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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.
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‘Auschwitz’ is a hit Iranian protest anthem, part of a music genre rebelling against official antisemitism
Last month, well-known Iranian singer Mehdi Yarrahi released a song titled “Auschwitz,” about the regime’s brutal crackdown on protesters earlier this winter, which estimates suggest killed between 7,000 and 30,000 people over the course of a few days. The song quickly gained traction online, drawing around 10 million views on the singer’s Instagram account.
The choice of Auschwitz as a historical touchstone was not accidental: it is a direct answer to the Iranian regime’s persistent mockery and denial of the Holocaust, and a point of identification for Iranians who may see an echo of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in their own government’s brutality.
Yarrahi, who lives in Iran, released “Auschwitz” after reports emerged of thousands of Iranian protesters being gunned down in the streets for protesting the regime. The song compares their fate to that of people who endured the Nazi death camps. Its opening line declares: “I come from Auschwitz, of night transfers. I come from a killing field of youth.” The music video accompanying the song features footage of protestors being beaten by regime forces in the streets, as well as photographs of those who were killed.
Yarrahi knows the price one can pay for making anti-regime music. In March 2025, he received 74 lashes as a part of his sentencing for the release of his song “Rousarieto” (“Your Headscarf”), which criticized the regime’s requirement that women cover their hair and dress modestly.
The lyricist behind “Auschwitz,” Hossein Shanbehzadeh, has also faced the regime’s wrath. In 2024, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison after he commented with a single dot in response to a post on X from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei — a reply that received more likes than Khamenei’s original post. Iranian authorities accused him of being an Israeli spy and of spreading anti-regime propaganda. While Shanbehzadeh languishes in prison, through Auschwitz’s lyrics, his words have now been heard by millions both inside and outside Iran.
The Holocaust metaphor in “Auschwitz” is especially subversive because it invokes a history the Iranian regime refuses to recognize — just as it refuses to acknowledge its own brutality. Many high-ranking members of the Iranian regime have publicly denied, minimized, or questioned the Holocaust, including former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the fighting on Feb. 28. The regime has also hosted state-sponsored cartoon competitions mocking the Holocaust— most recently in 2021 — and was the only country to reject a 2022 United Nations resolution condemning Holocaust denial.
By comparing the regime’s violence against protesters to Nazi brutality — atrocities that Iranian leaders do not acknowledge — Yarrahi’s song challenges both political repression and the antisemitic narratives promoted by the state that have made it a global pariah.
The soundtrack to the revolution
In Iran, where culture is steeped in poetry, protest music has become a central part of the anti-regime movement.
An Iranian activist who was arrested and jailed for his involvement in the protest movement told the Forward, “These songs push people forward. They give you the energy to keep going.” Now living in the United States, he said the music also connects diaspora Iranians to the movement back home. “When we get together with friends in the community, we play these songs,” he said. “We start talking, and the music is playing in the background.”
Music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music are difficult to access in Iran because of payment sanctions and bans. While protest songs are censored on social media, many Iranians download music using VPNs through Telegram — an encrypted messaging app that has 45 million Iranian users despite being banned — as well as other websites. Many Iranian singers have their own Telegram channels where they share their music.
During the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests, the song “Baraye” (“For the Sake Of”) went viral and became an anthem for demonstrators mobilizing against the regime. It garnered 40 million views in its first two days of being released and later won a Grammy.
The singer Shervin Hajipour wrote the lyrics based on responses from Iranians on X to a simple question: “What are you protesting for?” One line references the regime’s “meaningless slogans” — “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
According to Thamar E. Gindin, a research fellow at Haifa University’s Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Research, music has been a meaningful part of the protest movement. “Baraye,” particularly, was sung “from balconies and windows when they didn’t want to go out to the streets and be killed. They sang it at the end of ceremonies.” She compared it to the way many Israelis and other Jews sing “Hatikvah,” as an expression of collective hope.
Polling suggests that Iranian public opinion diverges from official rhetoric.
One survey from last September found that 69% of Iranians believe their country should stop calling for the destruction of Israel. When respondents were asked about their views of foreign countries, the United States received the highest favorability rating, with 53% expressing a positive view. Israel ranked second. A 2014 survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League found that Iranians held the lowest levels of antisemitic attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa outside Israel, despite decades of state-sponsored antisemitic narratives.
Invoking Iran’s pluralistic past
For many Iranians, protest music has become a way to reclaim their national identity. While the regime defines itself through external struggle with Israel and the West, many protestors prefer to define Iran through its culture and history. One figure frequently invoked in protest discourse and music is Cyrus the Great.
King Cyrus, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, created one of the largest empires of the ancient world. After conquering Babylon in 539 BCE, he issued a decree allowing exiled peoples — including Jews taken captive by the Babylonians — to return to their homelands. In the Bible, he is remembered for permitting Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.
According to the activist, “Cyrus to Iranians is like the Founding Fathers to Americans,” adding: “Cyrus is a symbol of peace among nations, and also a person who respects human rights and your beliefs regardless of who you are.” He is viewed as particularly “important for what he did for the Jewish people” and other minorities, which, for many anti-regime Iranians, represents an Iran rooted in human rights.
London-based Iranian artist Amin Big A’s 2018 song “Be Name Iran” (“In the Name of Iran”) channels this sentiment. The song gained massive popularity, especially among the Iranian diaspora, during the 2022 protest movement in Iran and has since been widely shared on social media alongside videos of the current protests. The song opens with a tribute to Cyrus: “In the name of Cyrus, that King of Kings — the one who taught us to be good to our friends and companions.”
Iranians invoke Cyrus, he said, to remind themselves and the world of that history. They want to “signal to the world, especially to non-Iranians,” that “if you want to understand how Iranians think, you can look at our history.” For protestors, it is a way to demonstrate that “the current regime in Iran is not representative of Iranians.”
Another song, “Dictator,” released in January by Iranian artists Shaayn and Moonshid during the height of the protests, contrasts Iran’s current authoritarian system with the nation’s ancient past. “It’s basically saying: we had Cyrus, and Cyrus was not a dictator,” said the activist. “Our history is not all about dictators.” One line in the song reads, contrasting Cyrus with a Turkish conqueror: “One gives freedom to the people, another kills and oppresses…. One becomes like Cyrus the Great, another becomes like Timur.”
Over the years, several anti-regime protests have been held at Cyrus’ tomb in Iran. In response, the regime has restricted access to the site and deployed security forces to discourage protestors from gathering there.
According to Beni Sabti, an Iran expert from the Institute for National Security Studies, Cyrus’ pluralistic legacy makes him recognized as “the best King that Iranians had. It’s another reason to love Jews, or to re-love them,” he said, adding: “They don’t believe the state’s propaganda.”
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War with Iran puts the US-Israel alliance at grave risk
The Iran war is strategically sound yet politically unsupported — an unstable foundation for a gamble that could reshape the Middle East. That creates danger for Israel, which needs the support of an American public that is rapidly drifting away.
For decades, the country’s greatest strategic asset has not been its military technology or intelligence capabilities — spectacular as these are — but rather the political, diplomatic and military backing of the United States. That relationship has not been merely transactional. It was supposed to rest on shared values and deep public support across the American political spectrum.
If that support erodes or disappears, Israel’s strategic environment will fundamentally change. To be blunt: it will not be able to arm its military. This creates a paradox. A campaign that has so far demonstrated extraordinary value for the Jewish state also stands a risk of fundamentally weakening it.
An alliance at its strongest
The conflict has showcased the depth of the current U.S.–Israel alliance. To many observers, and critically to Israel’s enemies, the operation has underscored not only Israel’s capabilities but also the reality that it stands alongside the world’s most powerful state.
The strikes have projected deep into Iranian territory, revealed astonishing intelligence penetration, and destroyed or degraded key threats. Israel’s enemies across the region have already been weakened by previous rounds of fighting since Oct. 7, and the current operation has reinforced the impression that Israel can reach its adversaries wherever they operate.
Moreover, Iran’s regime has managed to isolate itself to the point where most Arab countries are in effect on the side of Israel and the U.S. That projection — of an unbreakable and strong alliance – may ultimately be the most important strategic element of this war.
But therein lies the rub.
The political foundations of American support for Israel are eroding, which means the very element that currently strengthens Israel’s deterrence — American participation — may also be the one most at risk.
A just war, unjustified
Americans do not understand why their country is at war.
A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted at the start of the conflict found only 27% of Americans supported the U.S. action, while 43% opposed it. Other surveys show similar results, with roughly six in ten Americans against the military intervention.
In modern American history that is highly unusual. Most wars begin with a “rally around the flag” moment when public support surges. Even conflicts that later became controversial — from Afghanistan to Iraq — initially enjoyed majority backing.
This one did not — in part because the case for it has not been made clearly to the public.
That error is compounded by years of polarization in American politics; declining trust in institutions and leadership; and the record of President Donald Trump, who has spent years spreading conspiracy theories and demonstrating a remarkable indifference to factual truth. It is no exaggeration to say that many Americans do not believe a word he says – which is perhaps unprecedented.
When a president with that record launches a war, at least half the country assumes the worst. Even if the strategic logic is sound, the credibility deficit remains.
The tragedy is that the war is, in fact, eminently justifiable. The Islamic Republic has long since forfeited the moral legitimacy that normally shields states from outside force. It brutally suppresses its own population, jailing and killing protesters, policing women’s bodies, and crushing dissent with an apparatus of repression. Its foreign policy is not defensive but revolutionary. Through proxy militias it has destabilized Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, as well as the Palestinian areas, in some cases for decades.
The regime has pursued nuclear weapons through a series of transparent machinations, deceptions and brinkmanship. Negotiations have repeatedly been used as delaying tactics while enrichment continued. Any deal that relieved sanctions would not simply reduce tensions; it would also inject new resources into a system dedicated both to repression at home and aggression abroad — one that is despised by the vast majority of its own people, as murderous dictatorships inevitably will be.
There is a doctrine in international law known as the Responsibility to Protect — the principle that when a state systematically brutalizes its own population, the international community may have the right, even the obligation, to act. By that standard, the Iranian regime has been skating on thin ice for years.
But with this clear rationale left uncommunicated, the politically dangerous perception has spread that the U.S. was reacting to Israel rather than acting on its own strategic judgment.
A perilous future
If Americans come to believe that Israel caused a costly war that they did not support in the first place, the backlash could be severe.
For centuries, one of the most persistent antisemitic tropes has been the accusation that Jews manipulate powerful states into fighting wars on their behalf. The suggestion that Israel can pull the U.S. into conflict feeds directly into that mythology. Once such perceptions take hold, they can be extremely difficult to reverse.
Even people who reject antisemitism outright can absorb a softer version of the same idea: that American interests are being subordinated to Israeli ones. In a political environment already marked by growing skepticism toward Israel, that perception risks deepening the erosion of support that has been underway for years.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to inadvertently feed such notions by suggesting in recent days that the U.S. had to attack Iran because Israel was going to do so “anyway,” and then America would have been a target. It was a short path from that to conspiracy theorists like Tucker Carlson blaming Chabad for the war.
A future Democratic president, facing a base that appears to have abandoned Israel, may feel far less obligation to defend it diplomatically or militarily. Even a Republican successor could prove unreliable if the party continues its drift toward isolationism.
That likelihood is compounded by studies showing that a large part of the U.S. Jewish community itself no longer backs Zionism. That process is driven by Israel’s own policies, including the West Bank occupation and the deadly brutality of the war in Gaza.
So the very war that is showcasing the best the U.S.-Israel alliance has to offer is also at risk of fundamentally damaging that partnership. Particularly if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the rightful object of much American ire — manipulates the Iran campaign into an electoral victory this year, the alliance’s greatest success could also be its undoing.
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Report: Iran’s New Military Plan Is Regime Survival Through Regional Escalation
Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attend an IRGC ground forces military drill in the Aras area, East Azerbaijan province, Iran, Oct. 17, 2022. Photo: IRGC/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – After last year’s devastating conflict with the United States and Israel, Iranian leaders have reportedly adopted a major strategic shift aimed at expanding the war across the Middle East to secure the regime’s survival, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Previously, Iran responded to foreign strikes with limited, targeted reprisals. The new doctrine abandons that approach, aiming instead to escalate the conflict regionally, particularly against Gulf Arab states and critical economic infrastructure. The goal is to disrupt the global economy and pressure Washington into shortening the war.
This decision followed the twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025, during which Israeli and US strikes eliminated senior Iranian military leaders, destroyed key air defense systems, and severely damaged nuclear facilities. In response, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—before his elimination early in the current conflict—activated a strategy designed to maintain continuity even if top commanders were neutralized.
Central to this approach is the so-called “mosaic defense” doctrine: a decentralized military structure in which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operates through multiple regional command centers. Each center can conduct operations independently, allowing local commanders to continue fighting even if national leadership is incapacitated. This makes the military apparatus more resilient to targeted strikes.
Analysts cited by the Wall Street Journal suggest that Tehran’s calculation is to make the conflict costly enough for all parties to force the US and its allies into a diplomatic resolution.
However, the plan carries enormous risks. By escalating attacks on regional states and international economic interests, Iran could provoke a broader coalition against itself. Despite prior military losses, Iranian forces retain the capability to launch drone and missile strikes, maintaining their influence over the ongoing conflict.
For Iranian leaders, the immediate priority remains unchanged: the survival of the regime, even if it requires a major regional escalation.