Uncategorized
Before I became an orthodontist, I was my good friend Neil Sedaka’s saxophonist
When I first heard Neil Sedaka had died at the age of 86, I posted a Sedaka song on social media. I’m a Gen-X alternative rock fan, which is not exactly Sedaka’s lane, but it’s hard not to tip your hat to a pop culture legend. I posted “Standing on the Inside,” from 1973, and told people to wait for the chorus. Then, in the comments, my friend Beth Tichler Mindes from my Camp Tranquility summer camp days, wrote a sentence that stopped me: Neil and her dad had been in a band together when they were teens in the Catskills. She’d known Neil her whole life. I asked if I could talk to her 86-year-old father, Howie Tichler, and when I got him on the phone, he told me about the time in the spring of 1958 when he first met Neil Sedaka.
I first met Neil at the Kingsway Theatre on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. I was standing in the back near the popcorn. He was next to me, wearing a high school band sweater. I asked him what school he went to, and I told him I was a musician too. He said he was a piano player and that his band was auditioning for a saxophone player for a Catskills summer gig. I said, great, I’m in. It was that quick. He told me to come down to the basement and audition.
Honestly, I was at the theater to meet girls, not to watch the movie. That’s why I was hanging out in the back.
Before the audition, I spoke to my uncle, Sid Cooper. He was a saxophonist and woodwind player with the Tommy Dorsey band and later at NBC, playing with the Tonight Show band during the Jack Paar years and into the Johnny Carson era. He made sure I was ready. I needed a rhumba, a cha-cha, a foxtrot, a jitterbug. In those days you had to know the dances.
The audition was for a four-piece band. Neil wasn’t even the leader. He was just the piano player. The job was in the Catskills, at a hotel in Monticello called the Esther Manor. Esther ran the place, and her daughter, Leba Strassberg, worked behind the front desk. Neil would later marry Leba.
I don’t remember exactly how we got there. Maybe my father drove. Maybe someone in the group had a car. But we packed everything in and drove up.
When we arrived, we were told to introduce ourselves to the owner using only our first names. Half the band was Italian. In most places in the 1950s, people were hiding Jewish heritage. In the Catskills, Italian last names apparently wouldn’t go down so well. So, Eddie Caccavale became just Eddie. Paul Delova became Paul.
There were sometimes four of us, sometimes five. The group was called The Nordanels. My name wasn’t in the title because I joined a little late. The name came from Norman, David, and Neil. N-O-R-D-A-N-E-L-S.
If it was a wedding or a bar mitzvah, we wore white tuxedos. Sometimes black. At the hotels, it depended on the night of the week.
We worked six days a week, and this is no exaggeration. Afternoons, we played poolside for cha-cha lessons. Then we’d run back to our rooms, change, and play in the lobby as guests came in for dinner. After that, we played dance music before the stage show, then read the charts for the acts — usually, a dance team, a singer, or a comedian.
I was making about $85 a week, plus room and board. I wouldn’t exactly call it a room as I slept near the chicken coops. We didn’t get tips, either — unless you count being seated at dinner with the single girls.
I was born in 1939, so you can do the math. I was 18 when I started at Brooklyn College. By 1961, I was headed to Temple University in Philadelphia for dental school.
The Catskills gig helped pay for all of it as I could save every summer. Brooklyn College tuition was $15 a year, and they even threw in the textbooks. Dental school was another story. So the band gig felt like a gift.
People think of Dirty Dancing when you say Catskills. That came later. The movie is set in 1963, at a fictional resort called Kellerman’s. But the atmosphere was already there in the late 50’s and early 60’s. It was smoky. It was loud. It was hopeful.
At Esther Manor, single girls came up with their parents for the summer, and at dinner they would sometimes seat the musicians with the guests. So there we were, night after night, at long tables with our instruments nearby. We were in heaven. So were the girls.
I did this for six or seven summers. It wasn’t a one-time gig. I kept playing through my third year of dental school. After Carol and I were married, and I graduated, that era ended. From then on, I focused on dentistry. I’m a retired orthodontist, and I practiced on Long Island for about 45 years, and now I teach at Columbia. We originally lived on Long Island near my practice. My wife became a social worker and psychotherapist and opened a practice in Manhattan, so we moved halfway to the city. Once the kids flew the coop, we moved into Manhattan.
During the pandemic, we did something that still makes me laugh. Back when everything was masks, masks, masks, Carol and I were stuck in our apartment one day, and we wrote new parody lyrics to one of Neil’s songs. The original was “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” We turned it into “Masking Is Not Hard to Do.” I called Neil and told him we’d written these lyrics, and I emailed them over.
“Don’t take your mask away from me.
Don’t put my health in jeopardy.
If you don’t, then I’ll be blue,
Because what I am asking is not hard to do.
Remember when you held me tight.
We can’t do that now, but that’s all right.
Thinking safe will get us through,
Because masking is not hard to do.
They say that masking up is a difficult task.”
The next day we found out he’d posted it on Facebook. During the pandemic, he was doing this daily thing where he would sing three songs, and he introduced us and said we wrote the lyrics, and then he played it.
I guess I wasn’t so shocked when I heard he died, as when I spoke to him about a week ago, he was frailer than I ever heard him. But when we talked, we were right back to music.
We always talked about gigs we did together, about musicians who were on the job, and about little details he might have forgotten. For example, the last time we spoke, just two weeks ago, he said, you know that album I recorded that wasn’t very successful, where I sang a bunch of standards? I said sure, I remember it; I still have it. And he said, who was the piano player on that gig?
Our conversations were brief on family, and then we’d get into the details of the cool things we did together. It was always a walk down memory lane.
What I truly admired about Neil was his humility. He understood the unspoken thing between musicians. He knew my limitations, and he never judged my playing. He also knew I was an orthodontist. I had patients, not jam sessions. I wasn’t able to keep up my chops the way a full-time musician could, and he never made me feel like I was anything less than part of the band.
About 15 years ago, Neil called me up and said, “I’m on tour, and I have a gig at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven. My saxophone player is stuck in Montreal. Can you come do the show with me?”
I said, “Sure, but you realize you’re asking an orthodontist to sit in with an eight-piece orchestra.”
He said, “No problem. I’ll fax you the music.” Fax. That’s how long ago this was.
So the music starts flying through my fax machine, half of it unreadable. I called Neil and said, “I’m doing the gig, but don’t expect me to be reading those charts. I’m going to do it by ear.” And he said, “Great.”
I drove up the night before because we had soundcheck the next afternoon. The band was there, Neil wasn’t even there yet, one of the other musicians was running the rehearsal. I’m standing in this magnificent old theater in the middle of New Haven, and I walked up to the guys and said, “Hi, I’m Howie Tichler. I’m really an orthodontist. So go easy on me.” And the guy says, “Neil told us everything. Don’t worry about a thing. Come on up. We’ll rehearse.”
They put me right behind Neil, so the spotlight wasn’t only on him. It was on me, too. The air conditioning was blasting, and it kept blowing my sheet music off the stand, so I’m trying to keep the pages from taking flight while also pretending I belong there.
Neil was incredibly gracious. He introduced the band and he said, “This is my friend Howie Tichler, who is really an orthodontist, and he came to help me out.”
And when I left the theater, I’m walking out with my saxophone on my shoulder, and a woman stopped me and said, “Can I talk to you for a second?” I thought she was going to compliment my playing.
Instead she asked me if she needed braces.
Right now, I’m mostly thinking about the good times. Whenever he came to Manhattan we’d meet up. We went to museums together — the Met, the Guggenheim. It wasn’t always about music. Sometimes it was just two old friends walking around looking at art.
He also came to visit us on Fire Island. Within half an hour, everyone in Fair Harbor knew he was at our house. Not because of an announcement, because of his voice. We had a little portable piano, and he’d sit down and sing. Someone walking by would hear it, stop, and then word would spread.
I actually sang on his first hit, “The Diary.” It’s a doo-wop song, and they couldn’t afford, or maybe couldn’t find, backup singers, so I became the backup singer on Neil Sedaka’s first record.
But the thing I keep coming back to isn’t the credit. It’s the sound of him in the room, that voice carrying out the window. In Fair Harbor you could hear him before you saw him.
The post Before I became an orthodontist, I was my good friend Neil Sedaka’s saxophonist appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Atlanta movie exec who complained of ‘nasty Jews’ is running for Congress
Ryan Millsap, a prominent film and real estate executive in Atlanta who made antisemitic and racist comments in private text messages, is now running for a congressional seat in rural Georgia.
ProPublica and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported two years ago that Millsap had sent the offensive texts to a girlfriend.
“Just had a meeting with one of the most nasty Jews I’ve ever encountered,” Millsap wrote in a 2019 text message viewed by the Forward. John Da Grosa Smith, Millsap’s former attorney, filed the text messages in Fulton County Superior Court in Georgia in 2024.
The news outlets also reported that Smith said in court documents that Millsap had allegedly made derogatory comments about Jews while they worked together, including referring to his Jewish colleagues as “the Jew crew” and calling one of them “a greedy Israelite.”
ProPublica and the AJC reported that during arbitration with Smith, Millsap said the comments Smith had described represented “locker room talk.”
Millsap apologized for the offensive text messages in a 2024 statement to the news outlets, saying “comments which I never intended to share publicly have come to light, and people I care about and who put their trust in me have been hurt.”
He also spoke directly at the time to the racist and antisemitic remarks.
“I want to extend my sincere apologies to my dear friends, colleagues and associates in both the black and Jewish communities for any and all pain my words have caused,” his statement continued. “My sincere hope is that the bonds and friendships that we have forged speak far louder than some flippant, careless remarks.”
Millsap is running in the Republican primary for the open seat in Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, which stretches from the far outskirts of Atlanta to the South Carolina border and includes the college town of Athens. The district is outside of the major Jewish population centers in Georgia and had fewer than 7,000 Jewish adults, according to the American Jewish Population Project.
The election is on May 19 and Millsap is running against a popular state lawmaker Houston Gaines in what is expected to be a competitive race.
Gaines called Millsap’s reported text messages “disqualifying.”
“Antisemitism has no place in this country, and as a Christian, I’ll always stand firmly against it,” Gaines said in a statement to the Forward.
Millsap did not respond to a request for comment about the text messages or whether he has conducted any outreach to the local Jewish community as part of his campaign.
In an interview last month with the Washington Reporter, Millsap said that negative interactions with local protesters had pushed him into politics. Millsap’s studio controlled land adjacent to the construction site for Cop City, a planned police training ground near Atlanta, and both sites were targeted by activists.
“They tried to ruin my reputation,” Millsap said in the interview. “Leftist journalists at ProPublica were enlisted to write hit pieces on me, call me a racist, antisemite, anything they could do to hurt my life and put me in a bad political position, because obviously DeKalb County is mostly black Democrats.”
Millsap’s Blackhall Group, whose studio produced movies including “Venom,” “Blockers,” and “Loki,” purchased the property in a county forest near the future Cop City site in 2021. Millsap said activists violently attacked construction workers on his property, burned a pickup truck and left threatening messages in 2022.
He has referred to the demonstrators as “antifa” and made his dispute with them a cornerstone of his campaign.
Antisemitism does not seem to be a major issue in the congressional race, in which Millsap and Gaines have focused on immigration and election security. The seat is considered a safe Republican district and the winner of the GOP primary is expected to win the general election.
According to the text messages filed in court and reviewed by the Forward, Millsap and his then-girlfriend, Christy Hockmeyer, complained about Jews and Black people on several occasions. “F—king Black people,” Millsap wrote in one message reported by ProPublica and AJC after Hockmeyer complained about a Black driver whose car she hit.
Hockmeyer also apologized for her role in the text message conversations with Millsap. “Those comments do not reflect who I am and I disavow racism and antisemitism as a whole,” she wrote in a statement to ProPublica and the AJC.
The ProPublica and AJC article noted that Millsap had built close ties with the Black and Jewish communities in Atlanta after relocating to the city from California and seeking to become active in its robust film industry. He had also been applauded for embracing workplace diversity.
His apology received a mixed response from those he had worked with in Atlanta.
Smith, Millsap’s former attorney, filed the text messages in a lawsuit after the two became embroiled in a heated legal dispute. An arbitrator found that Smith had violated his contract with Millsap when the two were working together and ordered him to pay $3.7 million for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.
Millsap said in his 2024 apology that Smith had “violated the most basic and fundamental principle of attorney client privilege and released private text messages between myself and a former romantic partner.”
The post Atlanta movie exec who complained of ‘nasty Jews’ is running for Congress appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
A new book explores the vibrancy of pre-war Warsaw
The Last Woman of Warsaw
Judy Batalion
Dutton, 336 pages, $30
Don’t be misled by the title of this debut novel by Judy Batalion, nor by her previous book, The Light of Days, about the role of Polish-Jewish women in the anti-Nazi resistance.
Though the specter of the Holocaust looms over The Last Woman of Warsaw, the novel is not really Holocaust fiction. It does not portray a final female survivor of that embattled city. Its subject is instead the odd-couple friendship of two young Jewish women embroiled in the artistic and political ferment of pre-World War II Warsaw.
For Batalion, recreating the atmosphere and quotidian life of this cosmopolitan city, which once elicited comparisons to Paris, was a major aim. “In our contemporary minds, historical Warsaw conjures images of gray and death,” she writes in a lengthy author’s note. But that shouldn’t negate its more vibrant past. “Long before Vegas,” Batalion writes, “Warsaw was the capital of neons, its night skyline dotted with glittering cocktail glasses and chefs carrying platters of roasts. Much of this artistic production was Jewish.”
Even this brief excerpt shows that Batalion isn’t much of a prose stylist. But awkward locutions and diction mistakes aside — including the repeated use of “cache” when she means “cachet” — Batalion generally succeeds in immersing readers in Warsaw’s lively urban bustle and heated street politics. Here, skating on the edge of catastrophe, Polish Jews of varying ideologies and backgrounds face off against antisemitic persecution and violence.
Batalion’s handling of the historical backdrop is defter than her fledgling fictional technique. The narrative of The Last Woman of Warsaw is a plodding and repetitive affair that ultimately turns on an improbable coincidence.
The plot involves the sudden disappearance of a photography professor with communist ties and the halting efforts of the novel’s two protagonists to find and free her. The pair, whose initial antagonism mellows into friendship, are Fanny Zelshinsky, an upper-middle-class Warsaw University student, and Zosia Dror, who hails from a religious shtetl family. Her adopted surname references the Labor Zionist group that now claims her loyalty. Despite their differences, the two women have in common a desire to shake off the past and forge new lives. They also share an attraction to a single man, Abram, who can’t seem to decide between them.
When the story begins, Fanny is engaged to the perfectly nice, highly suitable Simon Brodasz, whom she’s known since her teenage years. Her mother is pushing the match. But Fanny is not in love and dreads the loss of freedom marriage entails. Her true passion is photography – in particular, fashion photography, to which she brings an idiosyncratic, modernist flair.
Zosia’s passion is political activism, and she aspires to a more prominent leadership role in Dror. Like Fanny, she is at odds with her mother, who is urging her to return to the shtetl for the festivities preceding her sister’s wedding.
What brings these women together is the arrest of the famous photographer Wanda Petrovsky, to whom both are connected. Wanda is one of Fanny’s professors, and Fanny needs her help to enter a potentially career-making exhibition. Wanda also happens to be a political activist, a leader of Zosia’s Zionist group, and Zosia hopes she’ll provide her with a visa for Palestine.
As Batalion’s narrative alternates between their perspectives, the antisemitic fervor in Warsaw mounts. Polish right-wing groups have started terrorizing Jews. Police invade clubs where Jewish comedians are mocking antisemitism. At Warsaw University, where Jewish students already have been subject to admissions quotas, the humiliation of being consigned to a “Jew bench” in class comes as a humiliating shock to Fanny.
Zosia, by contrast, has seen far worse. She and her family were victims of one of the murderous pogroms that periodically roiled the Polish countryside. She has been traumatized by the burning of her home, her father’s injuries and the refusal of her neighbors to offer refuge from the catastrophe.
In late 1930s Warsaw, Polish Jews are fighting back – with protests, hunger strikes and more. But what will any of this accomplish? Will Wanda attain her freedom, with or without the help of her protegees? Will Zosia and Fanny successfully defy their families and find meaningful lives? Which woman will Abram ultimately choose? And will any of this matter as both Poland and Polish Jewry hover on the brink of destruction?
Batalion answers these questions in an epilogue describing the fate of both women and of Fanny’s photographs, which eventually take a political turn, and in her author’s note. In the note, she reveals that all four of her own grandparents “spent their young adulthoods in interwar Warsaw.” That heritage helps account for her own passion: “to memorialize Warsaw’s golden age of creativity and the Jewish art and culture that, along with six million lives, was also decimated in the Holocaust.” A worthy endeavor, however clumsily executed.
The post A new book explores the vibrancy of pre-war Warsaw appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Mahmoud Khalil’s anti-Zionist case to Jews shows the case for skepticism
Mahmoud Khalil wants to reassure the Jewish community. In an extensive new interview with the Forward, the pro-Palestinian protest leader recognized “a Jewish connection” to Israel, and promised that a free Palestine would include safety and security for Jewish residents.
And yet I read the interview and felt a sense of alarm.
Not because Khalil seems insincere. I believe he means much of what he says. But rather because his attempts to instill confidence fall short in ways that illuminate exactly why so many Jews remain afraid and skeptical of the anti-Zionist movement.
Serious causes for serious concerns
Khalil describes himself as a pragmatist. In his activism, however, he envisions a utopia.
He is adamant that a two-state solution preserving a Jewish majority in Israel is a nonstarter. He argues, instead, for a democratic country — or multiple countries — across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, with equal rights for all and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
“I know it might sound like a very ideal utopia,” he told the Forward‘s Arno Rosenfeld, “but this is what we should aspire for.”
Khalil is concerned that Jewish fear is an obstacle to Palestinian liberation, and suggests that this fear is misplaced. “People think that we want to drive all Jews to the sea,” he said. “We don’t believe that.”
But history has long shown that Jewish safety without Jewish autonomy often proves conditional. In the ideal that Khalil advances, Israel would lose the self-determination that leads so many Jews to view it as a safe haven. My late grandfather, who was deported to a Siberian gulag by the Soviets from Lithuania — where about 90% of his fellow Jews were murdered by the Nazis — put it simply: Israel was a place where he felt his fate was in his own hands.
Nor is apprehension of anti-Zionism misplaced. Report after report has cataloged persistent harassment of Jews, threats of violence against Zionists, and invocations of antisemitic tropes within anti-Zionist movements. Yes, there are moderates, many of whom are driven by a commitment to a better future for Palestinians. But there are also extremists, and scenes on campuses and city streets around the world have shown that their tactics often prevail.
Adding to Jews’ sense of alarm are decades of violence within Israel — including the Second Intifada and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack — and globally, including recent violence against American Jewish institutions. Jews are not scared because we misunderstand the aims of the anti-Zionist movement. We are scared for good reason.
Political abstractions
A genuine effort at reassurance would engage with that truth. Instead, Khalil dances around it, suggesting that the thing we’re worried about doesn’t actually exist. He says, for example, that the pro-Palestinian campus movement did a good job of keeping antisemitism at bay. It did not.
Even when it comes to the well-established facts of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, he demurs: “I wouldn’t rule out that Hamas targeted civilians,” he said, “but I wouldn’t confirm it either.”
When referencing the excesses of pro-Palestinian campus protests, Khalil retreated into vague language. “There were maybe some bad actors,” he said. His denunciations of antisemitism remained safely generic: “some anti-Zionist actions may touch on antisemitism that we absolutely oppose.”
Who, exactly, is “we” here?
Political movements are not abstractions. They consist of real people doing real things. When excesses are common enough, they become characteristic. This is something I’ve long argued about the Israeli right as well. We cannot dismiss settler violence or anti-Palestinian abuses as fringe when they keep escalating and enjoy support from those in power.
It’s easy to say you oppose antisemitism or suffering by Palestinians, or that a utopian future is possible if we all look past our fear. It’s much harder to look within your political coalition and call out the specific negative acts your allies have committed — or acknowledge their very real consequences.
Denial and Oct. 7
Circle back to Khalil’s alarming equivocation about Oct. 7.
He frames the killings as civilians being “caught up” in violence, not targeted by it. Notice the evasive grammar: Khalil says “there were crimes committed” and Hamas has “a responsibility,” rather than “Hamas committed crimes.”
Khalil does explicitly say that he thinks Hamas is “not up to the Palestinian aspiration for liberation” and that he “doesn’t believe in political Islam.” But for someone so attuned to the language of liberation and justice, he is remarkably comfortable with passive voice when it comes to Hamas carrying out horrific murders on Oct. 7.
As I’ve previously written, the evidentiary record is overwhelming. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, organizations critical of Israel, independently concluded that Hamas deliberately and systematically targeted civilians. In one intercepted call, a Hamas terrorist bragged to his parents, “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!”
Neutrality on established facts is no different than denialism. If you are trying to reassure Jews but can’t acknowledge that Hamas killed Jews as such, any reassurance you have to offer will ring hollow.
A practical peace
Khalil says he is opposed to any violence against civilians but cannot dictate what Palestinians who experience Israeli human rights abuses should do. He says he understands why Palestinians turn to resistance, even violence, in the face of oppression.
But if you say you understand why decades of oppression push Palestinians toward resistance, then you should also understand why decades of terrorism push Israelis toward aggressive security measures, including ones that harm Palestinian civilians. If every act is merely a justified reaction to a prior act, we will end up in a world in which it’s too easy to argue that all violence is legitimate, rather than none of it.
The deep culture of mutual suspicion that this painful history has bred may be the biggest obstacle to Khalil’s utopian vision.
I share Khalil’s aspirations for peace. But Israelis, even most liberals, leftists and the millions who have protested the right-wing government, say they won’t accept a one-state solution. One 2025 poll by The Institute for National Security Studies, an independent think tank affiliated with Tel Aviv University, found that only 4% of all Israelis, and 1% of Israeli Jews, prefer a one-state solution with equal rights. Palestinians, too, are skeptical of a single state with equal rights.
At the same time, many Israelis oppose a two-state solution. So do many Palestinians. The people who live in the region hold complicated and often contradictory ideas of the path forward, and Khalil does not necessarily speak on their behalf.
Any anti-Zionist looking to reassure Jews needs to, at minimum, acknowledge that Hamas killed civilians deliberately, because they were Jews; condemn specific instances of antisemitism rather than just the concept in the abstract; and ask why Jews are scared right now, rather than telling us we shouldn’t be.
Yet Khalil’s reticence to be honest about his own movement’s flaws is a mirror of our own. Supporters of Israel have long been reluctant to name the failures of the Israeli right and to reckon with how settlements and the occupation harm Palestinians.
Khalil recounts being born in the Palestinian refugee camp Khan Eshieh in Syria, and raised on stories of his grandparents’ expulsion from a village near Tiberias. He was shot by an Israeli soldier when he was just 16. His effort to nevertheless engage with Israeli perspectives, like by reading Ari Shavit, is admirable. Jews should similarly listen to Palestinian perspectives and sit with Palestinian stories, including Khalil’s and those of Palestinians living today in the West Bank and Gaza.
The only way for any of us to build a durable political movement is to be exactingly honest about the ways in which we have, so far, failed, and to ask others with open ears: Why are you so scared?
The post Mahmoud Khalil’s anti-Zionist case to Jews shows the case for skepticism appeared first on The Forward.