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As landmark Saul Bellow documentary premieres, a look back at his life through the JTA archive
(JTA) — Given his place in the international literary canon, it’s hard to believe that there has never been a widely-released documentary made about the Jewish Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow.
That’s about to change, as PBS debuts “American Masters: The Adventures of Saul Bellow” on Monday night.
The documentary, which was filmed by Israeli director Asaf Galay between 2016 and 2019 and features what is being touted as the last interview Philip Roth gave before his death in 2018, digs deep into Bellow’s personal life and inspirations. Many know about his successful novels and memorable (usually Jewish) characters, but as the film shows, Bellow had a turbulent personal life that involved five marriages. Several of his closest friends and family members felt betrayed or offended by how Bellow wrote unflattering characters closely based on them. His moderate conservative political leanings put him at odds with the ethos of the 1960s, and some saw his framing of occasional Black characters as racist.
But the film also devotes time to explaining — through interviews with scholars, other novelists and members of the Bellow clan — how Bellow’s deep-rooted sense of “otherness” as the son of Jewish immigrants influenced his work, and how he, in turn, influenced many Jewish American writers who followed him. Roth, for instance, says on camera that Bellow inspired him to create fuller Jewish characters in his own work.
To mark the milestone film, we looked back through all of the Saul Bellow content in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s archive. What emerged was a portrait of a leading Jewish intellectual of his time who was deeply invested in the Soviet Jewry movement and Israel, and who was beloved by the American Jewish community — despite his complicated relationship to his Jewishness and his bristling at being called a “Jewish writer.”
The Soviet Jewry movement
Bellow was born in 1915 in Canada to parents with Lithuanian ancestry who first immigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia. In the 1920s, when Bellow was 9, the family moved to Chicago. By the 1950s, the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union — who were forbidden from openly practicing their religion and from emigrating — had become a rallying cry for American Jews. As a 1958 JTA report shows, Bellow was passionate about the issue; in January of that year, he signed a letter to The New York Times about “the purge of Yiddish writers, the refusal of the current Soviet regime to permit a renaissance of Jewish culture and the existence of a quota system on Jews in education, professional and civil service fields.” Other signatories included fellow Jewish writers Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling.
Saul Bellow, Anita Goshkin (his first wife) and their son Gregory Bellow, circa 1940. Bellow’s turbulent personal life involved five marriages. (Courtesy of the Bellow family)
He signed another letter to the Times on the topic in 1965, and in 1969 he circulated an appeal for cultural freedom for Jews to the Soviet Writers Union, getting other prominent writers such as Noam Chomsky and Nat Hentoff to sign. By 1970, the issue had become widely publicized, and Bellow stayed involved, signing onto a petition with several other thought leaders that asked: “Has the government of the Soviet Union no concern for human rights or for the decent opinion of mankind?”
Israel
Like many American Jews, Bellow had complicated feelings on Israel. “If you want everyone to love you, don’t discuss Israeli politics,” he once wrote.
In the 1970s, JTA reports show that he followed Israeli diplomacy closely and was a strong supporter of the Jewish state in the face of international criticism. In 1974, at a PEN press conference, he called for a boycott of UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural heritage arm that has historically been very critical of Israeli policy.
In 1984, Bellow met with then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who was in the United States on an official state visit.
But Bellow wasn’t a blanket supporter of Israel — in 1979, he signed a letter protesting West Bank settlement expansion that was read at a rally of 30,000 people in Tel Aviv. In 1987, while in Haifa for a conference on his work, Bellow criticized the Israeli government for the way it handled the Jonathan Pollard spy case, bringing up an issue that still reverberates in Israel-Diaspora conversation — and in U.S. politics.
“I think the American Jews are very sensitive to the question of dual allegiance, and it is probably wrong of Israel to press this question because it is one which is very often used by antisemites,” Bellow said.
Nobel Prize
After garnering multiple National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. JTA’s report on the award noted that Bellow’s most recent book at the time, published right around the time of the Nobel announcements, was a memoir about his 1975 stay in Jerusalem, titled “To Jerusalem and Back.” The report added: “Two of his books, ‘Herzog,’ published in 1964 and ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet,’ which won him the National Book Award in 1971, have been translated into Hebrew and were enthusiastically received by Israeli critics and public.”
(Bellow wasn’t the only Jew to win a Nobel that year: Milton Friedman won the economics prize, Baruch Blumberg shared the medicine prize and Burton Richter shared the physics prize.)
Bellow, center, with his fifth wife Janis Freedman-Bellow and longtime friend Allan Bloom, who is the subject of Bellow’s last novel, “Ravelstein.” (Courtesy of the Bellow family)
A “Jewish writer”?
The Anti-Defamation League also gave Bellow an award in 1976. According to a JTA report, Seymour Graubard, honorary national chairman of the ADL at the time, said that Bellow “has correctly rejected all efforts to pigeonhole him as a ‘Jewish writer.’ Rather, he has simply found in the Jewish experience those common strains of humanity that are part of all of us — and therein lies his greatness as an American writer.”
Debate over whether or not Bellow should be labeled a “Jewish writer,” and what that meant, dogged him for much of his career. After his death in 2005, at 89, a New York Jewish Week obituary focused on Bellow as “a literary giant who did not want to be bound by the tag of Jewish writer.”
“Mr. Bellow bridled at being considered a Jewish writer, though his early novels, most notably 1944’s ‘The Victim,’ dealt with anti-Semitism and featured characters who spoke Yiddish and Russian,” Steve Lipman wrote.
Bellow’s biographer James Atlas added in the obituary: “He always said he was a writer first, an American second and Jewish third. But all three were elements of his genius. His greatest contribution was that he was able to write fiction that had tremendous philosophical depth.”
In a JTA essay at the time of Bellow’s death, academic and fiction writer John J. Clayton argued: “No good writer wants to be pigeonholed or limited in scope. But he is deeply a Jewish writer — not just a Jew by birth.
“Jewish culture, Jewish sensibility, a Jewish sense of holiness in the everyday, permeate his work.”
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How Jesse Jackson changed his mind about Jews — and what Abe Foxman made of it
As Reverend Jesse Jackson navigated a tricky relationship with the Jewish community in the late 1980s and early 1990s, former ADL chief Abraham Foxman had a front-row seat.
“I was very critical of him publicly, with his meeting with Arafat, with Farrakhan,” Foxman told me in a phone call, referring to Jackson’s public meetings with PLO leader Yasser Arafat in 1979 and Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan in 1984. And “with ‘Hymietown’” — Jackson’s infamous reference to New York City using a slur for Jews during his ’84 presidential campaign.
But as Jackson changed in the face of Jewish uproar, so did Foxman’s criticism of him. In the late 1980s, when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that Jackson had been taking pains to grow closer to the Jewish community, Foxman told them that “It is a different Jackson in 1988 than in 1984.”
“One has to recognize and welcome that certain sensitivity he is now showing,” he said.
Things still weren’t always rosy between the duo. In 1990, Foxman accused Jackson of using a prayer service for then-New York Mayor David Dinkins as an occasion to “attack Israel”; at the event, Jackson had said “the birthplace of Jesus the Christ is under occupation.” But still, the two leaders developed a cordial relationship over the years — so much so that Jackson spoke at a 2015 dinner marking Foxman’s retirement.
In a phone interview after Jackson’s death this week at age 84, Foxman held much the same line as he expressed in 1987. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What did you make of the arc of Jackson’s relationship with the Jewish community?
Look, we’re a strange people. We want people to love us. We want people to come around, and when they do, we don’t trust them, and we’re not always willing to accept people’s change of heart. Now, people would always say to me, you don’t know what’s in the kishkes. True. You don’t know. But it’s also very important what’s on the tongue.
He was a politician, and as a politician, he was smart. At least pragmatically, not only did he say the right things, but you know, he was the guy who couldn’t pass the synagogue without going in. He was available to the Jewish community. He stood up on Soviet Jewry, on Iranian Jewry, on Syrian Jewry, on Ethiopian Jewry. He couldn’t miss a minyan.
He was there for us, which was very important. Because in the struggle to get freedom for Jews in all these places, we needed more than just the Jewish community.
What lessons do you think we as a community should take from his turnaround?
We have to learn that people can change their minds and hearts. I think Jesse Jackson is a great example for us, having gone from “Hymietown” to Arafat, when Arafat was really a terrorist, and to Farrakhan, who was probably the most significant antisemite all these years. If people can understand that they can come around from being a bigot, then I think it serves us. It serves them. It serves the community.
What was your personal relationship like?
Basically, when we needed him, I would pick up the phone and say, “Listen, can you be at such and such a rally on behalf of Soviet Jewry,” or “we need you to reach out to the president of Syria.” He said to me, “Abe, if you need me, call me.” And so when I felt we needed him, I called him. And there were no excuses. He said, “I’ll look on my calendar, if I can be there, I’ll be there.” And most of the time, he was there.
What would you say to people who are still skeptical about whether he really did change his perspective on Jews?
We’ll never know. The fact is, he was a symbol. People would ask me, “well, how do you know what he really feels?” And I’d answer, “I don’t know.” I don’t know what a lot of people think, you know, especially when they’re politicians, but it’s important that they’re on your side.
We live now in a time where there’s no civility. There’s no truth. If you get people to be civil to each other, to respect each other, to stand with each other, we’re ahead.
I think these are tougher times to get people to change their minds and hearts, because we don’t talk to each other. But we shouldn’t hesitate to reach out if we think there is a chance to change people’s hearts and minds.
The post How Jesse Jackson changed his mind about Jews — and what Abe Foxman made of it appeared first on The Forward.
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The dark message behind Tucker Carlson’s attempt to drum up drama in Israel
Tucker Carlson’s visit to Israel lasted only a few hours — not long enough to experience the country, but sufficient to stage a performance.
Carlson claimed he had experienced “bizarre” treatment at Ben Gurion Airport, a description that Israeli and U.S. officials dismissed. What actually happened: He underwent routine security questioning on his way to interview United States Ambassador Mike Huckabee.
In Israel, Carlson’s outrage was widely received with a mixture of indifference and eye-rolling. But Israelis with their ears to the ground understood that his attempt to stir the pot means they have a problem brewing in American public opinion — and a more immediate problem with public relations.
Because Carlson’s airport drama was never about Israeli airport procedures. It was about American politics, an arena in which Carlson has built a lucrative post-Fox career selling a particular worldview: one suspicious of alliances, contemptuous toward interventionism, and invested in the conspiratorial belief that shadowy forces distort American sovereignty.
Israel, in this rhetorical universe, functions as a convenient prop in a broader narrative of elite manipulation and national victimhood.
Carlson and Huckabee, the man he traveled across the world to interview, now personify two increasingly incompatible strains of MAGA politics. Huckabee represents something recognizable to mainstream conservatives: he’s traditionalist, evangelical, instinctively pro-Israel and broadly aligned with America’s historical posture as a global power.
Carlson speaks, instead, to a newer faction defined by nationalist retrenchment, hostility to foreign entanglements, and an often startling indifference to liberal democratic norms. He has been scathingly critical of U.S. support for Israel in its war with Hamas and has backed far-right conspiracy theories about whites being “replaced” by people of color. And when he attacks evangelicals like Huckabee for supporting Israel too much, there is extra value in the antisemitic dog whistle for the white supremacists with whom he is popular.
Call it deep MAGA: a coalition that regards alliances as burdens, admires strongmen — including and especially Vladimir Putin — and deeply disdains anyone who cares about democratic values and their promotion around the world. This large and growing constituency within American conservatism is eager for narratives that recast foreign policy debates as struggles against manipulation rather than disagreements over strategy. And Israel fits neatly into that story.
Carlson’s brief airport encounter was therefore not a journalistic episode, but content generation. The grievance was the product.
Nothing about the incident requires serious factual dispute to achieve its purpose. Its value lies in symbolism, not accuracy. Whether Carlson genuinely subscribes to every element of this worldview is, at this point, almost irrelevant. His extraordinary success after leaving Fox News suggests he understands his audience perfectly. He is not drifting toward obscurity by embracing this kind of stunt; he is responding to market demand.
In doing so, he is illustrating a story about a Republican Party negotiating an identity crisis.
President Donald Trump, widely seen in Israel as a huge friend, is not a reliable ally. If the wing behind Carlson becomes clearly stronger than that behind Huckabee, there’s no telling whether he would hew to their demands. His loyalties are famously contingent, and he has shown little hesitation in entertaining figures once considered radioactive within mainstream Republican politics.
In a movement defined by power, primacy will belong not to the most coherent worldview but to the most electorally useful one.
For Israel, the implications are uncomfortable. The country has long relied on the assumption that American support is both durable and bipartisan. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu badly upset that applecart by so clearly aligning himself with the Republican Party at large, and Trump specifically.
In growing sections of the progressive left, Israel is framed as a colonial antagonist, and Israel’s support on the Democratic side of the public is in free-fall. On parts of the populist right, it is cast as an entangling liability or worse. The political center sustaining the relationship is shrinking.
Carlson did not invent this shift. But he is capitalizing on it. Netanyahu’s outrageous behavior — including his alignment with the fascist underbelly of Israeli politics and ennabling of the ultra-Orthodox establishment — is causing a rift with U.S. Jews, and giving pundits like Carlson tailwind.
If a media entrepreneur of Carlson’s sophistication believes there is a vast audience for rhetoric that treats Israel as suspect, burdensome, or undeserving of American backing, Israeli policymakers would be unwise to dismiss the signal.
Carlson’s Ben Gurion theatrics were undeniably entertaining. What they reveal about the trajectory of American politics — and Israel’s place within it — is rather less amusing.
The post The dark message behind Tucker Carlson’s attempt to drum up drama in Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Rediscovering the ‘Dybbuk’ composer Henokh Kon
When the 1936 Polish Yiddish feature Al Khet (I Have Sinned) screened at the New York Jewish Film Festival last month after a decades-long restoration process, seeing the film was cause for celebration.
Hearing the soundtrack was my greatest joy. It was scored by one of my favorite Yiddish composers, Henokh Kon, who created the music for the 1937 film classic The Dybbuk. In his heyday between the world wars, Kon was already renowned as a prolific creator of catchy songs and sophisticated multi-genre instrumental repertoire, even years before his first film commissions.
My ears perk up for Kon’s distinctive, eclectic sound textures (as well as ingenious folk-stylized song repertoire) — from the iconic dance sequences of The Dybbuk, to angst-driven passages in the Bundist quasi-documentary Mir Kumen On (called Children Must Laugh in English), to darkly ironic background cues for the low-budget Freylekhe Kabtsonim (Jolly Paupers).
I heard a signature sonic palette: Brightly dissonant chords, off-kilter rhythmic patterns on moody drums, frantic flurries of plucked violins, haunting exotic double-reed instrumental leads (played by the oboe’s English horn cousin, or by bassoon) alternating with more klezmer-standard clarinet, flute or fiddle.
Kon soundtracks often juxtapose traditional Jewish modal scales with more angular chromatic passages. An opening scene in Al Khet features a lovely subdued range of his orchestration punctuated by a triangle chiming downbeats as though to clarify the air during a montage of shtetl vistas. Later in the film, Kon crafts a vibrant, sultry tune for Ruth Turkow (the real-life daughter of actor-directors Zygmund Turkow and Ida Kaminska) to sing from her parlor keyboard: “Zing zhe mir a lidele” (“Sing me a little song”) with a tango lilt.
I admire Kon the alchemist, infusing Hasidic melodies with both modernist expressionism and baroque techniques, as well as Kon the entertainer, gifted at popular singable hits. (He also set “Yosl Ber” — a humorous song about a Jewish soldier — and even led a jazz band for a secular New Year’s Eve Jewish ball.)
Kon was equally in demand for dramatic and satirical stage projects in an ever-shifting constellation of visionary writers, artists, production teams and performers that propelled Yiddish cultural movements of the 1920’s and ’30s.
Like many artists involved in interwar Jewish Poland’s kleynkunst (cabaret-style entertainment) and experimental performance scenes, Kon had himself grown up “between two worlds” (which, by the way, was the original title of the Dybbuk author An-sky’s groundbreaking play). Born in 1890 into a religious household in the Polish industrial city of Lodz, Kon was sent at age 12 to live with his grandfather, a rabbi in Kutno, since his family hoped the boy would become a yeshiva scholar.
Instead, intrigued by listening to klezmer musicians and badkhns (wedding entertainers), Kon followed a more creative path, and was sent as a teenager to Berlin to study at a royal music academy for several years. But homesickness for his Jewish roots led him back to Poland.
Arriving in Warsaw in 1912, he found creative encouragement and connections through the literary salons hosted by the classic Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz and the Yiddish playwright and actress Tea Arciszewska. Peretz insisted that Kon compose settings for his poetry, and later Kon scored the premiere of Peretz’s groundbreaking expressionist stage play A Night in the Old Market.
In the cultural upheaval and ferment following WWI, Kon garnered various commissions from the Vilna Troupe, but more regularly partnered with the charismatic writer and impresario Moishe Broderzon for a series of collectivist performance projects, often with a leftist political edge.
All these productions used titles referring to radically reimagined Jewish culture. Their popular 1922 puppet parody company “Khad Gadye” — a Passover reference — was followed in 1924 by their ambitious yet low-budget, biblically-based modernist opera Bas-Sheve (Bathsheba, King David’s lover and future wife). When a lead singer fell ill, Kon sang his bass part from behind the piano.
Two visionary variety-show format “revue” theater collaborations by Broderzon and Kon came next. The first collaboration was the mid/late 1920’s variety theater collective Azazel (Scapegoat), famously rhyming with shlimazel which you hear in Broderzon and Kon’s “Azazel Shimmy” — a song that all of Jewish Warsaw used to hum. The Yiddish actress and playwright “Totshe” Arciszewska, whom Kon knew before WWI, was another key player in this group.
Broderzon next established the theater collective Ararat, the acronym for the Artistic Revolutionary Revue Theater, but also referring to Mt. Ararat, the place where Noah’s ark landed after the flood, signifying a fresh start.
Through the legendary 1930’s Ararat kleynkunst ensemble, Kon became well-acquainted with several cultural figures he would also soon write for in celluloid format. Dzigan and Schumacher, the comedy duo, first known to Polish-Yiddish audiences through live shows with Ararat, played supporting roles in the film Al Khet, adding humor to the screen melodrama.
The following year the pair starred in Freyklekhe Kabtsonim, scripted by Broderzon, the same guy who had discovered them.
Most significantly for Kon himself, the dancer Judyta [Judith] Berg joined Ararat. Kon encouraged her choreographic innovations, accompanying her solo dance concerts and using his established celebrity to draw elite Warsaw audiences for her in 1934. By the time the prestigious cinematic version of The Dybbuk was cast, Berg was not only recruited as choreographer, she also performed in white skull mask and tallis for the toytn-tants (Dance of Death) accompanied by Kon’s evocative music, the indelible Dybbuk scene for which she and Kon are best known. Kon and Berg became a romantic couple as well, though it’s not clear whether they ever married.
Like Kon, Berg had grown up influenced by Hasidic culture around her and then studied in Germany. At various Jewish celebrations, her grandmother led women’s dancing and told Judith about older traditional dance forms like the toytn-tants, while her brother would hold open the door so she could watch the men’s group dancing.
Later Berg went to Dresden, Germany, for intensive classes with modern dance pioneer Mary Wigman. (During the rise of Hitler, Judith and other Jewish dance students left Wigman’s school and Germany altogether.) In the late 1930’s, she and Kon escaped the Nazis separately, but Berg’s niece Yvette Metral told me she recalled seeing Kon once in 1948-49 when he came to visit her aunt at the dance school Berg established for Jewish survivor children in Wroclaw.
Kon’s legacy is being rediscovered in numerous recent cultural explorations. “Bas-Sheve,” the opera he wrote with Broderzon, was performed in 2019 at Yiddish Summer Weimar, based on a rediscovered partial piano score, with major arranging and re-imagining by klezmer performer Josh Horowitz and added libretto portions devised by the writer and Yiddish translator Michael Wex. This piece will soon be performed again by the UCLA Symphony.
Also in recent years, much research and revival effort has focused on two works that Kon composed for the avant garde leftist theater troupe Yung teater, both based on landmark American trials which galvanized political movements. One composition, called “Boston,” is about Sacco & Vanzetti, and the other, “Mississippi,” is about the Scottsboro Boys. Small wonder that a quote from the leftist anthem “Internationale” found its way into Kon’s score for Mir Kumen On (the Bundist film already under threat by Polish censors).
Last December brought us the diasporic Yiddish puppet show The Trial of Modicut, directed by Yael Horowitz, who gave a conference presentation on Kon, Broderzon and their Azazel Shimmy in 2025. Splendid music for the Modicut show was performed by the duo of Raffi Boden (cello/music director) and Ira Temple (accordion), which at one point featured a gorgeous adaptation of one of Kon’s most recognizable orchestrated Dybbuk motifs, graced by a fluffy puppet sheep.
While my musician friends who took part in the puppet show seemed unaware of the composer’s name, the spirit of his creation lives on in their fusion of conservatory training, deep klezmer chops, respect for cultural ancestors and antic humor aimed at serving the creative proletariat.
Eve Sicular is a cinema scholar, co-curator of the Yiddish New York Film Festival and a former curator of film & photo archives at YIVO Institute. She is also the drummer/bandleader for Metropolitan Klezmer & Isle of Klezbos whose latest album is “Yiddish Silver Screen.”
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