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Burt Bacharach, sophisticated Jewish hitmaker of the ‘60s and ‘70s, dies at 94
(JTA) — Songwriter Burt Bacharach, who with his longtime lyricist Hal David turned out a string of hits in the 1960s and ’70s — including “Alfie” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” — died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.
Bacharach and David, both Jewish New Yorkers, also wrote a host of songs that made Dionne Warwick a megastar, such as “Walk on By,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and “I Say a Little Prayer.”
The duo came to fame while working in the Brill Building — a Midtown Manhattan mecca for music publishing that housed a slew of Jewish songwriters, including the teams of Carole King and Gerry Goffin and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But unlike their peers, who wrote for the burgeoning teen market, their songs were marked by a certain elegance and romance that drew more on the Great American Songbook and Broadway than rock ‘n’ roll.
Fittingly, the pair collaborated with Broadway producer David Merrick on the 1968 musical “Promises, Promises,” which yielded two hits, including the title tune and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” That show too had a strong Jewish pedigree: The book by the legendary playwright Neil Simon was based on the 1960 film “The Apartment,” written by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond.
Bacharach grew up in Forest Hills, Queens; his father was a journalist and his mother an amateur musician. He recalled in his 2013 autobiography, “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” written with Robert Greenfield, that “no one in my family ever went to synagogue or paid much attention to being Jewish.”
And yet Jonathan Freedman, author of “Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity,” told the New York Jewish Week in 2013 that what made Bacharach’s music Jewish was his “wild play with time signatures; he is to time signatures what [George] Gershwin is to chord changes.” He called Bacharach “really audacious and experimental,” an example of what he sees Jewish artists doing as they “enter popular forms and make them their own.”
Bacharach was also the first composer to be featured in the experimental jazz musician John Zorn’s late-1990s “Great Jewish Music” series; in the CD’s jacket notes, Zorn thanks him for not changing his name and points out that Bacharach is “one of the great geniuses of American popular music — and he’s a Jew.”
In the 1970s Bacharach split with David and Warwick and entered into a new collaboration – and third of four marriages – with lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, another Jewish New Yorker. Their best-known song was the AIDS fund-raising anthem “That’s What Friends Are For.”
Bacharach remained busy nearly to the end of his life, with his later activity including collaborations with the rock star Elvis Costello. He won seven Grammy awards in all, the latest in 2006 for his pop instrumental album “At This Time.” In 1983, at the height of the British “New Wave” in rock, a synth-pop version of the then 20-year-old Bacharach-David song “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me” by Naked Eyes climbed into the Billboard Top Ten.
Bacharach would eventually reunite with Warwick and with David. In 2012, 40 years after they were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and shortly before David died at age 91, Bacharach and David received the Library of Congress’ Gershwin Prize for Popular Song — named for the Jewish composer to whom Bacharach had long been compared.
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Israel’s Netanyahu Hopes to ‘Taper’ Israel Off US Military Aid in Next Decade
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on Friday that he hopes to “taper off” Israeli dependence on US military aid in the next decade.
Netanyahu has said Israel should not be reliant on foreign military aid but has stopped short of declaring a firm timeline for when Israel would be fully independent from Washington.
“I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years,” Netanyahu told The Economist. Asked if that meant a tapering “down to zero,” he said: “Yes.”
Netanyahu said he told President Donald Trump during a recent visit that Israel “very deeply” appreciates “the military aid that America has given us over the years, but here too we’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities.”
In December, Netanyahu said Israel would spend 350 billion shekels ($110 billion) on developing an independent arms industry to reduce dependency on other countries.
In 2016, the US and Israeli governments signed a memorandum of understanding for the 10 years through September 2028 that provides $38 billion in military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defense systems.
Israeli defense exports rose 13 percent last year, with major contracts signed for Israeli defense technology including its advanced multi-layered aerial defense systems.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Israel supporter and close ally of Trump, said on X that “we need not wait ten years” to begin scaling back military aid to Israel.
“The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the US military,” Graham said. “I will be presenting a proposal to Israel and the Trump administration to dramatically expedite the timetable.”
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In Rare Messages from Iran, Protesters ask West for Help, Speak of ‘Very High’ Death Toll
Protests in Tehran. Photo: Iran Photo from social media used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law, via i24 News
i24 News – Speaking to Western media from beyond the nationwide internet blackout imposed by the Islamic regime, Iranian protesters said they needed support amid a brutal crackdown.
“We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help. Snipers have been stationed behind the Tajrish Arg area [a neighborhood in Tehran],” said a protester in Tehran speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. He added that “We saw hundreds of bodies.”
Another activist in Tehran spoke of witnessing security forces firing live ammunition at protesters resulting in a “very high” number killed.
On Friday, TIME magazine cited a Tehran doctor speaking on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital recorded at least 217 killed protesters, “most by live ammunition.”
Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Setare Ghorbani, a French-Iranian national living in the suburbs of Paris, said that she became ill from worry for her friends inside Iran. She read out one of her friends’ last messages before losing contact: “I saw two government agents and they grabbed people, they fought so much, and I don’t know if they died or not.”
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Report: US Increasingly Regards Iran Protests as Having Potential to Overthrow Regime
United States President Donald J Trump in White House in Washington, DC, USA, on Thursday, December 18, 2025. Photo: Aaron Schwartz via Reuters Connect.
i24 News – The assessment in Washington of the strength and scope of the Iran protests has shifted after Thursday’s turnout, with US officials now inclined to grant the possibility that this could be a game changer, Axios reported on Friday.
“The protests are serious, and we will continue to monitor them,” an unnamed senior US official was quoted as saying in the report.
Iran was largely cut off from the outside world on Friday after the Islamic regime blacked out the internet to curb growing unrest, as videos circulating on social media showed buildings ablaze in anti-government protests raging across the country.
US President Donald Trump warned the Ayatollahs of a strong response if security forces escalate violence against protesters.
“We’re watching it very closely. If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States,” Trump told reporters when asked about the unrest in Iran.
The latest reported death toll is at 51 protesters, including nine children.