ceremony in the Bronx, June 2, 2023. (Courtesy of Voloj)
And she co-produced with Henry Chalafant the 1993 documentary about gang life titled “Flyin’ Cut Sleeves.” How did that come about?
She brought a video camera to the Bronx in the late ’60s, early ’70s, and she gave the kids the camera to document their own lives, which was unheard of. Over a decade later, she tried to track down her former students and see where they ended up. That’s really the powerful thing: you see these angry kids who feel left behind and then you see that everything somehow worked out.
For me, the fascinating part of “Flyin’ Cut Sleeves” is you see Yellow Benjy at the Intervale Jewish Center, the last synagogue of the South Bronx. He goes to services and he’s with Moishe Sacks, who was the rabbi there.
Each episode of “Can You Dig It?” ends with a song by the Ghetto Brothers band, which was fronted by Melendez. Did he rap too?
He really didn’t like hip-hop. It wasn’t his music. He was more of a Beatles fan. He liked Santana.
Although he wasn’t a hip-hop artist, he has a direct connection to the hip-hop troika of [DJ Kool] Herc, Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash. Like Herc, he was once a member of the Cofon Cats [gang]. He was friends with Afrika Bambaataa, who may or may not have participated in the Hoe Avenue peace meeting. Grandmaster Flash, who is slightly younger, knew about the Ghetto Brothers growing up and mentions them in his autobiography.
Who is this podcast for?
Anybody who’s interested in nonfiction audio storytelling. Anybody who’s interested in the history of New York. The bookends of every episode are scripted reenactments, like they use in film documentaries. They really allow listeners to dive in and experience the Bronx in the 1970s.
For the hip-hop community, it allows people to discover a different origin story. You can argue over whether hip-hop is really 50 or not because there are so many origin stories. This is one of them.
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Antisemitism Skyrockets in 7 Countries With Largest Jewish Populations, Global Report Finds
Norwegian student Marie Andersen carries an antisemitic sign at an Oct. 21, 2023, pro-Hamas demonstration in Warsaw, Poland. Photo: Screenshot
The seven largest Jewish communities outside Israel have reported record spikes in antisemitic activity in recent years, largely driven by a wave of anti-Jewish hatred in the aftermath of Hamas launching its war against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to a new report released to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the Holocaust.
On Wednesday, the J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism — a coalition of Jewish organizations in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States — released its first J7 Annual Report on Antisemitism on the eve of Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, when Nazi Germany formally surrendered to Allied forces on May 8.
Affirming the findings of other recent research, the report described how from 2021 through 2023, antisemitic incidents increased 11 percent in Australia, 23 percent in Argentina, 75 percent in Germany, 82 percent in the UK, 83 percent in Canada, 185 percent in France, and 227 percent in the US. The data also showed a jump on a per-capita basis, noting that Germany saw more than 38 incidents per 1,000 Jews while the UK saw 13 per 1,000.
Common trends the seven communities identified included jumps in violent incidents, repeated targeting of Jewish institutions, rising online hate speech, and increasing fear among Jews, often prompting them to hide their Jewish identity.
The number of antisemitic outrages in all seven countries spiked to record levels following Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.
Different organizations from each of the seven countries authored the various sections of the report highlighting the surge in anti-Jewish animus.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews wrote the section on the UK, outlining the findings of the Community Security Trust (CST), a nonprofit charity that advises Britain’s Jewish community on security matters. CST recorded 3,528 antisemitic incidents for 2024, the country’s second worst year for antisemitism and an 18 percent drop from 2023’s record of 4,296. These incidents included 201 physical assaults, 157 instances of damage to Jewish property, and 250 direct threats.
The report also noted that polling suggested that “approximately 6.7 million people in the UK ‘harbor elevated levels of antisemitic attitudes,’ roughly the population of London, the UK’s capital and most populated city.” The group also expressed concern for “an increase in AI-generated deepfakes depicting Jewish individuals using harmful stereotypes and embedding hate symbols in otherwise innocuous images.”
“We must insist on zero tolerance of antisemitism and ensure that this message gets through to lawmakers wherever we live,” said Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies.”
For Canada’s section, the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) provided the information and analysis. The group reported that the Jewish community “was easily the most targeted religious minority, accounting for some 70 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes (with 900 total hate crimes against Jews recorded). Hate crimes against Jews increased by 71 percent from 2022 to 2023, and 172 percent in total since 2020.”
Toronto’s police also counted 164 hate crimes targeting Jews as of October 2024, a 74.5 percent jump from 2023’s statistics.
CIJA also pointed to the increase in antisemitic attitudes among some groups, notably college students (with 26 percent holding some antisemitic views) and Muslims (52 percent). Additional polling showed these numbers reflected in the feelings of Canadian Jews, 98 percent of whom say that antisemitism is a serious or somewhat serious problem and 82 percent who say the country has grown less safe for Jews following the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terror attacks on Israel.
“Since Oct. 7, Canada has experienced a wave of antisemitic attacks — with Jewish schools shot at, synagogues firebombed, Jewish-owned businesses vandalized, and neighborhoods targeted,” CIJA Interim President Noah Shack said in a statement. “In the wake of last week’s federal election, we have a clear expectation that the next Parliament will move urgently to advance serious and impactful solutions to combat hate and protect Jewish Canadians. What is at stake is not only the safety and well-being of our community, but the future of a Canada where everyone can live free from fear and discrimination.”
The report’s section on France, contributed by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), said that “Palestine” appeared in 30 percent of last year’s antisemitic acts in the country. Schools also saw a surge of incidents, jumping to 1,670 in the 2023-2024 school year, compared to 400 the previous year. Specific hate crimes spotlighted in the report included the assault and rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, whose attackers cited her “bad words on Palestine” to justify their cruelty.
A November 2024 CRIF study examining the antisemitic attitudes of the public found that 46 percent of the French people believed at least six antisemitic stereotypes. CRIF stated in the report that “in France, the extreme left instrumentalizes antisemitism as a political tool, while the extreme right instrumentalizes the fight against antisemitism as a political tool.”
“What we are witnessing is not just a statistical increase, it is a societal warning sign,” said CRIF president Yonathan Arfi. “This is not a crisis for the Jewish community, it is a test for our democracies. The escalation in hate speech, threats, and physical assaults against Jews around the world reminds us why international cooperation, like that of the J7, is more vital than ever.”
The Central Council of Jews in Germany provided the facts and analysis for their nation. While the government had not yet released 2024 hate crime statistics, the group said that “there were also more than 5,000 crimes reported by the German police in connection with the Israel-Hamas war that were not labeled as motivated by antisemitism.” The group pointed to a January 2025 study which showed that approximately 40 percent of 18-to-29-year-old Germans did not know that the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews.
“Oct. 7, 2023, has massively accelerated a development that was already looming. Jews in Germany are under threat. A front has formed, cutting across the left and right, from Islamists to the very center of society,” Dr. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in a statement. “This coalition questions the self-evidence of today’s Jewish life as well as Germany’s culture of remembrance. These developments are overlapping and mutually influencing online and offline. We are seeing similar developments in all the J7 countries, and I am glad that this strong task force exists.”
The Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA) explained the situation for Jews in Argentina, where the 2024 hate crime figures had also not yet appeared. The group pointed to the Anti-Defamation League’s 2024 Global 100: Index of Antisemitism, which showed that 39 percent of Argentinians (12.8 million) embraced six or more stereotypes about Jews and that 60 percent believed a small group controlled the world.
DAIA also described how “the political landscape in Argentina shifted significantly with the election of President Javier Milei at the end of 2023. His administration’s alignment with the United States and support for Israel has resulted in an increase in antisemitic and other conspiratorial rhetoric, which has become intertwined with broader geopolitical narratives.”
DAIA’s president, Mauro Berenstein, said in a statement that “in Argentina, we see with concern the exponential rise of antisemitism, in educational, academic, and professional settings, where many people, under the guise of critical thinking or a just cause, reproduce age-old prejudices. Social media has amplified these narratives. What was once whispered now goes viral in seconds. Therefore, more than ever, memory and education are not just tools of the past: they are a duty of the present and a hope for the future.”
In Australia, 64 percent of Jews called antisemitism “very much” a big problem in the country, a tenfold increase since 2017.
“This report presents the most comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of antisemitism in the western world since Oct. 7,” saidm Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. “All of our communities have been afflicted by this, but the situation in Australia presents a particularly staggering depiction of how healthy multicultural societies can be captured by networks of extremists who succeed in fundamentally altering relations between Jews and non-Jews and causing the Jewish community to question its future in a country where its roots are deep and its contributions have been profound.”
Ryvchin said that his country’s recent experience showed that “when antisemitism is not met with sufficient force of policing, law, and political leadership, it can escalate into devastating violence and can attract the most vicious elements of society ranging from religious and ideological fanatics to organized crime. The importance and value of this report is a testament to the work of the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] in convening the J7 and the outstanding cooperation between its member communities.”
As for the US, the ADL and Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations wrote the section, which noted an “alarming rise” in antisemitic incidents. Last month, the ADL released its own report revealing antisemitism in the US surged to break “all previous annual records” in 2024, recording 9,354 antisemitic incidents.
“Eighty years after the end of World War II, Jewish leaders from across the world have come together to reaffirm a simple truth: that we will never allow hatred to define our future,” said Betsy Berns-Korn, chair-elect of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “Rooted in memory, guided by justice, and strengthened by unity, we reaffirm our commitment to securing a safer and more inclusive world for generations to come. This inaugural report reflects the strength of our collective voice and unwavering resolve.”
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Eurovision Director Dismisses Pressure by Former Contestants to Ban Israel From Song Contest
Logos of the Eurovision Song Contest are seen in front of the St. Jakobshalle in Basel, Switzerland, May 1, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
The director of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest is ignoring pressure by dozens of former contestants to have the international competition ban Israel because of its military actions in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war.
Martin Green said in a statement to the British publication Metro on Tuesday that the Eurovision Song Contest “promotes connections, diversity, and inclusion through music.”
“We all aspire to keep the Eurovision Song Contest positive and inclusive and aspire to show the world as it could be, rather than how it necessarily is,” he added. “The EBU remains aligned with other international organizations that have similarly maintained their inclusive stance towards Israeli participants in major competitions at this time.”
Israel’s national broadcaster, Kan, is a member of the Eurovision Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the song contest. Yuval Raphael will represent Israel in this year’s competition with the heartfelt ballad “New Day Will Rise.” The contest will take place this year in Basel, Switzerland, and Raphael – a survivor of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel – will perform in the second semi-final on May 15. If she advances, she will compete in the grand final on May 17. Switzerland will host the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time since 1989.
More than 70 former contestants of the Eurovision Song Contest demanded in an open letter on Monday that Kan be banned from the competition this year, claiming that the broadcaster is “complicit in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the decades-long regime of apartheid and military occupation against the entire Palestinian people.” The open letter was signed by singers, songwriters, musicians, lyricists, and others from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Finland, France, Iceland, Malta, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Turkey. The national broadcasters in Iceland, Slovenia, and Spain have also criticized the EBU’s decision to allow Israel to participate in the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest.
Green’s comments defending Israel’s participation in this year’s competition echo similar sentiments recently expressed by an EBU spokesperson. Speaking to HuffPost UK, the EBU representative said the independent media organization makes decisions about the Eurovision based on rules of the song contest, and Kan’s application to join “met all the competition rules.” The spokesperson further noted that the EBU “remains aligned with other international organizations that have similarly maintained their inclusive stance towards Israeli participants in major competitions at this time.”
“The EBU is an association of public service broadcasters who are all eligible to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest every year,” the spokesperson added. “We are not immune to global events but, together, it is our role to ensure the contest remains – at its heart – a universal event that promotes connections, diversity and inclusion through music.”
Israel’s participation in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo, Sweden, was also highly criticized because of the Israel-Hamas war. Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators took to the streets of Malmo to protest Israel’s involvement and Israel’s representative, Eden Golan, experienced intense backlash during the competition, including death threats and boos from audience members. One Eurovision jury member even admitted that he refused to give Golan a single point merely because of his own anti-Israel views. Singers who participated in the contest last year also faced pressure to pull out of the event because of Israel’s involvement.
At the time, Jean Philip de Tender — the deputy director-general of the EBU – said the Eurovision contest is “a music event, which is organized and co-produced by 37 public broadcasters, so it’s not a competition between nations or governments.” He noted that Eurovision does not make decisions based on politics and if the EBU would ban Kan because of something other than competition rules, “that would have been a political decision.”
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Netherlands to Oppose Extension of EU-Israel Cooperation Deal Over Gaza Concerns
Netherlands Foreign Affairs Minister Caspar Veldkamp addresses a press conference, in New Delhi on April 1, 2025. Photo: ANI Photo/Sanjay Sharma via Reuters Connect
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp revealed on Wednesday that the Netherlands would oppose any extension of the EU-Israel Action Plan, which aims to implement an agreement that provides the basis for political and economic cooperation between the two sides, without a formal review first, citing concerns over the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
In a letter to the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, the Dutch top diplomat accused Israel of breaching the 2000 EU-Israel Association Agreement, which stipulates that ties between the Jewish state and the 27-member bloc must be “based on respect for human rights and democratic principles.”
“The situation in the Gaza Strip is rapidly deteriorating — it is dramatic, catastrophic,” Veldkamp told the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. “Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid is in violation of the laws of war.”
Israel has vehemently denied such claims and accusations, noting that, until its recently imposed blockade, it had provided significant humanitarian aid into the enclave throughout the war. Israeli officials have also said much of the aid that flows into Gaza is stolen by Hamas, which uses it for terrorist operations and sells the rest at high prices to Gazan civilians.
“Meanwhile, the [Israeli] War Cabinet is announcing a reoccupation of Gaza. Taken together, this is reason to draw a line in the sand,” the top Dutch diplomat continued, referring to Israel’s expanded offensive against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which may involve seizing control of the Gaza Strip and overseeing aid distribution.
In his letter, Veldkamp also argued that Israel’s newly proposed system for aid distribution, designed to bypass Hamas, seemed inconsistent with the “principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence.”
Veldkamp, a former ambassador to Israel, informed Kallas that the Netherlands would block European cooperation with Jerusalem until these alleged human rights abuses are thoroughly investigated. He also mentioned that he would bring up these issues during the upcoming two-day EU meeting in Poland.
Israeli officials argue they have gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, despite Hamas’s widely acknowledged military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The EU-Israel Action Plan, which requires unanimous approval from all EU foreign ministers, underpins cooperation in areas such as climate policy, policing, scientific research, and global poverty relief.
On Wednesday, far-right politician Geert Wilders — whose Party for Freedom is part of the Dutch government — criticized Veldkamp, calling him a “weak minister who sides with anti-Israel protesters” in a post on X.
Earlier this week, Wilders announced he met with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and Defense Minister Israel Katz, assuring them of “the support of millions of our people” for the war against “Islamic terror, whether from Hamas, Iran, or the Houthis.”
I spoke today by
with my friends the Israeli minister of Defence @Israel_katz and the minister of Foreign Affairs @gidonsaar and assured them of the support of millions of our people for #Israel fighting Islamic terror, whether from Hamas, Iran or the Houthis. #AmIsraelChai pic.twitter.com/6jjuN0ex6b
— Geert Wilders (@geertwilderspvv) May 6, 2025
Last month, Veldkamp requested a meeting with Israeli Ambassador Modi Ephraim to raise concerns over Israel’s expanding ground operations in the war-torn enclave.
“At my request, the Israeli ambassador was summoned this morning to provide clarification on the worrying developments in the Gaza Strip, including the attack on the aid convoy,” the top Dutch diplomat said at the time, referring to a March incident in which several aid workers were reportedly killed along with six Hamas terrorist traveling in a convoy of Palestinian ambulances.
During the meeting, Ephraim “emphasized the expectation that the Netherlands, as a friend of Israel, will support our efforts to dismantle the Hamas threat in Gaza — a terrorist organization that uses civilians as human shields,” the Israeli Embassy said in a statement.
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