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Harry Belafonte, singer and civil rights activist who popularized ‘Hava Nagila’ in the US, dies at 96
(New York Jewish Week) — Barrier-smashing singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who once boasted of being “the most popular Jew in America” because of his rendition of a Hebrew classic, died Tuesday at his longtime Upper West Side home. He was 96.
The New York City native was the one of the first Black artists to achieve widespread commercial success in the United States, and while he was raised Catholic, his life frequently dovetailed with Jewish causes, values and people. Among Belafonte’s many Jewish connections — which included brokering a meeting between Nelson Mandela and Jewish leaders in 1989 — was his marriage to his Jewish second wife, dancer Julie Robinson. The couple, who were married from 1958 to 2004, raised two children, Gina and David.
In 2011, Belafonte revealed in his autobiography, “My Song: A Memoir” that his paternal grandfather was Jewish. Belafonte’s parents were both Jamaican immigrants: his mother, Melvine, was the child of a white mother from Scotland and a Black father, and his father, Harold George Bellanfanti, who later changed the family name, was the son of a Black mother and white Dutch-Jewish father. In his book, Belafonte describes his paternal grandfather, whom he never met, as “a white Dutch Jew who drifted over to the islands after chasing gold and diamonds, with no luck at all.”
Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr., in Harlem on March 1, 1927. His father was largely absent during his childhood; his mother, who struggled with finding work, forged a relationship with a Jewish tailor who taught her how to mend garments. “That tailor gave me my first sense of kinship with Jews, which would deepen over time,” Belfonte wrote in his memoir. He spent a portion of his childhood with his grandmother in Jamaica, but he returned to New York to attend George Washington High School in Washington Heights — where Alan Greenspan and Henry Kissinger were also educated — before dropping out.
Following a stint in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Belafonte was bitten by the acting bug when, working as a janitor’s assistant, he was given a pair of tickets to the American Negro Theater as a gift. “It was there that the universe opened for me,” he told NPR in 2011. “I decided with any device I could possibly find, I wanted to stay in this place. What I had discovered in the theater was power: power to influence, power to know of others and know of other things.”
In the late 1940s, Belafonte enrolled in acting classes, where he met his lifelong friend Sidney Poitier. The impoverished pair would often share a single theater ticket, trading places at intermission. He also befriended Jewish actor Tony Curtis, writing in his memoir: “He lived in the Bronx with his family; why live downtown, he’d say, when he could live uptown for free? And who cared if they still greeted him up there as Bernie Schwartz?”
He and Curtis frequently went to parties together, he wrote, sometimes with the actress Elaine Stritch, “who swore more colorfully than any sailor I’d known,” and “the blunt Jewish comic” Bea Arthur, “who’d start matching wits with Elaine until the two of them had everyone in uncontrollable laughter.”
To pay for acting classes, Belafonte began dabbling in singing at nightclubs, and it was there that a true superstar was born. One of Belafonte’s early successes were his performances of the Hebrew dance hit “Hava Nagila” at the classic downtown folk club the Village Vanguard. His rendition, Belafonte joked to The New York Times in 2017, made him “the most popular Jew in America.”
In that same interview, Belafonte recalled the tough uptown streets of his childhood, and how he was drawn to the fast money his uncle’s number-running business earned. “Everybody in that world were role models in how to survive, how to be tough, how to get through the city, how to con, the daily encounters,” he said. “But my mother saw to it that unless I wanted to live life absent of testicles, she wasn’t going to have me follow her brother Lenny. Somewhere in there is a Sholem Aleichem — a rich story to be told of the lore of that time.”
With his 1953 breakthrough album, “Calypso” — which included his most iconic work, “The Banana Boat Song” — Belafonte “almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music,” according to The New York Times’ obituary. “Calypso” climbed to the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release and stayed there for 31 weeks; it is reported to be the first album by a solo artist to sell more than a million copies. By 1959 he was the most highly-paid Black performer in history, according to the Times.
Known around the world as the “King of Calypso,” Belafonte recorded and performed a wide range of global and folk classics throughout his wide-ranging musical career — Jewish standards among them. In 1959, he performed “Hine Ma Tov” in England, with what appears to be an Israeli military choir; his 1963 album, “Streets I Have Walked,” includes a rendition of “Erev Shel Shoshanim” (“Evening of Roses”), a popular Jewish wedding song.
Belafonte’s greatest passion, however, was neither acting nor singing — it was civil rights activism. There, too, he worked closely with many Jewish activists, as part of the historic Black-Jewish civil rights alliance of the 1950s and 1960s. But, as he recalled in his memoir, it was racism delivered by a Jewish TV executive that first inspired him to take on racial segregation in the United States.
The executive, a Jew from Montreal named Charles Revson, asked Belafonte to stop hosting white dancers on his performance show, citing the preferences of Southern viewers. Belafonte said he rejected the instruction and let Revson cancel the show. He realized, he wrote, that TV could only reflect societal attitudes, not change them. “To change the culture you had to change the country,” he concluded.
Through his civil rights activism, Bellafonte befriended Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956; the pair remained close until King’s assassination in 1968. “My apartment was a retreat for him,” Belafonte told NPR of King and his 21-room apartment in 2008. “He had his own entrance, his own kitchen. The home became, for him, a place where he could think and reside, take his shoes off, have his collar open and be him.”
Belafonte helped provide the seed money to launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and he was one of the lead fundraisers for that organization and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was “deeply involved” in the 1963 March on Washington and helped fund the Freedom Rides.
Belafonte’s commitment to social justice endured throughout his long life and career. In the 1980s, he helped organize the Live Aid concert, and he served as UNICEF’s goodwill ambassador after Jewish entertainer Danny Kaye pioneered the role. He was also a co-chairman of the Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, along with Gloria Steinem, though ill health kept him from attending.
Though primarily famous for his singing, Belafonte continued to make movies throughout his career; in 1970 he produced and co-starred in “The Angel Levine” alongside the original “Fiddler on the Roof” star Zero Mostel. Based on a story by Bernard Malamud, Belafonte starred as the titular Jewish angel. (The “project had a sociopolitical edge,” the Times noted, as the entertainer’s Harry Belafonte Enterprises hired 15 Black and Hispanic apprentices to work on the film’s crew.)
The cause of Belafonte’s death was congestive heart failure. He is survived by his two children with Robinson; the two children he had with his first wife Marguerite Byrd, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte; and eight grandchildren. After divorcing Robinson in 2004, he married photographer Pamela Frank in 2008; Frank also survives him, along with stepchildren Sarah Frank and Lindsey Frank and three step-grandchildren.
“There’s just so much left that’s in my basket of possibilities,” Belafonte told The New York Times ahead of his 90th birthday in 2017. “I’m not as young as I feel, or as young as I would consider myself to be. The 90 figure is a blur. But I do know that if there’s anything left for me to do, I had best hurry up and do it, because time is not an ally.”
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Metropolitan Police investigating abuse of Jewish attendees at London Pride
(JTA) — London’s Metropolitan Police launched an investigation Monday into antisemitic abuse at a Pride parade after videos and pictures circulated on social media showed Jewish participants enduring taunts at Saturday’s event.
The police department said in a statement that officers were “aware of videos circulating online that show antisemitic verbal abuse directed towards attendees” at the parade in central London and that footage was being reviewed to assess whether criminal offenses had been committed. The department added that it “continues to work hard to tackle hate crimes of all types.”
Videos shared online show people carrying rainbow flags incorporating the Star of David being confronted by individuals shouting “Free Palestine.” The harassment escalated with attendees shouting, “Go back to your Zionist homeland,” “You kill Arab children, you kill gay children,” “F*** you, Jew,” and “How many babies did you kill?”
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to Pride in London for comment. The group had not replied by press time.
The incident comes amid heightened concern over antisemitism in Britain since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, with a record number of antisemitic incidents reported over the past two years. It also comes as Pride celebrations around the world have been roiled by tensions over Israel and antisemitism.
Pride in London drew tens of thousands of participants and visitors to the Soho neighborhood in the British capital. Some Jewish LGBTQ+ organizations have in recent years chosen not to participate in Pride, citing hostility towards Zionist Jews. But this year, around 150 people marched as part of a Jewish bloc at the event.
Organizers said the return this year followed discussions with Pride in London over Jewish inclusion and commitments that organizers would undertake antisemitism awareness training in partnership with the Community Security Trust, the main security consultant to the Jewish community. Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet UK stated earlier this year that the measures were intended to help ensure Jewish LGBTQ+ participants could march “safely and openly” following concerns raised after Oct. 7.
It was not clear whether the Jewish marchers who endured the abuse were part of the official Jewish bloc – accounts from marchers who stayed with the Jewish bloc were generally positive.
“A few people came and chanted ‘free, free, Palestine,’” Israeli author and LGBTQ+ activist Hen Mazzig told JTA. “They were passing through. And there was another person who was at a cafe and then they came by and they were just staring at us.”
Mazzig shared footage from the event on X, writing, ”My pride is not affected by the opinions of others. I am gay, I am Jewish, and I’m here to stay. Am Yisrael chai.”
Mazzig splits his time between London and Tel Aviv, because his husband is British. He told JTA in a phone interview that Saturday’s incidents “were scary, especially when a Pride parade is supposed to be inclusive.”
Mazzig said that since Oct, 7, circumstances have been exceptionally challenging for the British Jewish community “but specifically for LGBTQ youth that are being forced to choose between their Jewish identity and their queer identity.”
Mazzig claimed that Jewish marchers are not accepted unless they specify that they are anti-Zionist. “Every statement of solidarity with LGBTQ Jews seems to come with a ‘but,’” he said. ‘We support you, but not if you’re physically Jewish, not if you’re supporting Israel. You have to renounce half of your identity first.’ That’s not equality.”
In advance of Saturday’s event, some 650 Met police officers were deployed to enforce “zero tolerance” on hate crimes and to ensure that attendees could “safely and securely” enjoy the parade.
When JTA asked the Metropolitan police why at least two policemen appeared to stand by as Jews were subject to abuse, the Met requested that JTA provide the video in question. After being supplied with the video, the Met later told JTA that it had nothing further to add at this stage but would provide an update if it did.
Mazzig said the Met police should consider the abuse at the parade “shameful and it should alarm everyone.”
He added, “I hope that we stop debating whether or not antisemitism is real and accept it. And that communities that are supposed to be inclusive and pluralistic start taking action.”
The post Metropolitan Police investigating abuse of Jewish attendees at London Pride appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s diaspora minister calls Erdogan a ‘grotesque hybrid of Hitler and Sinwar’
(JTA) — Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli compared Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Adolf Hitler and slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a post on X on Monday.
“We all know how narcissistic power-obsessed fanatics like you begin and how they end. The Jewish people have never feared mere flesh and blood, from Pharaoh until today,” Chikli wrote. “You are nothing but a pathetic blood soaked zero who history will soon forget.”
In the post, Chikli accused the Turkish leader of being a “patron of Hamas and ISIS” and described him as a “grotesque hybrid of Hitler and Sinwar” alongside an AI image of Erdogan in front of a Nazi flag.
Chikli’s post was in response to an address by Erdogan last month, in which the Turkish leader called Zionism a “genocidal occupying expansionist ideology” and said the “struggle” against Zionism was for the “collective survival of ourselves and our nation.”
Long-standing tensions between Turkey and Israel stoked by the war in Gaza have escalated in recent weeks, amid increasing Israeli concerns over the tight ties between Ankara and Washington and the possible sale of advanced American F-35 fighter jets to Turkey. Erdogan, who has consistently voiced support for Hamas, has been one of Israel’s most outspoken international critics.
Chikli’s post followed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s blistering attack against Erdogan during an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Fox News Monday. Netanyahu said Turkey was “governed by a man who calls openly for the annihilation of Israel…and talks openly about conquering Jerusalem.”
The Israeli leader warned against the sale of weaponry to Ankara, portraying Turkey as an aggressive country that didn’t help the U.S. battle Iran. He spoke in advance of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trip to Ankara late Tuesday for a two-day summit of NATO.
“For a regime infected by the Muslim Brotherhood, an extreme movement that hates America and chants ‘death to America’ from that side of the spectrum, I don’t think they should be given F-35’s or the engines for their fighter jets,” Netanyahu told Fox News.
Such a sale would “upset the power balance in the Middle East, which is ultimately guaranteed by Israeli air superiority and … by America’s posture in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.
Relations between the two regional powers have also been aggravated by the Israeli government’s June 28 decision to recognize the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Empire during and immediately after World War I.
Turkey has condemned Israel’s recognition of the Armenian genocide. It’s a move so diplomatically controversial that to date, only some 33 countries, aside from Israel, have taken this step, including the U.S. in 2021.
According to Politico, Erdogan said in a public address last week, “We do not give the slightest heed to the slanders about our country from the murder network that has the blood of 73,000 innocent Gazans, most of them children and women, on its hands.”
Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Saar, also took aim at Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, during a press conference in Jerusalem Monday, decrying Fidan’s comments to CNN Türk on Friday in which he said that Israel had become a “burden that humanity can no longer bear.”
“The remarks by Turkey’s Foreign Minister are a clear call for genocide,” Saar said. “The Jewish people know all too well what happens when such words are allowed to go unanswered. The first step on the road to genocide is dehumanization.”
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A narrowed Michigan Democratic Senate race leaves Jewish voters with a stark choice
(JTA) — When Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow suspended her campaign for the U.S. Senate on Sunday, some progressive Jews were bereft.
“I’m still in mourning,” Eve Mokotoff, a public health expert who had been advising McMorrow’s campaign on issues including Jewish ones, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency the next day. “You have to understand, I was sobbing yesterday.”
McMorrow, who is married to a Jewish man and raising a Jewish child, had sought to carve a progressive identity in the state while taking on the far left, particularly on Jewish issues and Israel.
Now with her out of the primary, the race is down to two candidates with polar opposite visions of the Democratic party’s future — particularly on Israel policy — battling over a seat that the party must retain if they hope to flip the Senate in November.
The race will inevitably be seen as a bellwether for the party’s larger orientation on Israel.
The sharp reorientation of the party in the recent years to embracing Israel-critical policies will be exacerbated by the specific dynamics of Michigan. A state home to large Jewish and Arab/Muslim populations weathered the attack at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, outside Detroit, earlier this year and in 2024 saw the rise of the Uncommitted movement that pressured party leaders over Gaza.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former county health director who has grassroots momentum in the state, has said the Israeli government is as “evil” as Hamas and made headlines for campaigning with streamer Hasan Piker, an anti-Israel hardliner. His opponent, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, has accepted backing from AIPAC, whose affiliated super PAC has spent over $10 million on the race according to Federal Election Commission disclosures, at a time when the pro-Israel behemoth is historically unpopular among Democrats.
Neither campaign’s representatives responded to JTA requests for comment for this story, though both have issued statements reaching out to McMorrow supporters since she left the field. Mokotoff described the new playing field as “a terrible choice.”
“I don’t trust either of them,” she said. “You either have someone whom I completely don’t trust, or someone who can be completely manipulated by the state of Israel.”
For many of the state’s other estimated 129,000 Jews, the choice is less difficult. While analysts are torn on what McMorrow’s exit from the race will mean for each candidate, Jewish Democratic leaders — and some clergy — in the state are coalescing around Stevens.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and a close ally of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, endorsed Stevens following McMorrow’s announcement. “Haley cares deeply about the needs of her constituents,” Nessel wrote in her announcement.
The Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus had already endorsed Stevens, as well — but it had been close between her and McMorrow, the group’s chair told JTA.
“The Jews that I know, my sense is that if they were supporting Mallory, they’re going to support Haley at this point,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the caucus’s chair, told JTA.
While Alexander added that she could “still see myself supporting” El-Sayed if he wins the nomination, some Jewish clergy in the state have sounded loud alarms about his candidacy.
“For many Michigan Jews, the Democratic primary race for senator feels like an existential moment,” Rabbi Aaron Starr, of the historic Conservative Congregation Shaarey Zedek in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, told JTA. “We pray that our neighbors and fellow Michigan residents will vote to reject extremism and the kind of rhetoric that leads to violence.”
Along with his fellow Shaarey Zedek clergy, Starr authored a letter to congregants in June urging them to support “the candidate whose record, actions, and rhetoric demonstrate the strongest commitment to protecting Jewish lives by combating antisemitism, seeking federal security funding for American Jewish communities, and supporting Israel’s security and right to exist as a Jewish state.”
“As a clergy team, we agreed that we cannot remain silent if our voice might encourage people to prioritize protecting Jewish lives,” Starr told JTA.
The letter, which invoked the Book of Esther, did not name Stevens or any other candidates. But to JTA, Starr called Stevens “an ongoing friend of the Jewish community” who “personally reached out to me after October 7,” referring to the 2023 Hamas-led massacres in Israel that launched the Gaza war. El-Sayed — whom Starr said he has “heard nothing from” — has publicly expressed doubt that Israel should be a Jewish state.
Now that the race had narrowed, Starr said, “We are hoping that it is now even more likely that the November election will see two candidates who recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, who support Israel’s right to defend itself when under threat, and who will be committed to protecting American Jews in Michigan and around the U.S.” The likely GOP nominee is Mike Rogers, a former congressman known for his pro-Israel outlook.
While El-Sayed often welcomes the Jewish community at his rallies, his comments on local radical behavior affecting Jews have also caused controversy. He angered Jewish leaders, including a rabbi at Temple Israel, when he issued a statement about the attack at that congregation that mentioned Israel’s war in Lebanon.
In recent weeks El-Sayed also suggested that a group of pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan, recently arrested by federal authorities and accused of plotting attacks against university officials, were politically targeted.
“It’s a lot more about what you’re advocating for that gets you indicted or not indicted, rather than what you did,” El-Sayed told a rally of supporters about the indictments last month, according to the Detroit News. One of the arrested protesters had briefly worked for El-Sayed’s campaign.
His campaign has amplified the voices of Jewish supporters, including former U.S. Rep. Andy Levin, who lost his reelection bid in a redrawn district to Stevens in 2022 after AIPAC backed Stevens.
El-Sayed’s campaign has also launched a Jews For Abdul affinity group. The group’s mission statement says the candidate “correctly recognizes that the Israeli government does not speak for all Jewish people, or even for all Jewish citizens of Israel,” and “has properly characterized Israel’s US-enabled genocide in Gaza to be among the most immoral events of our time.”
An El-Sayed campaign spokesperson did not respond to a JTA inquiry about how big the group is. Alexander, the state’s Jewish Democratic Caucus chair, said she believed it was “a very small faction.”
Nationally, the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which had endorsed both McMorrow and Stevens, reaffirmed its commitment to Stevens on Monday. Meanwhile, J Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobby, had backed McMorrow. In a statement Monday to JTA, the group did not endorse a new candidate.
“We are grateful to her for the campaign she ran and the nuance she infused into this race,” Tali deGroot, vice president of political and digital strategy, told JTA. “We hope the next Senator from Michigan will be an advocate for peace and diplomacy in the Middle East and will recognize the need for a new U.S. policy toward Israel.”
A new super PAC formed to counter AIPAC’s influence signalled in a statement on Sunday that it was prepared to get more directly involved in the race on El-Sayed’s behalf. American Priorities PAC told reporters it was “fully committed to seeing Abdul El-Sayed become the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, and we will do what it takes to get there.”
Representatives for El-Sayed and American Priorities PAC did not respond to questions from JTA about whether the candidate, who has said he would reject all PAC funding, would accept American Priorities’ financial support.
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