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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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The definitive Oct. 7 book was written — and sketched — before the attack
As Salomé Parent-Rachdi and Zac Deloupy worked on the drawings for a book about Israeli-Palestinian romance, they had no way of knowing the world they were depicting was on the brink of collapse.
The day they finished their pencil sketches, we learn in the book’s introduction, was Oct. 6, 2023. The next day, Hamas invaded Israel, killing about 1,200 and taking another 251 hostage. By the time the book was published in April 2024, Israel was locked in a multi-front war that still hasn’t quite settled.
That context — a looming attack, a forever war that has not yet begun — colors every panel of Love and Desire in the Promised Land: The Private Lives of Israelis and Palestinians, a French graphic nonfiction book whose English translation was released this summer. Reading the book feels like opening a time capsule that had been buried in the distant past: Even as it reminds you how bad the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was before Oct. 7, it leaves you wishing desperately you could restore things to how they were.
The book follows Parent-Rachdi, a French journalist, as she travels across Israel and the Palestinian territories to interview 16 subjects about their love lives. She talks to a mix of singles and couples, straight and gay, in Israel, West Bank and Gaza. (That’s one giveaway this book couldn’t have been made today: No journalist has been permitted to enter Gaza unaccompanied since Oct. 7.)
A few tell of dating across Palestinian-Israeli lines. Lana, an Arab Israeli, finds herself in a situationship with a right-wing Israeli — and ends up marrying him. Samira, an Arab Israeli woman, tells us about her Israeli ex, whose enlistment during the 2014 Gaza war — when they are living together — brings the unspoken tension in their relationship out into the open. And we learn the complex family dynamics of a celebrity Muslim-Jewish couple: Fauda star Tsahi Halevi and his Arab-Israeli wife, TV anchor Lucy Aharish.
The less politically fraught experiences are relayed with the same empathy. Avi, an ex-Hasid, reveals that, despite unbearable teenage horniness, he initially didn’t know how to find porn on the internet due to his insular upbringing. (He searches for “woman in pajamas” instead.) Rami, Parent-Rachdi’s fixer and taxi driver in Gaza, says, as a single man in his thirties, he told people he had erectile dysfunction so they wouldn’t grow suspicious.
In between these revelations are glimpses of life as it was in Israel and the Palestinian territories before Oct. 7. We ride shotgun as Parent-Rachdi navigates checkpoints on her way out of the West Bank and deals with Israeli and Palestinian officials on the way into Gaza. Rami — who did finally marry — says he made sure his son was born in Jordan so that he wouldn’t be trapped in Gaza as an adult. Parent-Rachdi has brought his stepson a remote-control car — the kind of toy Rami can’t buy in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade.
The love stories describe conflict, of course, and they do not uniformly lead to happy endings. (Or for that matter, breakups.) What they consistently show instead is people — as far as we can tell, basically good people — reaching out to each other in a pressure cooker of cultural, religious, sexual and political attitudes.
The stories also betray civilians’ genuine skepticism of their own communities with a frankness that seems unimaginable today. The clearest example of this comes in Gaza, where Mohammed, a closeted Palestinian looking for hookups, tells Parent-Rachdi about Hamas honor killings of gay men and his own brush with death. “They’re more likely to kill you if you’re a bottom,” he says matter-of-factly. Catfished by a Hamas intelligence officer, Mohammed escapes arrest by swearing he’s a virgin and flees to the U.S. a few days later.
Would Mohammed make the same disclosures today, when “What about Hamas?” has become a refrain for anyone defending Israel’s response to Oct. 7? The Gaza he left behind no longer exists. The book’s afterword, written in Feb. 2024, reveals that Rami’s wife’s cosmetics store — lovingly illustrated by Deloupy earlier in the book — was leveled in Israeli airstrikes; the family was now living in a refugee camp in Rafah. “We have gone from a life with all the modern comforts to a reality where we move with a cart, where we buy wood to split and burn in order to cook and take a shower,” he says.
As for Mohammed, his house was destroyed, as were many friendships with Jews and Israelis: “I write to them,” he says in the afterword. “They don’t respond, but they read my message.” As for Hamas, he says, “today, seeing the suffering, somehow I feel like I better understand their resistance.” When the authors checked in with the subjects, several did not respond. By then, some 30,000 Palestinians were dead.
As it reminds us what we’ve lost, Love and Desire in the Promised Land also points the only way toward a shared future: people on all sides defying the forces pulling them apart. It shows us it can be done. Even in the afterword, one of the interviewees, a Modern Orthodox Jew named Jean-Marc, is optimistic: “I am still convinced, even more so now, that we have to work with the Palestinians,” he says. “Our safety depends on it.”
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Christian leaders are racing toward the Rapture. Is Israel really to blame?
End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World
By Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 384 pages, $32
Judaism is not usually a religion associated with apocalyptic thought. There’s no Jewish version of the Book of Revelation. There is a concept of a Messianic Age, but most observant groups forbid interfering with — encouraging or discouraging — its arrival.
Yet Judaism, or at least Israel, is central to Christian apocalyptic thought. The lines that drive its connection to Israel are well-traced. The Book of Revelation requires Jews to return to the promised land, and a Third Temple to be built for Jesus to return, and so, for years, Christian Zionists like John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel and Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel, have encouraged wars in the region, seeing them as part of prophecy.
Hagee and Huckabee have talked in glowing terms of the many lands they believe comprise “greater Israel” all becoming part of the modern nationstate, in fulfillment of biblical requirements for the Rapture. Byron Stinson, another wealthy evangelical leader, has worked to breed and import blemish-free red heifers to Israel, because their ashes are necessary to build the Third Temple that will herald the return of Jesus.
More recently, the Jewish extremists who are also hungry to build a Third Temple have moved from the fringe into the Israeli government. Several times now, Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has stalked around the Temple Mount, where Jews are officially forbidden from prayer, and led a large group in prayer, flanked by the police force he heads. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s minister of finance, has promised to fund the construction of a Third Temple.
But as powerful as these Jewish leaders are, the Christians are far bigger. CUFI, the group led by Hagee, is the biggest Zionist group in the U.S., far larger than AIPAC.
And yet End Times Fascism, a new book from activists and writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor — Klein is known for books like No Logo and Shock Doctrine, where she coined the relevant term “disaster capitalism” — focuses largely on Israel, and the extremists in its government.
The book’s central argument is that accelerationist fanatics believe an apocalyptic future will benefit them — whether in heaven or on earth. And they’re racing toward that future with increasingly fascistic terms.
These apocalyptic futures vary. For Christians, it might be the Rapture, and ultimately heaven. For AI techies, it’s a world ruled by the silicone grip of an all-knowing machine — or at least a world ruled by the superrich and filled with AI-driven propaganda masquerading as the voice of God while it surveils its users. For ethno-nationalists, it’s a homogenous country in which they can live out their nostalgia for an imagined perfect past. End Times Fascism is divided into sections, each taking on one of these groups and its ravenous vision for the end of the world, and how it is leading the world into fascism — through moral policing, surveillance, xenophobia.
But in the section on religious extremism, Israeli extremists get at least as much airtime as the Christians, despite the fact that these end time fanatics have far less global influence and don’t represent the vast majority of Jews.
It is, of course, important to understand the interplay between Christian apocalyptic thought and Judaism, and this is where things can get tangled. Christian Zionists’ desire for the Rapture leads them to support Israel and, sometimes, to display a kind of philosemitism. Ultimately, they are neither true friends to the Jews nor supporters of Israel; Hagee once gave a sermon claiming God sent Hitler as a kind of shepherd to force Jews back to Israel, in alignment with the biblical plan — when, of course, Jews will convert or burn in hell. But these beliefs have not made most Jewish groups cut ties with CUFI; Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has, for decades, referred to U.S. Christian Zionists, and Hagee in particular, as beloved supporters of Israel, and has said that Christian Zionists made Jewish Zionism possible. Many Jews are similarly grateful for evangelical support of Israel, regardless of what less supportive beliefs might undergird it, and are willing to ally with these religious extremists if it means support for Israel’s wars and annexations.
Certainly, all of these thoughts build on one another, and are difficult to untangle; plenty of hawkish Jews and Israelis want Israel to expand for non-biblical reasons. But the vast majority of Jews are not actively working to build a Third Temple and bring about the end of the world as we know it. Yet Klein and Taylor represent Jews largely through extremists like Ben-Gvir, and even focus their discussion of Christian apocalyptic thought on its overlap with Judaism and Israel. These religions share the Hebrew Bible, but little else.
There is far more to Christian apocalyptic thought than Israel. Plenty of Rapture-hopefuls in the U.S. believe their own country is the promised land; indeed, theological power is shifting away from Israel, as a new cohort of Christian extremists like Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson catch hold of the political discourse and steer it toward open antisemitism and harsh scrutiny of U.S. support of Israel.
The old guard is being replaced by a new Christian right that is suspicious of Israel’s every action, and doesn’t egg on its wars. When Tucker Carlson interviewed Ted Cruz, a staunch supporter of Israel, the senator explained the Christian theological grounding of his support for Israel; Carlson, also a loudly devout Christian, jeered.
That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t still many Christian Zionists in power in the U.S., shaping its foreign policy regarding Israel. But End Times Fascism feels as though it is stuck in a previous era of American Christianity, and of U.S. politics.
This problem is not limited to the section on religious apocalypse. The second part of the book, focused on the AI hunger of transhumanist tech titans, spends time on neoreactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin’s plan for a New Gaza, as it was presented at a Peter Thiel conference. Thiel is, himself, a Christian who is famously obsessed with the antichrist and the end of the world — once again, there is crossover, and these topics all share threads. But Israel is not the major driver of the race toward AI killing us all, or any other tech-related doom.
The fundamental idea of Klein and Taylor’s work is that rapturous obsessions drive not only worldly destruction — that much seems obvious — but also fascism. It’s a smart idea, and they have plenty of examples, whether surveillance by our internet overlords or ICE raids pushed for by white nationalists. But the book spends so much time on its trendiest target — Israel — when it should direct its energy examining figures like U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the muscular Christianity driving his new testosterone regime for the U.S. military, or influential online figures like Owens or Fuentes agitating for a white, Christian U.S. (Some of these influencers are mentioned, but not as primary drivers.)
Certainly, Israel is involved in U.S. politics, in Christian nationalism, in the building of an ethnostate. (Israel in fact appears least in the third section on ethnonationalism, which is surprising given its identity as a Jewish state.) But despite Israel’s importance, the U.S., and its leaders, are still far more powerful.
The issue might be the book’s structure. The idea that apocalyptic thought drives fascism is a fairly simple one, and many of Klein and Taylor’s examples are familiar. The idea that is more subtle, and harder to grasp, is the way the threads of eschatological thought, ethnonationalism and tech wealth all share ideas and shape each other.
Peter Thiel alone, given his tech companies, his antichrist obsession, his love of Nazi theorists and his influence over Vice President JD Vance, could generate at least a chapter in any of the book’s three sections, or serve as a throughline for the entire book. Yet the topics are divided, as though each form of apocalyptic thought is its own entity, instead of woven together to show the ways they all reinforce each other.
End Times Fascism closes with a section on how to fight the rising fascism. Perhaps this should be the main focus of the book; many people who read the news already feels as though our leaders are racing toward the apocalypse, or at least WW III and a second Great Depression. The real question is what to do.
End Times Fascism offers some inspirations, including New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, as well as the Jewish Labor Bund. At least if the focus is once again on Jews, this time it’s positive.
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Why Dolly Parton sang a song about a Jewish journalist
A Broadway show, a star-studded television tribute, a new hotel and museum in Nashville. As odes to Dolly Parton keep coming, a recording of the late country music singer honoring an American Jewish journalist has recently surfaced.
Never before released in America, the song, “A Bridge Across,” sung by Parton and accompanied by the Nashville Symphony, honors slain journalist Daniel Pearl.
The song features spare lyrics set to violin music composed in honor of Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was brutally murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.
Originally recorded in 2008 by Parton, renowned fiddler Mark O’Connor, and the Nashville Symphony, the song was intended to be part of a compilation album called This is My America, produced and funded, oddly enough, in Canada but never released in the U.S.
It was O’Connor and his wife Maggie who resurrected the recording this fall, shortly after the deaths of Parton and another musician that connected the four artists: Oregon violinmaker Jonathan Cooper, who died in September.
Deeply troubled by the journalist’s murder in 2002, Cooper learned Pearl was an amateur fiddler and set out to create a quartet of string instruments – two violins, a viola and a cello – in the journalist’s honor. He entrusted the instruments to O’Connor to use during his annual summer music camp in North Carolina. Every year since, four students from the camp have received one of the Daniel Pearl memorial instruments to play for a year.
“These young people carry the message that love fights hatred through music-making and understanding that Daniel Pearl’s family want him remembered for,” O’Connor told The New York Times. Likewise, Cooper’s loving gesture inspired Parton, O’Connor said.
Canadian violinist Samantha Robichaud received one of the violins in 2005 and has gone on to become a successful recording artist with more than a half dozen albums. She has toured North America as an ambassador for the Daniel Pearl Foundation, sharing Pearl’s story, including his passion for
music and its power to change lives. Enter songwriters Tom McBryde and Lynn Wilbanks, whose introduction to Robichaud inspired verse.
On the album, the Nashville Symphony played one of Robichaud’s compositions while Parton introduced Pearl to listeners.
“He believed that music was something that could cross all social barriers, political borders and imaginary boundaries,” Parton says, before singing McBride’s and Wilbanks’ lyrics.
“A bridge across a question one journey begins, one step at a time to a place within.
A bridge across a border, a hand reaching out one heart at a time to erase the doubt.
A bridge across a difference can close a divide, one song to be sung on the other side.”
“It was perfect. She knows what he stood for,” Pearl’s father, Dr. Judea Pearl, told the Forward. “She was such a giving person.”
Judea Pearl met Parton in 2018 at the Los Angeles Press Club where she received that year’s Public Service Award for Contributions to Civic Life for her Imagination Library, which sends free books to children. (It inspired the creation of the PJ Library for Jewish books.) The Press Club recently dedicated its upcoming National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards to Parton’s memory.
In 2018, Judea Pearl was there to present the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism to Saudi Arabian writer and blogger Raif Badawi whose wife accepted the award while he served a 10-year prison sentence for his online activism.
The foundation devoted to Daniel Pearl’s legacy has been less visible since the 2021 death of Pearl’s mother Ruth who, as a young girl, witnessed and survived the anti-Jewish pogroms in Baghdad known as the Farhud.
As the 25th anniversary of his son’s murder approaches in February, Judea Pearl said the foundation will start a new chapter under his daughters’ leadership. Parton’s song lends the effort a touching soundtrack.
The post Why Dolly Parton sang a song about a Jewish journalist appeared first on The Forward.
