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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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In ‘31 Candles,’ a manchild becomes bar mitzvah to court his crush
In the thick of 31 Candles, a cockeyed rom-com about a 30-something’s ploy to become an adult bar mitzvah to get closer to a childhood crush, a one-night stand observes a jar of pickles in the kitchen of our hero’s Brooklyn apartment.
“Really?” she asks.
“I’m embracing cultural stereotypes,” he tells her, “What do you want me to do?”
To speak for myself: less.
Entering a now crowded field of rabbinically-inspired romantic comedies, the film — written, directed and edited by Jonah Feingold who also stars — wears its influences on its snide sleeve. A Nora Ephron autumn. Woody Allen-esque narration and titles. New York is a character!
Feingold plays Leo Kadner, a director for Lifetime and Hallmark Channel-coded Christmas films (Feingold, in real life, helmed the 2023 streamer EXmas). When he reconnects with an old flame from camp at his nephew’s bris, and learns she tutors b’nai mitzvah, he decides it’s finally time to become a man and make falling in love his bar mitzvah project.
There’s only one snag, beyond the obvious ick of the subterfuge: Feingold’s tutor, Eva (Sarah Coffey) is not the least bit interested. While the two have some kidding chemistry, it’s not a love match. The movie knows it — but the audience catches on quicker than it does.
There’s an element of subversion in Feingold’s approach, but the humor is packed in the same old schmaltz.
Leo’s mom (Jackie Sandler) somehow orders an off-the-menu martini at Barney Greengrass, while his father mentions a great uncle who invested with Jeffrey Epstein. Zabar’s black-and-white cookies play a featured role. Caroline Aaron (who already starred in a much better adult bar mitzvah film) as Leo’s grandmother, listens to his spiel on dating apps and the etiquette of Instagraming with your “situationship” at a shiva.
Watching Feingold confide in Aaron, I wondered who this movie was for. Its weekday screenings at Quad Cinema in the Village and at Movies of Delray in Florida would suggest an older crowd. A seminal discussion of an OTPHJ (over the pants handjob) and the celebrity dating app Raya suggests a younger audience that would likely groan at this sub-Apatowian dialogue.
One could contend it is for young Jews with old souls or older people who are young at heart. I kinda consider myself both and rolled my eyes throughout.
That it belongs to a growing school of self-aware comedy writing wherein every character seems to have taken at least a level one improv class, is irksome, but its use of Judaism is perhaps most objectionable.
Nothing in the film is glaringly wrong — though how Leo could struggle with basic brachas after having spent many summers at a Jewish sleepaway camp raises eyebrows — but it resists its natural endpoint of finding the rite of passage meaningful for its own sake.
Leo learns a lesson on love, and offers it in the form of his drash on his Torah portion, Jacob and Rachel’s meet cute at the well, but he finds no deeper significance in his tradition, beyond a largely played-for-laughs visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust with his situationship.
A connection to peoplehood is not Leo’s consolation prize. The bar mitzvah process turns out to be a vehicle for his pathetic epiphany that she’s just not that into him. (The logic of 31 Candles calls to mind a better treatment of manhood and entitlement on an episode of Seinfeld where the bar mitzvah boy has eyes on Elaine.)
If there were now a dearth of Jewish content, Feingold’s film might be a refreshingly frothy entry to the American Jewish pantheon. As it stands, though, it feels like we’re being served Shiva Baby and Bad Shabbos’ reheated leftovers with more jokes about product placement and AI.
Like 31 candles glowing on a cake, the film is eye-catching and ultimately excessive. And, like the cake itself, it’s a confection that goes down easy enough — even if it may give you a stomachache.
The post In ‘31 Candles,’ a manchild becomes bar mitzvah to court his crush appeared first on The Forward.
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In Gaza, It’s Déjà vu All Over Again
A Red Cross vehicle, escorted by a van driven by a Hamas terrorist, moves in an area within the so-called “yellow line” to which Israeli troops withdrew under the ceasefire, as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages seized during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in Gaza City, Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alk
Eleven years ago, the 2014 Hamas rocket war against Israel ended in a ceasefire.
In the ensuing years, Israel and the United States should have learned something about “ceasefires” as opposed to “peace.” President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan, however, has the flaw that every single such plan has had (in the territories and in Lebanon): the failure of anti-terror forces to control territory and enforce the rules. In the absence of that, Hamas has reemerged and is rearming in Gaza.
As I wrote in 2014:
The Hamas rockets have, for the time being, stopped; the current cease-fire is holding. The tunnel threat, a strategic one most Israelis had not understood until several days into the war, has been alleviated; many Hamas rocket manufacturing facilities have been destroyed; a substantial percentage of the Hamas arsenal has been used up; and Hamas achieved none of its strategic goals — not large-scale Israeli casualties or physical destruction, an airport, a seaport, or the opening of border crossings. Israeli children have returned to school and, after a brief dip, the Israeli economy is expected to grow for the year.
Those were the days of “mowing the grass.” Eliminating the visible threats.
As I asked at the time:
To the extent that the Israeli public wanted the destruction or elimination of Hamas, or an end to the rocket threat, it was doomed by its unreasonable expectations. Americans suffer similarly. Having understood the Islamic State [IS] as a threat not only in Syria and Iraq, but also to our interests and potentially to our own country, they want it gone. The question for the American government, as it is for the Israeli government, is: “How do you defeat an armed ideological movement with a territorial base if you are unwilling to fight in that territorial base?”
President Barack Obama spoke of “degrading, dismantling, and destroying” ISIS. He never said how — and neither has President Trump.
Try this:
Control of territory and the ability to subject one’s enemies to enforceable rules is the only known mechanism for ending, rather than managing, a war. Despite the Western propensity for “peace processes” and negotiations, it is hard (impossible?) to find a historical example of one side simply agreeing to give up its mission, arms, ideology, or interests without a forcing mechanism — military defeat.
We don’t like to talk about “winners” and “losers,” preferring to “split the difference” or find a “win-win” formula. But “peace” itself was defined by Machiavelli as “the conditions imposed by the winners on the losers of the last war.” There are different iterations of “peace,” depending on whether the winners institute good or bad conditions. There can be a cold peace, a warm peace, or the peace of the dead. The peace that followed WWI contained the seeds of WWII; the peace after WWII produced the German economic miracle.
Even when wars aren’t “won,” control of territory and enforceable rules can make the difference between long-term success and failure – the US military has been in South Korea since the 1953 Armistice, allowing a democratic, technologically advanced society to emerge despite the continuing threat from the impoverished, heavily armed, and dangerous North. The withdrawal of American forces from South Vietnam within months of the armistice there allowed North Vietnam to capture territory and impose a communist government on a single Vietnamese entity. Although NATO faced Russia across the Fulda Gap, there is no denying that the Allied presence also enforced anti-Nazi rules in West Germany.
October 7, 2023, brought about a change in Israeli military thinking. A ceasefire is no longer enough. Hamas, in Israel’s view, has to be disarmed and ripped out of the territory in a verifiable and enforceable manner. The IDF is making plans to reassert itself across the yellow line. The US appears more interested in bringing Turkish troops into Gaza, a move rejected not only by Israel but, oddly, by Egypt. Qatari troops are no better. Both are Muslim Brotherhood partners of Hamas.
As I wrote:
The enemies of Israel and the West are similar. Ideological similarities aside, both are vicious and absolutist, and neither plays by Western rules regarding women, children, religious diversity or war crimes. Both rely on the relative gentility of their adversaries — Israel and the West — to protect them from ultimate defeat. Thus far, theirs is the correct bet.
Or at least it was.
The difficulty now will be bringing the US and Israel to the meeting point. President Trump was there. He called for ,“Hell to rain down on Hamas.” But now he appears to have changed his mind. Talk, negotiate, promise, offer, talk some more. This simply provides time for Hamas to rearm and reassert itself among the people of Gaza. And Hamas is using the time.
The US and its allies have to acknowledge the original flaw in the plan — both in 2014 and 2025. Without a military presence determined to uproot and destroy Hamas in whatever manner the military deems necessary, “peace plans” and “ceasefires” are simply wishes and, with due respect to Yogi Berra, “Déjà vu all over again.”
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.
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Bias and Distortion: When the BBC Becomes the Story
The BBC logo is displayed above the entrance to the BBC headquarters in London, Britain, July 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
“Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” (Micah 4:3).
That is unironically the official motto of the British Broadcasting Company, otherwise known as the BBC. And yet in recent weeks, the world has watched the opposite unfold: a state-funded broadcaster selectively edited footage to falsely imply that President Trump was actively inciting the January 6th Capitol riot. Presumably done because they believed the “truth” of their worldview mattered more than the truth of the footage.
This rightfully ignited an international scandal and a crisis of legitimacy. The BBC has offered a terse apology — but that apology rings hollow, given that the BBC has engaged in this behavior for decades — especially when it comes to covering the Jewish State.
The same editorial scalpel that carved Trump’s words, has for decades, performed cosmetic surgery on Middle Eastern reality. This stems from their belief that narrative truth supersedes factual truth — and that the BBC are the arbiters of all things truth.
The BBC represents the old-school institutional brand of nuanced antisemitism: never say explicitly what can be more effectively implied.
Israel is forever the aggressor and villain. Anything that contradicts that reality in any way whatsoever — from Palestinian terrorism, to Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’ constant rejection of an Israeli state — is simply ignored.
Things simply happen, without agency, causality, or perpetrators — at least for one side of the conflict.
This is antisemitism through narrative staging. Israel is the intentional actor; its enemies are organisms responding to their environment. Israel’s choices are scrutinized; Hamas’ choices are naturalized.
To the BBC, Israel becomes a narrative accelerant while its enemies are granted the dignity of inevitability. The BBC does not invent the facts; it simply removes context. In the absence of evidence, it encourages audiences to “draw their own conclusions” — because, after all, the network is “just asking questions.” The result is reflexive antisemitism, an atmosphere rather than an argument.
According to a recent report in The Telegraph, the BBC has been forced to correct, on average, two anti-Israel Gaza stories a week since October 7th. This is not journalism; it is groupthink manipulation funded by the British public.
The ancient Greeks had a word for speech that abandons truth while avoiding outright lies: sophistry. Protagoras defined this worldview when he said, “Man is the measure of all things.” Truth becomes subjective, determined by what you want your audience to believe. Sophists mastered narrative manipulation and engineered entire populations with it.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle held a unanimous antipathy for all things sophistry. They believed the sophist class posed a greater threat to the republic than foreign invasion.
Plato warned that democracy becomes theatre when society loses the ability to distinguish between truth and plausibility. He could have been describing the 21st-century BBC.
The BBC has become the global engine for adjusting the Overton window — not just disparaging President Trump and American relations, but normalizing sympathy for terrorist groups, and delegitimizing Israel’s sovereignty. What are the effects of these manipulations on world events and British relations? The BBC is no longer a news organization; it is a mood architectural firm.
The Greeks understood the peril to democracy when sophistry overwhelmed truth. Throughout history this pattern has repeated itself for civilizations that ignored the early warning signs. Those signs are flashing again — and not merely at the fringes, but at the very apex of Britannia’s most trusted institution.
There is always a moment before the point of no return when better angels can still prevail. This is that moment. If “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” is to retain any meaning, it must begin with truth. Peace built on sophistry is merely sophistry.
Britain’s closest ally is the United States, and its most besieged ally is Israel. The BBC chose to malign both, not accidentally, but institutionally.
You cannot claim moral authority while eroding the foundations of your own alliances. You cannot claim neutrality while waging narrative warfare. And just as the Greeks warned — so it begins.
Philip Gross is a London-based American businessman and writer whose work focuses on politics, culture, and Jewish history. Born in New York and living in Britain for three decades, he writes from a transatlantic perspective shaped by a career in global commodities and a lifelong engagement with Jewish thought and contemporary affairs.