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An 82-year-old Jewish recording legend on his film directing debut: ‘I could have been good at this’
Kenny Vance (born Kenneth Rosenberg), 82, was not quite ready to use my word “omen,” but he acknowledged that in some oblique way the destruction of his home in the Rockaways, compliments of superstorm Sandy, played a role in shaping his award-winning documentary, Heart & Soul: a Love Story.
The evocative and elegiac film pays homage to the groundbreaking and, in Vance’s view, unsung rock and doo-wop performers of the 50s. It interweaves archival footage with Vance interviewing some of its lead players, including Eugene Pitt (the Jive Five,) Arlene Smith (the Chantels) and Jimmy Merchant (Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers).
Vance is best known as the 1961 co-founder of the Billboard chart-topping group Jay and the Americans (whose signature songs included “Mia Cara,” “Come a Little Closer” and “This Magic Moment”) and, more recently, Kenny Vance and the Planotones, whose musical calling card is “Looking for an Echo.”
During his 60-plus year career, Vance has served as the musical director on Saturday Night Live (1980-’81), composed movie scores and appeared as an actor in Animal House, Eddie and the Cruisers and American Hot Wax as well as in a host of Woody Allen films, usually playing musicians or music producers.
Writing and directing a film seemed like the natural next adventure for Vance, particularly in the wake of the storm that devastated the home he had lived in for 40 years.
“The walls were all gone and most of the ceilings were gone, though the kitchen remained without a stove or fridge — looting,” he told me at the Upper East Side coffee shop where we met. “Still, I was able to climb up to my office above the kitchen to retrieve dozens and dozens of CDs wrapped in plastic bags that I had stored in my desk drawers. I took what was salvageable back to the FEMA hotel where I was staying in Staten Island and went through all of it.
“Making the film was meant to be. It was fated as if fueled by an omen,” Vance said, gently mocking my earlier word suggestion.
Tall, clad in black, and sporting sunglasses throughout our indoor meeting, he came across as very reserved, bordering on shy, yet also, paradoxically and by turns, talkative, free-wheeling and free-associative in his commentary.
Recalling his artistic mentors, many of whom appear in the film, he said, “They had a sensuality and spirituality that entered you. It’s not something you can easily describe. But as time went on, these great vocalists were seen as almost comic. They were the world of the TV show, Happy Days. But that was never what they were about.”
Their cultural significance cannot be overestimated either, Vance said. For the first time, Black and white teenagers were dancing in the same space.
“They created a youth culture that never existed before. They inspired the movies that were being made and the clothing that was worn and we’re still feeling their impact today,” he said.
Vance found that the artists he wanted to interview were eager to tell their stories, though some expressed disappointment and anger at the trajectory of their lives while others looked back nostalgically. Some voiced both sentiments.
It took close to ten years to get the film off the ground. The subject matter just didn’t resonate with investors or the festival circuit. But for Vance, it was a story that needed to be told and seen. The time was long overdue for these performers to be the stars of a film before it was too late. “They were always movie stars,” said Vance.
‘The writing was on the wall’
When I asked the Flatbush, Brooklyn native if singing had always been his career choice, he found the very concept of a “career choice” mildly amusing. His life evolved extemporaneously, at least that’s the way he made it sound.
While his mother sang on the radio and was at one time the girlfriend of Irving Fein, who would go on to manage both Jack Benny and George Burns, Vance did not grow up wanting to be a singer.
The seminal moment for him, and the scene that opens the film, happened in the 1950’s when he was a teenager attending a mega-show filled with screaming fans at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, which was known for its legendary shows hosted and promoted by DJ Alan Freed.
“I knew I wanted to be part of that,” Vance said.
In short order, he became a member of a local band, singing in the school hallways, on neighborhood stoops and even in the subways.
“No, we were not buskers,” he said. “We just went down into the subways for their echo. But when we made eye contact with other riders, there was just a connection and we all felt it. There was a simplicity, an essence, and everyone wanted to be part of it. That was spiritual. There was a band on every street corner. That couldn’t happen today.”
At 15, he launched his first vocal group, and ultimately, after a number of band iterations, Vance forged Jay and the Americans, which enjoyed a string of hits. The band performed on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, opened for The Beatles and played the closing act following The Rolling Stones at Carnegie Hall.
“They wanted to move The Rolling Stones out of the theater unobserved, thinking if we were on stage that would keep the audience engaged, but it didn’t work that way,” said Vance. “The audience understood what was happening and when we started to sing they were running out of the theater screaming to catch up with the Rolling Stones. In the end, we were performing for an empty house.”
Vance knew this was the death knell for Jay and the Americans and groups of that ilk. They continued to perform and produce hits, but they couldn’t compete with the new breed that appeared on every major TV show and generated unprecedented press coverage. In 1974, Jay and The Americans dispersed.
“The writing was on the wall,” Vance said. “The Beatles wore Nehru suits,” We wore dickies and sweaters.”
Vance managed to thrive doing, among other things, TV jingles to earn extra money.
He produced the soundtrack for Animal House, which sold sold more than one million copies, and the one for Eddie and the Cruisers, which went triple platinum when the movie became a cult hit. In the film American Hot Wax, he played the role of “Professor La Plano” who led a fictional band, the Planotones, which inspired Vance in 1992 to create the very real Kenny Vance and the Planotones. His son, Ladd, is a band member. “We do duets and when we sing he shares a unique version of me. And to share that with him is a unique gift,” Vance told me.
‘How could these rock guys be Jews?’
I asked Vance if he were starting out today, whether he would have kept the name Rosenberg. He said that Vance has been his last name for so long he couldn’t imagine another. “Vance was cool,” he said. “We were all Jews in Jay and the Americans. But everyone assumed we were Italian. Congratulations!”
He told me he rarely discusses his connection to Jewishness — when he was growing up, his family was largely secular, though he did have a Bar Mitzvah.
For him, Jewishness is about “doing the ethical thing,” he said. “I love that. I get it. But I’m not observant. ‘I feel like a hypocrite,’ I told a friend who said, ‘if you get it, you’re not a hypocrite’”
From time to time, though, he does attend Chabad services for what he sees as their essence, purity and authenticity.
“The Lubavitch consider us orphans from the true information” he said. “Orthodox, Conservative and Reform are man-made concepts. Did Moses belong to one of those three denominations? He was an authentic Jewish person. It was his essence. I love the Talmud. When I attend services, I study the commentaries of that week’s Parsha.”
Though he never experienced heavy duty antisemitism, being Jewish on occasion made him feel like an outsider, most pointedly, he said, in the deep south during the Jim Crow days.
“After one show, a bunch of us had gathered in one of our hotel rooms, including several cops, all with guns and sitting there in their undershirts. They were playing cards with some of the guys from the band. We were in a relaxed situation and one of them said, ‘Hey, what are you?’ and one of the guys said, ‘We’re the Chosen.’ I thought I was going to die when he said that, but then the cops started laughing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the fact that we would be Jews was so far off the radar, they thought it was a joke. How could these rock guys be Jews? It was absurd. I knew we had entered a different reality.”
‘I started to cry’
As we left the restaurant and walked down the street, Vance told me that he’d never imagined that he’d ever be a filmmaker, but now he thinks that his debut documentary may just be his most potent legacy.
“When they showed it on PBS, I started to cry in the middle of it,” he said. “I was so happy to see Eugene Pitt, Wally Roker and Arlene Smith starring in a movie that was on TV. They are stars on screen.”
“I could have been good at this,” he said wistfully, then added, “I’ve been told I belong in The Guinness World Records as the oldest director making a debut.”
Heart & Soul is available on DVD and on various streaming platforms including Fandango and Plex.
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Arab parties are kingmakers, but will Israel’s Jewish leaders accept them?
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Less than an hour after election night exit polls were published, Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, whose representation was predicted to almost double, declared: “We will translate this electoral power into an influential political force … we’re here — not on the sidelines.”
With all the votes now counted, Ra’am has indeed grown from five to eight seats, while the other Arab party, the Joint List, has received 11. Their combined unprecedented 19 seats out of a total of 120 in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, now make the Arab parties a powerful force and one that could potentially break the political deadlock after neither the bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot have enough seats to form a governing coalition.
A record number of Arab-Israelis voted in last Tuesday’s election, signaling for the first time in Israel’s history that the country’s Arab public, which makes up around 21% of the general population, is demanding to be counted in Israel’s political process.
The question, now, is whether Israel’s Jewish political leaders — and the public they represent — are ready to accept them as legitimate partners in governing the country.
“The Arab parties managed to produce an historic turnout in the Arab community, a reflection of this population joining Israeli democracy and the democratic process, and their desire to see their issues being taken care of by the Israeli government and political system,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“But while they performed phenomenally and beyond any expectation, it’s still too early to tell whether the massive expectations that led Israeli Arab voters to the streets will actually be met by a political system willing to respond to this desire,” he said.
The record voter turnout among Arab-Israeli citizens breaks with a decades-old tradition of shunning Israel’s political institutions in protest over the conflict with the Palestinians – many themselves identify as Palestinian citizens of Israel – and a feeling that whoever is in power will not truly address their needs.
After four years of a government dominated by far-right Israeli nationalists, however, Arab voters felt they had no choice but to step up, analysts told JTA. It was not only the inflammatory rhetoric and attacks on the Arab community by senior government ministers that drove up turnout to some 80% – compared to only 53.2% in the last election in 2022 – but also the outgoing government’s policies.
Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who prior to his political career was convicted for incitement to racism, has overseen mass demolitions of illegally built homes, especially in the Bedouin towns in Israel’s Negev region, and failed to address soaring crime rates in Arab towns.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has threatened to force the Arab population in Israel out of the land, outlining in September a plan to Judaize Arab-majority areas in Israel’s periphery. In one recent case, he even backed young Israeli Jews who set up an illegal outpost inside an Israeli-Arab town.
It is such moves, as well as multiple statements casting suspicion on Israel’s Arab sector, especially following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, that ultimately pushed the community to vote en masse, according to experts on the Arab community. Many cast ballots for the first time.
“It was an existential fear,” said Michael Milshtein, head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, who has researched political trends in Israel’s Arab community for years.
He pointed to a poll published following the election by Arabic-language newspaper Kul al-Arab showing that nearly 92% of Arab voters said that the main thing driving them out to vote was the fear of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
“It’s an almost unprecedented motivation,” he said. “But it can also be a formula for a cascade of expectations.”
Among those expectations now is that Israel’s majority Jewish parties that have promised change in the country – and promised to oust Netanyahu and his far-right partners – will include Arab parties or at least make use of this electoral momentum.
The political party Ra’am, which has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, has already shown a willingness to join the government. The party, which focuses on social welfare issues and fighting crime, already broke down barriers in 2021 by joining former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in a government that briefly ousted Netanyahu.
For the Joint List, an alliance of three majority Arab parties focusing on socialist politics, civic equality for Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinian nationalism, joining an Israeli government or even providing it with a safety net from the outside is a big step.
All three parties – Hadash, a left-wing socialist party, Ta’al, a party promoting Arab civic rights and equality, and Balad, which represents pan-Arab nationalism – hold at their core the fight for Palestinian rights and national statehood.
Yet at least two of the parties, Hadash and Ta’al, have indicated a willingness to put some of their agenda aside in order to help change Israel’s current leadership.
“We are ready for political cooperation to form an alternative government that will present a genuine alternative and commit to a fundamental change in the current government’s racist policies,” Yousef Jabareen, head of the Joint List, said as votes were being counted on Thursday. “A government that will work to recognize the rights of the Arab public and end its exclusion, and that of its representatives, from the political system.”
However, Gadi Taub, a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-host of the Israel Update podcast, called including such parties in Israel’s government “ridiculous.”
“These parties are anti-Zionist, they are against the very existence of Israel and some of them are direct terror supporters,” he said, referring to statements made by Balad’s leader Sami Abu Shehade after Oct. 7, which he later walked back.
“None of them will designate Hamas as a terror organization, even after Oct. 7,” noted Taub, adding that Israeli law should forbid parties that are openly against a Jewish state from running for parliament.
He pointed out that attempts to ban the Arab parties from running in this election were ultimately blocked by Israel’s Supreme Court, although Shehade did withdraw from the race. No other country would tolerate political leaders that “do not acknowledge the self-determination” of the country they live in, said Taub.
Including Arab parties in a government is something that was not even considered by Jewish or Zionist-focused parties until the offer came from Ra’am in 2021. In fact, there have only ever been two Muslim Arab ministers, Ghaleb Majadele, a member of the Labor Party, who served under former prime minister Ehud Olmert and Issawi Frej, from the Meretz Party who served from June 2021 to December 2022.
Three years after Oct. 7, when fear and mistrust of Arabs because of the attack remain high, the idea of aligning politically with Arab politicians who openly advocate for Palestinians is even more complex.
While Netanyahu and his coalition partners painted such a collaboration as an existential threat for the state in the lead-up to last week’s vote, almost all the parties in Eisenkot’s bloc, except for the Democrats headed by Yair Golan, also ruled out the possibility.
Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group, said it was difficult to evaluate whether Israeli society as a whole was now ready for such political influence from Arab Israelis, but said the more pertinent question was whether Eisenkot and his political partners, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman, were ready for it.
“This is pretty much their only option if they want to get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu,” she said. “The main question is how important it is for them to remove Netanyahu that they would be willing to compromise on something that they made a frontline issue?”
Zonszein added that even center-left former prime minister Yair Lapid, whom she characterized as pragmatic in every other way in his efforts to oust Netanyahu, has stated that he would not work with the Arabs.
She called lumping the entire sector together “outrageous.”
“It really defies the very notion of a democracy,” Zonszein said, accusing Netanyahu of dismissing “Palestinians just for being Palestinians, regardless of the fact that they are law-abiding citizens, that they pay taxes and are present in all aspects of the workforce.”
Throughout Election Day, the embattled Netanyahu published a stream of video clips declaring that Arabs were “flocking” to the polls. He told his supporters that if they did not want an Islamist state in Israel, then they’d better get out and vote for him.
Analysis by some fact-checkers has since revealed that many of the images Netanyahu used to scare his voters were in fact AI-generated fakes.
Tani Frank, director of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Center for Judaism and State Policy, argued that the delegitimization of the Arab vote was one of the “focal points of the Likud campaign.”
“One reason for this is to weaken the ability of the change bloc to form a government with the support of, or reliance on, the Arab parties — specifically Ra’am and Mansour Abbas, who has already done so previously,” he said.
Frank said he believed that the willingness of Jewish Israelis to accept cooperation with Arab parties, especially after Oct. 7 and the Likud campaign, was extremely limited.
A few days before the election, a snap poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute found that “a clear majority of Israeli Jews opposed either Arab party playing a role in any government.”
While a majority of those on the left said that they would support a coalition of center and left-wing parties with the support or participation of the Arab parties, those in the center and right preferred another round of voting rather than forming a coalition with them.
Since the election, Netanyahu and his supporters have tried to cast doubt on the mass Arab turnout and on the legitimacy of the Arab political leadership. This has included accusations by members of his Likud party of voter fraud and foreign interference from Qatar, followed by statements Thursday from the Central Elections Committee that it was investigating foreign funding irregularities.
Netanyahu wrote in a post on X: “The elections in the State of Israel were stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism and the elimination of the Jewish state, through serious criminal offences involving bribery, threats, violence, forgery and the use of prohibited software to mobilize voters.”
Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, head of the elections committee, said on Sunday at a press conference with the country’s attorney general and the director of the Israel Security Agency, the Shin Bet, that the investigation into alleged foreign funding was serious and ongoing but would not change the results.
“Our position is that even if the suspicions are substantiated, this would not undermine the integrity of the electoral process or the election results as a whole,” he said.
On Saturday night, protests were held by both those against allowing Arabs into the government and those who believe it is the only way forward. A small group of those who are against such a move gathered in Tel Aviv chanting that Israel must not allow “terror supporters into the government.” Much larger groups of protesters in favor of a collaboration gathered around the country urging Eisenkot to take the step.
Mohamed Darawshe, a political analyst and director of strategy at Givat Haviva, a leading center educating for a shared society in Israel, said that if after the massive turnout on Election Day the Arab parties were not included in a change government, there would be great “disappointment.”
“If they are blocked from the right wing, that is understandable. But if their natural partners in Jewish society block them, they will end up turning their back on the whole political scene,” he said.
Darawshe said such a scenario would make Arab society unlikely to participate in such numbers in future elections.
“It will be like a vote of no confidence in the Israeli political system and complete disbelief in the promise that Israel can offer political equality as promised in the Declaration of Independence,” he said.
Political equality, Darawshe pointed out, is “not just allowing Arab citizens to exercise their equal rights on the day of the elections, but also to exercise their rights the day after the election, meaning allowing them to be part of the coalition and not to create a glass ceiling at representation in parliament.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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With a Kennedy Center honor under Trump, David Mamet enters his final, tragic act
There was a time when David Mamet being honored at the Kennedy Center wouldn’t have raised eyebrows.
His contributions to American theater and film transcend an affinity for four letter words (let’s call them “the F— Variations”). His tough-talking, desperate men gave splenetic voice to the indignities of a capitalist system in Glengarry Glen Ross, evolving sexual mores in Sexual Perversity in Chicago and, in a movie like The Verdict, the justice system.
Cut to 2026 and Mamet’s scripts are but an afterthought to his grievance. When he makes headlines now, it’s for his reactionary conservative streak and his role as a partisan in the culture war. Together with a run of flops, numbering a Harvey Weinstein #MeToo comedy and a Broadway show not even Al Pacino could save, his esteem has cratered among the liberal circles that once embraced him, and to which he once belonged but now prefers to eviscerate.
He has made the transition from dramatist to pundit, first at HuffPost, lately at The Free Press. Reading too much into Oleanna, perhaps, he has called teachers pedophiles on Fox News, written screeds on cancel culture and, a prerequisite for the Kennedys at this moment, praised President Donald Trump.
In the honor, there is a strain of tragedy. Mamet has strayed so far from where he started — what he called his “brain-dead liberal” era — that he makes perfect sense for this appointment, under a regime that tried to slap its leader’s name onto a tribute to a slain president meant as a bipartisan shrine to art. (Due to the Center’s closure amid turmoil and legal battles, the ceremonies will take place at the Capital One Arena, which is only too perfectly bleak.)
A younger Mamet would have looked askance at such a figure as our current Commander-in-Chief, a character who is on the make with all sorts of half-baked schemes. The Iran War may be his latest play on a Buffalo nickel.
It’s enough to make one wonder if we’ve been misreading Mamet all along. Are the men breaking-and entering to steal the Glengarry leads meant to be admired? Are the Hollywood sleazes in Speed-the-Plow aspirational? Is Al Capone the real hero of The Untouchables?
Perhaps the evening, which tends to include career retrospectives, will elucidate. But if the Kennedy Honors could once be said to be for closers, it may now be only for a particular kind of sellout.
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Why is Britney Spears studying Hebrew?
It’s Britney, Yitz!
Continuing a curious social media trend that has previously seen appreciation for the beards of chess-playing Chabadniks and the Zohar hidden among baby clothes, Britney Spears took to Instagram Sunday to post a Hebrew Book of Psalms and the Lekutei Amaraim, or Tanya, a Hasidic book of sayings.
The caption reads: “I’m extremely bored !!! Learning Hebrew reading right to left !!! Beautiful language !!!” (A previous caption, posted Sunday, was more cryptic, concluding “God speed little man !!! I love u !!!,” perhaps indicating the presence of a havruta or someone in her life who keeps his mitzvot.)
What exactly is happening here? Is Spears, like Marilyn before her and Sydney Sweeney now, about to dip her toe into the mikveh?
The best clue we have isn’t from Spears’ page, but from Israeli model Natalie Dadon, who tagged the “Hit Me Baby One More Time” singer in a selfie with the Tanya. “Finally, it’s possible to tell,” Dadon posted, in a gallery with Hebrew language news coverage of the posts. Dadon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Dadon’s social media presence involves Tanya study, which itself is a cornerstone to Lubavitch philosophy (so perhaps is connected to the Chabad chess players whose beards Spears so admired) and adjacent to Kabbalah.
Spears is no stranger to Jewish subjects. Around the time she locked lips with Madonna at the 2003 VMAs, she started, like so many others, to look into Kabbalah, as this handy timeline from Hey Alma notes. She has a Hebrew tattoo of letters that signify healing in kabbalistic texts and was apparently once attached to star in a Holocaust-time-travel-romance film called The Yellow Star of Sophia and Eton, which now that I’ve heard of it I will never shut up about.
She has credited Kabbalah with helping her through a difficult time in her life and has been spotted wearing a star of David.
But we should approach Spears’ dalliance with Judaism, now sandwiched on her Insta page between a call-out of her sister Jamie Lynn and a NSFW video of her dancing with a rose Emoji as a fig leaf, with some healthy skepticism.
Her Instagram bio currently reads “Pray Every Day” with a prayer hands emoji next to a Bible emoji with a cross. She’d still appear to be Christian — or, at the very least, waiting for the new iOS update with the Tanya emoji.
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