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Does Jewish law say it’s OK to lie to the high-roller who wants to manage your rock ‘n’ roll band?
The year is 1986.
Last night, as I left for our gig at the Ritz, Migdalia — a stunning Puerto Rican hooker — was back on my stoop, proffering her nasty wares and services. Coming home later that night with an onion bagel and a half-gallon of milk, I see her again, this time with beard stubble pushing up through her makeup. She shoots me a forlorn look and continues pissing, upright, in the tiny foyer of my Hell’s Kitchen apartment.
“Hey,” I say. “Wouldn’t it be better for everyone to pee outside the entryway?”
Once inside, moonlight is glinting off what appear to be diamonds — dozens of them. On closer inspection, I see they’re just bits of glass. Some asshole shot out my back window again.
In the morning, out on 47th Street, a car honks and I head downstairs. It’s a gold stretch limousine. My roadie — and soon-to-be manager — Wess is sitting in back in torn Levi’s, his pasty knees poking through the holes. Today we’re heading to Caesars Atlantic City to meet Jimmy Valenti. Jimmy got my new record from his nephew Bobby, a DJ at a club in Bergen County, and now he wants to help. They say he’s got connections.
The limo driver starts the car and turns around in his seat. “You guys need anyting, jus’ ask. We got shrimp cocktails and plenty o’ booze in the fridge.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“Jimmy’s crazy excited to see the bot’ a youse. He wants ya to know you’ll be flyin’ back to the city in his private chopper.”
We arrive at Caesars and two bellmen with little white towels draped over their forearms greet us at the door. Each towel is embroidered with my last name in gold. I quickly notice Himelman has been misspelled — one m where there should be two. Wess and I trade what-the-hell looks as we ride the elevator to the penthouse.
“Enjoy your stay,” one of the bellmen says, leading us into a room big enough for a grade-school soccer game.
In the center of the penthouse is a kidney-shaped swimming pool overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Draped over a chaise longue are a swimsuit and two enormous towels, both embroidered with my last name — again, spelled incorrectly.
The ornate double doors swing open. In walks Jimmy Valenti, a large, gregarious man with dyed black hair and a Buddhist mala bead bracelet around his left wrist.
“Sit down, boys. Relax,” he says. “I’ll have Scotty send up lunch. You like chops?”
He leads us to chairs near the pool. “Pete, ya know the difference between a stallion and a gelding?”
Before I can answer — and of course I have no idea — Jimmy says, “A gelding is a horse with its balls clipped off.”
He pauses, letting the thought hang there.
“Without capital, that’s exactly what you are — a ball-less perdente. Good news is, I’m here to give you some. What do you need? 500K? A million?”
“Actually,” I say, “I hadn’t really given it much thought.”
The doors open again and two long tables are wheeled in. On the first is a platter of lobster tails on ice alongside a trough of French-fried onion rings. On the other, a crystal bowl of jumbo prawns, three massive Caesar salads, and a tray with enough porterhouse steaks to feed a dozen men.
Jimmy spears a slab of meat with the tip of his steak knife and waves it in my face. “Mangiare!”
“Jimmy,” I struggle to say through bites of the tenderest steak I’ve ever eaten, “I already got a guy helpin’ us out. He’s kind of our manager. Kind of.”
“Oh yeah?” Jimmy says. “What’s he puttin’ in, cash-wise?”
“Well, considering his time and everything, probably around $1,500.”
With a mouthful of bloody meat, Jimmy laughs. In fact, he laughs so hard and for so long I think he’s going to choke to death. He finally catches his breath.
“I see you in a rock video with some big-titted broad, walkin’ hand-in-hand near that giant globe they got down at Epcot Center. Romantic as hell. You ever been there? We shoot a real classy video for your song, “Only You Can Walk Away” for around 100, 150 grand. Then we pull some strings and get MTV to play the shit out of it.”
He leans in. “Whaddya say, Pete? You a stallion or a gelding?”
Jimmy pulls out three cigars. “Cubans,” he says, and from under the table produces a gold bucket of matchbooks, each bearing a close-but-no-cigar version (Samson Laraunce) of my band’s name, Sussman Lawrence, embossed in gold letters.
He cuts the tip of a cigar with the steak knife and asks, “Pete, I gotta know. You a horse with balls or no balls? Which is it?”
He looks out at the dark waves.
As I struggle to come up with the right answer, I can’t help imagining some unfortunate future in which I’m forced, at the barrel of a gun, to sing at Jimmy’s cousin’s wedding, his uncle’s birthday, his nephew’s christening, and his great-aunt’s wake.
Clearly, I am the gelding.
“It sounds amazing,” I say. “I’ll just need a day or two to think it over.”
Jimmy reaches for the phone. “Scotty, can we fly these boys back to the city in the bird, or is the weather too rough?”
A couple days later, back in Hell’s Kitchen, I compose this simpering, utterly gelding-esque letter:
Dear Mr. Valenti,
Thank you for your graciousness and generosity. This past month I’ve been offered a position as a broker with Merrill Lynch, and today, regrettably, I’ve decided to join the firm.
Should I ever decide to pursue a career in music again, please know you’ll be the first person I call.
Today, decades later, I search for a justification for my lie. Since nothing else seems to apply, I turn to Halacha, Jewish law, and settle on this: pikuach nefesh — the saving of a life — overrides nearly every commandment. Given the circumstances, a credible argument can be made that my life would have been at risk if I failed to perform or show up when asked; therefore, lying was permitted.
That said, I should also mention that the man did not have the best personal hygiene. I’m not certain that alone rises to the level of pikuach nefesh, but it didn’t help.
As for the “bird,” Jimmy was right. The weather was too rough. Scotty had the limo we came down in “all refreshed ‘n’ replenished.” The same driver took us all the way back to Hell’s Kitchen. Migdalia was there, sitting on the front stoop. I stopped into a bodega and picked up a tuna sandwich for the both of us.
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VIDEO: ’Love was there too:’ A Yom Hashoah commemoration in Yiddish
די פֿאַרגאַנגענע וואָך האָט דער „ייִדישפּיל“־טעאַטער אין תּל־אָבֿיבֿ אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ פֿון אַ „יום־השואה“־אַקאַדעמיע וואָס די טרופּע האָט דורכגעפֿירט אין 2022. די טעמע פֿון דער פּראָגראַם איז געווען מאָמענטן פֿון ליבע בײַ ייִדן אין די געטאָס און קאָנצענטראַציע־לאַגערן.
אינעם ווידעאָ לייענען די אַקטיאָרן פֿאָר זכרונות פֿון לעבן געבליבענע ווי אויך ייִדישע לידער אָנגעשריבן בשעת דעם חורבן. זיי באַשרײַבן ווי אַזוי געליבטע פּאָרלעך האָבן זיך געטראָפֿן בשתּיקה; רירנדיקע מאָמענטן פֿון געזעגענען זיך און ווי די לעבן געבליבענע האָבן זיך באַמיט מיט אַלע כּוחות צו געפֿינען די געליבטע נאָך דער באַפֿרײַונג.
דער ווידעאָ הייבט זיך אָן מיט אַ באַגריסונג פֿונעם תּל־אָבֿיבֿער בירגערמײַסטער, רון חולדאי, אויף העברעיִש, אָבער די פּראָגראַם גופֿא איז אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש.
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In Elie Wiesel’s latter years, he and I discussed the effects of the Holocaust. Those conversations are now an opera.
Back in 2012, while on assignment as the Chicago Tribune’s longtime music critic, I received a phone call from my editor that would change my life.
Elie Wiesel had just accepted the newspaper’s annual Literary Prize. Would I be interested in interviewing him for the paper?
Would I?!
There was only one minor problem: I had never read a word Wiesel had written, not even his revered Holocaust memoir Night. Holocaust education was not required in the 1950s and ’60s when I was growing up – not even in Skokie, a nexus of Holocaust survivors where I lived with my family. As the son of two survivors, I considered Holocaust books, films and TV programs emotionally overwhelming and something to be avoided, if possible.
My avoidance ended abruptly in 2001, when my then 69-year-old mother began re-experiencing her unspoken Holocaust childhood in the form of delusions. This prompted me to unearth her hidden story and tell it in a Tribune article and a subsequent book and a documentary for PBS – all aptly titled Prisoner of Her Past.
I assumed that work was the reason the Tribune tapped this music critic to interview Wiesel.
After a few weeks of reading everything he wrote that I could lay my hands on, I flew to New York and found myself seated inches away from him in his Manhattan office. Within minutes, we were speaking with a degree of comfort and intimacy I had not anticipated.
Even more remarkable, after Wiesel and I held a public conversation before 2,500-plus people in Chicago’s Symphony Center — a longstanding feature of the Tribune’s Literary Prize proceedings — he suggested that we stay in touch.
That’s when I realized we had the beginnings of a book: two generations — a survivor and a son of survivors — trying to come to terms with what happened to our families and to our people. For the next four years, I visited Wiesel regularly in New York and Florida and spoke with him often on the phone. The utterly unexpected privilege of these conversations ended suddenly with his death July 2, 2016, at age 87.
In effect, Wiesel had spent the last four years of his life communing with me about the Holocaust and its apparently never-ending after-effects, my tape recorder rolling all the while. These proved to be his final thoughts on the subject, which I took as precious lessons on a fraught subject. For Wiesel had given me answers to questions I never had been able to ask my parents. To them, the Holocaust was a subject not to be discussed with me or my sister, presumably to spare us the burden of such tragedy.
Wiesel poignantly addressed what I needed and wanted to know: How does the second generation deal with feelings of guilt over our parents’ unrelieved sufferings? How do we live up to our parents’ expectations of us, without suppressing our own dreams? How do we even speak of this terrifying subject? How religious must we be? How politically active? How do we cope with the enormity of it all?
And more.
I packed the answers – and our reflections on them – into my 2019 book The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel, which is the basis of the new opera: The Dialogue of Memories, which premieres next month in Seattle.
Why an opera?
Though I was glad to have captured on paper my treasured experiences with Wiesel, I wanted to share the wealth — to let others see and feel and hear what it was like to be in the room with him. I wanted audiences to witness Wiesel explaining and illuminating my own past to me. And like Wiesel, I’ve always believed in the indescribable but unstoppable power of music to go where words alone cannot.
In 2024, the Seattle-based non-profit Music of Remembrance commissioned composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer to write Before It All Goes Dark, an opera based on my Mac’s Journey stories in the Tribune about a Vietnam vet who learns he’s heir to a priceless collection of art looted by the Nazis (I had identified and located him).
After that opera’s success, I suggested to Music of Remembrance founder Mina Miller that my years with Wiesel represented a story of profound enlightenment that could be powerful onstage. Miller wasted no time commissioning the eminent American opera composer Tom Cipullo to write the music, with libretto by me with Cipullo.
The opera features three characters: Wiesel (sung by baritone Daniel Belcher); my mother, Sonia Reich (mezzo-soprano Megan Marino); and me (tenor Dominic Armstrong). Past and present, memory and prophesy, delusion and reality intermingle in its words. And Cipullo’s music lifts those words into the realm of sublime drama as only opera can do.
I don’t know how I’ll feel watching singers portraying Wiesel, my mother and myself confronting demons that have haunted all three of us, and millions of others around the world.
But as we mark Yom HaShoah, I do know that moments once shared by Wiesel and me alone now will be available to everyone. I hope that Wiesel’s brilliant insights and my mother’s tragic experiences will help others who — like me — have long struggled with dark and enduring histories.
The Dialogue of Memories plays May 17 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle; May 20 at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco; and May 23-24 at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago. For details and tickets visit www.musicofremembrance.org. Howard Reich can be reached at howard@howardreich.com.
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J Street says Israel should fund its own defense
J Street, the progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace political advocacy, is shifting its stance on defensive U.S. military aid to Israel as a growing number of Democrats, including some of the congressional candidates it endorsed this year, call for ending such assistance.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, the organization’s longtime president, said in a lengthy post on Monday that the organization is now advocating for phasing out direct financial support for arms sales to Israel when the current $38 billion 10-year memorandum of understanding between the two countries expires in 2028. He called it “a fundamental reassessment of the U.S.-Israel security relationship,” citing “the war in Gaza, rising extremist Jewish terror in the West Bank and the US-Israel war with Iran.”
Also stressing that “the US-Israel security relationship remains a central pillar of American policy in the Middle East,” Ben-Ami added that joint research and technological investment “should continue” and that the U.S. should continue to sell short-range air and ballistic missile defense capabilities to Israel. However, “all future Research and Development agreements with Israel must include genuine cost-sharing and aim to produce defense items that both countries plan to field.”
Ben-Ami’s post includes this statement, in boldface: “The goal of this reassessment is to advance the broader American interest of a more stable and prosperous Middle East that includes both Israelis and Palestinians living in security and freedom.”
U.S. funding for Israel’s Iron Dome first started under the Obama administration in 2011. J Street’s acceptance of the position for candidates appears aimed at navigating divisions among congressional Democrats as Democratic Party voter views swing against Israel and influential progressive figures in the congressional delegation, most conspicuously Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who previously backed missile-defense funding, and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, join calls to end all military aid to Israel.
Other members and candidates in the party still back Iron Dome funding from the U.S. seek to condition offensive weapons sales on Israel’s compliance with human rights and international law.
Brad Lander, a Jewish challenger to Rep. Dan Goldman, said last week he would oppose any additional U.S. aid to Israel, arguing the country is in violation of human rights and international law.
Last week, Brad Lander, a Jewish Democrat running for Congress who has described himself as a liberal Zionist, on Friday joined the calls for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, while adding that “Israel should have access to purchase it with their own funds.” Lander, who has been “primary approved” to challenge Rep. Dan Goldman of New York — who is the official J Street pick in the race — told the Forward he did not coordinate his announcement with the group’s, which came after his.
Democrats are already taking legislative action. The Senate is expected to vote on Wednesday on two measures — filed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Jewish Vermont Independent and longtime critic of U.S. aid to Israel — to restrict at least $660 million in weapons sales to Israel. A record 27 Senate Democrats — a majority of the caucus — supported a similar pair of resolutions to block weapons transfers. J Streets urged members to vote in favor. In the House, the Block the Bombs Act, which would restrict certain offensive arms sales to Israel, currently has 60 sponsors.
J Street’s red line
Ben-Ami maintained that J Street’s updated stance to end grants, known as the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, aligns with calls by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, to gradually “taper off” U.S. military aid to Israel over the next decade until it reaches zero. “This reform would normalize the relationship and place Israel in the same category as other capable allies that purchase U.S. defense equipment without subsidy,” Ben-Ami said.
Ilan Goldenberg, J Street’s senior vice president and chief policy officer and previously an aide to former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, said the organization will still support the sale of Iron Dome components and other missile defense systems as long as it’s consistent with U.S. law and aligns with U.S. policy objectives and interests.
The strategy reflects a broader shift in politics, where Israel policy and Palestinian rights have become a litmus test for progressive candidates. Recent polls showed the tensions within the Democratic Party, which loomed large in the 2024 presidential election in the wake of the Gaza war — and now opposition to the war in Iran — are likely to shape the midterm elections.
J Street PAC is backing 133 House and Senate incumbents as well as Democratic challengers running against Republican incumbents. The group has also approved several candidates competing in open Democratic primaries, allowing its donor network to support their campaigns
Speaking with the Forward during J Street’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. last month, Ben-Ami outlined the organization’s red lines for endorsements. “If you’re in favor of a complete arms embargo against Israel, and you don’t recognize that Israel should be the national homeland of the Jewish people, you won’t come anywhere near our list,” Ben-Ami said.
A recent poll commissioned by the organization found that 70% of American Jews support placing some conditions on military assistance, including 26% who favor halting aid altogether.
The departure from the long-standing bipartisan consensus backing unconditional military support for Israel has drawn criticism from some Israel supporters.
Joel Rubin, a national security expert and a former Obama administration official who was the founding political and government affairs director at J Street in 2008, called it a “major shift” that “undermines” pro-Israel organizational support for the U.S.-Israel security assistance relationship and also “puts more pressure” on Democrats to oppose aid to Israel. “J Street is playing with fire regarding the US.-Israel relationship,” he said. “It’s much easier to tear down a relationship than it is to build one up.”
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