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What’s Jewish about the jam band Phish? Many things, according to a new book.
(JTA) — Those who are Jewish, or Phish fans — or both — have likely noticed at one point: Jews really seem to love Phish.
There are many possible reasons for this, starting with the fact that the genre-bending jam band has many ardent fans of all stripes, having sold millions of albums and played to enormous festival crowds for decades. Two of the band members — bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman — are also Jewish, and the group has been known to play Jewish songs such as “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” and “Avinu Malkeinu” live.
But there’s something else — a certain kind of spiritual aspect to Phish fandom that seems to attract the average modern Jewish fan.
“Phish is one of many vehicles through which Jewish fans connect on a meaningful level with their cultural Jewish identity,” University of San Francisco Professor Oren Kroll-Zeldin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2019. “Phish provides an alternative venue to build Jewish community and Phish shows become a site where fans can have meaningful Jewish experiences outside the confines of traditional Jewish life.”
A new book titled “This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity,” published this week by Penn State University Press, explores the ins and outs of the relationship through essays from several Phish fans and an interview with Gordon. It’s edited by Kroll-Zeldin and Ariella Werden-Greenfield of Temple University, who in 2019 hosted a conference — likely the first of its kind in academia — on the topic.
“There are so many connections and synergies between Jewish identity and Phish fandom,” Werden-Greenfield told JTA. “What we really have tried to highlight in this book… is the answer is different for every Phish fan who identifies Jewishly in and around Phish.”
As Phish’s legend grew in the 1990s, many Jews learned about them at Jewish summer camps, Kroll-Zeldin said. “Time and time again, people said ‘I learned about Phish from my camp counselor, and then I passed the music down to my campers, who then passed the music down to other campers,” in a process he compared to the Jewish tradition of passing the Torah down through the generations.
Since Phish is also known for their extensive live shows, Phish fans also love to intensely analyze setlists (along with their lyrics, musical styles and more).
“It’s’ very similar to how Jews engage with textual exegesis of Torah and Talmud,” Kroll-Zeldin added.
Another big part of the connection is a healthy sense of humor found in Phish’s lyrical themes and stage presence.
“They are playful and curious and experimental, and that is something that resonates with a lot of Jewish listeners,” Werden-Greenfield said of Phish.
Phish frontman Trey Anastasio performs at the Sixth and I synagogue in Washington, D.C., in 2018. (Andrea Nusinov)
Kroll-Zeldin and Werden-Greenfield were friends and college classmates at Skidmore College — where Phish played an early show in 1990. In the years afterward, they would see each other at Phish shows and then, once they both pursued careers as religious studies academics, at conferences. Both said they have lost track of how many Phish shows they have personally attended.
Their 2019 conference led to a call for papers, some of which ended up in the book.
While many Jewish Phish fans are secular, the book includes essays from devotees of the band who are more observant and often must reconcile the timing of shows with that of Shabbat. Religious services have been held during set breaks at Phish shows, with kosher food sometimes sold in the “shakedown” area, outside of concerts.
There’s also a chapter about Phish and food. The Jewish ice cream purveyors Ben and Jerry — natives of Vermont, where Phish formed — have been offering their Phish Food flavor for years, while Federal Donuts, owned by Philadelphia-based Israeli-American chef Michael Solomonov, has created out multiple special editions of Phish-themed donuts.
In addition to the essays, the book features numerous photographs, of everything from parking lot prayers to Phish-themed dreidels, bat mitzvah invitations and wedding ketubahs.
The band has always seemed to happily nod to its large Jewish fan base. The band got its start playing in cities, towns and colleges in areas with large Jewish populations, and the majority of their performances are still close to metro areas with large Jewish populations. Frontman Trey Anastasio played a solo show at the Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington, D.C., in 2018.
A big part of the book, mentioned by several essayists, is Phish’s performance of “Avinu Malkeinu.” Phish does not play the song often — once every 23.9 shows, according to phish.net‘s exhaustive database — but the band has played it a total of 83 times over many years, between 1987 and 2022.
Why “Avinu Malkeinu”? The book shares the heretofore untold story of how Phish’s Gordon, while growing up in suburban Boston, first heard the song from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a prominent rabbi and author in the Reform movement, who happened to be Gordon’s childhood rabbi. Kushner would sing the melody, sometimes wordlessly, “for everything,” including during Havdalah services. While, per the book, Gordon “admits that he never fully accepted Judaism’s belief system or rituals or and even rebelled against them,” that song stuck with him.
Phish drummer Jon Fishman, shown performing with the band in Brooklyn in 2004, is one of two Jewish members of the group. He’s known for performing in a colorful dress. (Scott Gries/Getty Images)
“[Aveinu Malkeinu] was getting not just into my ears but into my soul,” Gordon says in the book. “And so, when I’m bringing that song to the table [with Phish], in some ways… I’m referring back to an experience that was a deep soul experience for me, using that melody.”
The Phish bassist has a sister-in-law who is a cantor, and at the time of the interview, he was planning to sing with his daughter as part of a Zoom-based “Havdalah coffee shop.”
“Looking out into the crowd, it was easy to see who the Jews were because their eyes would light up when we went into it, and that was kind of fun,” Gordon said in the book of the band’s earliest performances of “Avinu Malkeinu.” “When we were playing in clubs and theaters and Jewish people wandering in having no idea that they were going to hear anything in Hebrew, there it was. A look of shock. I liked that part of it.”
For all of its Jewish connections, one thing Phish has not ever done is perform in Israel. There’s been a great deal of campaigning over the years for such a visit by Phish fans who live there, including one woman named Rachel Loonin Steinerman, interviewed in the book, who created the “OhKeePah,” a kippah made from the same fabric as the signature muumuu sported by drummer Fishman during shows. She inscribed #PhishInIsrael on the inside of each.
Music journalist Shirley Halperin says in the book that she spent time in Israel with drummer Fishman in 1993 — including an early-morning hike to the top of Masada — and that Gordon had reached out to her when he was trying to learn how to sing “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav.”
“What is it about Phish and Jews? I don’t know, but a lot of Jews are doing Jewish stuff at Phish shows, which makes it a very joyful way to be Jewish,” Kroll-Zeldin said.
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The post What’s Jewish about the jam band Phish? Many things, according to a new book. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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How the Left and Right Converge to Form a Horseshoe of Antisemitism
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) speaks at a press conference with activists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC, Dec. 14, 2023. Photo: Annabelle Gordon / CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
“One of the things that antisemitism does is, it creates coalitions,” Rabbi David Wolpe recently observed.
How ironic that he made this comment on the show of Theo Von, a right-wing podcaster who interviewed Trump during the 2024 election campaign. Some months later, upon his return from a trip to Qatar, Von suddenly felt the need to talk about the alleged “genocide” in Gaza, only to be quoted favorably in the hard-left music magazine Rolling Stone.
The far-right and the far-left have been coming together over antisemitism at least since 1961, when 10 members of the American Nazi Party attended a Nation of Islam (NOI) rally. Members of the NOI escorted the Nazis to front-row seats for a speech by Malcolm X, who was filling in for the originally scheduled speaker, Elijah Muhammad.
More recently, in 2019, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke called Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “the most important member of the US Congress” for her “Defiance to Z.O.G. [Zionist Occupied Government].”
That same year, the shooter at the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, left behind a manifesto that both embraced white supremacist ideology and incorporated tropes promoted by the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and the anti-Israel BDS movement, such as the false claims that Jews had a “large role in every slave trade for the past two thousand years” or that Jews persecute “Christians of modern day Syria and Palestine.” In 2021, left-wing academics adopted the language of David Duke and of the Nazis when they accused Israel of “Jewish supremacy.”
So it shouldn’t really have been a huge surprise to see this marriage of convenience beginning to make its way into today’s free-for-all media landscape. Rolling Stone, whose political slant generally is hard left and whose coverage of Israel, as CAMERA has documented at length, is egregiously biased, gushed over Von:
On Tuesday [May 19], comedian and podcaster Theo Von — who promoted the president during his 2024 campaign and accompanied him on a trip to Qatar last week — said the U.S. was “complicit” in creating the horrors that were taking place in Gaza.
“It feels to me like it’s a genocide that’s happening while we’re alive here … in front of our lives. And I feel like I should say something,” Von said on this week’s episode of the This Past Weekend podcast….
Pope Leo and Von couldn’t be more different, but frustration with the lack of progress toward a sustained cease-fire in Gaza, and the looming threat of more devastation to the region, reflect sentiments both in the U.S. and abroad.
There was a similar love-fest between Dave Smith, the conservative libertarian comedian best known for spouting nonsense on The Joe Rogan Experience, and Krystal Ball, the hard-left host of the online political news show Breaking Point, on Monday. Once again, Dave Smith let loose a dizzying blitz of false information, including making the claim that Iran was in compliance with non-proliferation agreements.
Smith said, “we’re left in the position where you’re supposed to sit here and justify a sneak aggressive, preemptive attack, like somehow you’re supposed to feel like you’re the good guys in an absolute war of choice, against a country that does not have nuclear weapons … Iran is a member of the non-proliferation treaty….”
But despite Iran’s (partial) ratification of the NPT, there have long been concerns about its enrichment capabilities, its building of new nuclear facilities, and its lack of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, leading up to the June 12 declaration by the IAEA that Iran was out of compliance with its NPT obligations, just a day before Israel’s attack. After that report, Iran threatened to leave the NPT altogether (although it’s clear it was not complying with the treaty).
And yet, instead of pointing any of this out, Ball responded, “and they’re [Israel] a rogue nation attacking like six of their neighbors as we speak and are not part of the non-proliferation [treaty] and we’re supposed to be cool with that” — while Smith nodded in agreement. Later in the show, in what may have been the only accurate claim made on that program, Ball remarked, “that’s the Israel horseshoe, between you and me, Dave.”
The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel functioned as a siren call to antisemites everywhere: “It’s open season on the Jews.” Not only has this signal been heeded by certain individuals from both the far-left and the far-right, but a media environment that has no guardrails provides ample opportunities for these two nefarious groups to come together over their ignorance-fueled bigotry.
Karen Bekker is the Assistant Director in the Media Response Team at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, and frequently writes about antisemitism in the media.
The post How the Left and Right Converge to Form a Horseshoe of Antisemitism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Anti-Israel Activists Damage Planes at UK Military Base
An activist from Palestine Action sprays a military aircraft engine with red paint at RAF Brize Norton, to damage it, in Carterton, Britain, June 20, 2025, in this still image obtained from handout video. The group’s action was in protest of British military assistance to Israel, claiming that they, “interrupted Britain’s direct participation in the commission of genocide and war crimes across the Middle East”, stating on their website. Photo: Palestine Action/Handout via REUTERS
Anti-Israel activists broke into a Royal Air Force base in central England on Friday, damaging and spraying red paint over two planes used for refueling and transport.
Palestine Action said two members had entered the Brize Norton base in Oxfordshire, putting paint into the engines of the Voyager aircraft and further damaging them with crowbars.
“Despite publicly condemning the Israeli government, Britain continues to send military cargo, fly spy planes over Gaza and refuel US/Israeli fighter jets,” the group said in a statement, posting a video of the incident on X.
“Britain isn’t just complicit, it’s an active participant in the Gaza genocide and war crimes across the Middle East.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the “vandalism” as “disgraceful” in a post on X.
Britain’s defense ministry and police were investigating.
“It is our responsibility to support those who defend us,” the defense ministry said.
A spokesperson for Starmer said the government was reviewing security across all British defense sites.
Palestine Action is among groups that have regularly targeted defense firms and other companies in Britain linked to Israel since the start of the conflict in Gaza.
The group said it had also sprayed paint on the runway and left a Palestine flag there.
The Gaza war was triggered when Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists attacked Israel in October 2023, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages.
US ally Israel subsequently launched a military campaign in Gaza aimed at dismantling Hamas and freeing the hostages.
The post Anti-Israel Activists Damage Planes at UK Military Base first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Supreme Court Upholds Law on Suing Palestinian Authorities Over Terror Attacks
The US Supreme Court building is seen the morning before justices are expected to issue opinions in pending cases, in Washington, DC, June 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
The US Supreme Court upheld on Friday a statute passed by Congress to facilitate lawsuits against Palestinian authorities by Americans killed or injured in terrorist attacks abroad as plaintiffs pursue monetary damages for violence years ago in Israel and the West Bank.
The 9-0 ruling overturned a lower court’s decision that the 2019 law, the Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, violated the rights of the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization to due process under the US Constitution.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the ruling, said the 2019 jurisdictional law comported with due process rights enshrined in the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
“It is permissible for the federal government to craft a narrow jurisdictional provision that ensures, as part of a broader foreign policy agenda, that Americans injured or killed by acts of terror have an adequate forum in which to vindicate their right” to compensation under a federal law known as the Antiterrorism Act of 1990, Roberts wrote.
The US government and a group of American victims and their families had appealed the lower court’s decision that struck down a provision of the law.
Among the plaintiffs are families who in 2015 won a $655 million judgment in a civil case alleging that the Palestinian organizations were responsible for a series of shootings and bombings around Jerusalem from 2002 to 2004. They also include relatives of Israeli-American Ari Fuld, who was fatally stabbed by a Palestinian in 2018.
“The plaintiffs, US families who had loved ones maimed or murdered in PLO-sponsored terror attacks, have been waiting for justice for many years,” said Kent Yalowitz, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
“I am very hopeful that the case will soon be resolved without subjecting these families to further protracted and unnecessary litigation,” Yalowitz added.
The ongoing violence involving Israel and the Palestinians served as a backdrop to the case.
US courts for years have grappled over whether they have jurisdiction in cases involving the Palestinian Authority and PLO for actions taken abroad.
Under the language at issue in the 2019 law, the PLO and Palestinian Authority automatically “consent” to jurisdiction if they conduct certain activities in the United States or make payments to people who attack Americans.
Roberts in Friday’s ruling wrote that Congress and the president enacted the jurisdictional law based on their “considered judgment to subject the PLO and PA [Palestinian Authority] to liability in US courts as part of a comprehensive legal response to ‘halt, deter, and disrupt’ acts of international terrorism that threaten the life and limb of American citizens.”
New York-based US District Judge Jesse Furman ruled in 2022 that the law violated the due process rights of the PLO and Palestinian Authority. The New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling.
President Joe Biden’s administration initiated the government’s appeal, which subsequently was taken up by President Donald Trump’s administration. The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case on April 1.
The post US Supreme Court Upholds Law on Suing Palestinian Authorities Over Terror Attacks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.