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For ill and for good, this ‘Wicked’ song has become ubiquitous
In the final minutes of the second act of the Broadway musical Wicked, Glinda and Elphaba sing together one last time. They have reached their ultimate, iconic forms: Glinda is the Good Witch, ringletted and resplendent. Elphaba is the Wicked Witch of the West, caped and glittering. They suspect they will never see each other again. And so the two women sing a duet that is part yearbook note, part deathbed confession.
“Because I knew you,” Glinda sings, “I have been changed for good.”
Jenna and her husband watched from their orchestra seats. It was 2005, Wicked was the toast of Broadway, and the tickets were a splurge. When the actress playing Elphaba sang, “It well may be that we will never meet again in this lifetime, so let me say before we part: so much of me is made of what I learned from you. You’ll be with me, like a handprint on my heart,” Jenna’s eyes filled with tears. Her husband reached over and took her hand.
Four months later, they separated. On her birthday that year, Jenna’s ex-husband sent her a card. “Because I knew you,” he wrote, “I have been changed for good.”
“I love the double meaning of that,” said Jenna, now 57 and a volunteer manager at a nonprofit in Maryland. “I have been changed to be a better person, but I have also been changed permanently, for good. There’s no going back.”
The second life of ‘For Good’
Amidst cheers and ballyhoo — to borrow a phrase from Glinda — a second Wicked movie is now hitting theaters. To mark the distinction between this movie and its predecessor, the 2025 edition is called Wicked: For Good.
“For Good,” the song, has attained an unusual second life outside of the musical. In Wicked, Jewish composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz launched a number of forever entries into the musical theater book of standards — “Defying Gravity,” “Popular,” “The Wizard and I” — but “For Good” belongs to an exclusive category: songs that have become staples at graduations, retirement celebrations and funerals. If you see a cap and gown, you are not safe from a heartfelt rendition of “For Good.” If there is a casket on a table, these days you may be as likely to hear “For Good” as you are to hear “Wind Beneath My Wings” or “Candle in the Wind.”
“As a cantor, it’s impossible to hear ‘For Good’ from Wicked without sensing that the song is doing something deeply Jewish, whether or not its creators intended it,” said Neil Michaels of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. “It has become, in many sanctuaries and life-cycle moments, a kind of contemporary niggun, carrying emotional truth where spoken liturgy might fall short.”
“I’ve played it for a funeral,” said Joe Wicht, who has accompanied singers for 18 years at the San Francisco piano bar Martuni’s. “I’ve played it for singers at wedding receptions, too.” But most often, he said, the song is sung “by two best friends.” Duos who request “For Good” are often about to be separated by a move, or redefined by one person getting married, he said. Sometimes, the singers are a parent and a child.
“This isn’t the kind of song where people just willy-nilly decide to sing it in a bar, a la karaoke,” he said. “It’s always sung with intent.”
“It’s always the same scenario — best friends,” he added. “I’ve never heard this song performed between two people in love.”
An anthem of friendship for this generation
Few songs aim to articulate the way that two people can alter each other’s lives and edit each other’s characters, sans romantic love. Schwartz has said in interviews that he wrote the song after sitting down with his daughter and asking her about her best friend. “If you could never see Sarah again and you had one chance to tell her what she’s meant to you,” he asked, “what would you say?”
The song, which lifts some of Schwartz’s daughter’s words directly, literalizes the way two people can blend without losing their own specificity. It begins with a solo for each woman, then they sing in counterpoint, then harmony. “For Good” is sometimes derided as schmaltzy and overearnest. But its impact is indelible: it is a song people rely on to express a kind of love that often goes unsung.
“For those of us who have lost someone,” wrote vocal coach and therapist Petra Borzynski in a recent essay, ‘For Good’ is “the song that speaks the unspeakable: that the person who is gone still lives in every choice we make, every kindness we extend, every moment we choose differently because they existed (for better, for worse).”
Borzynski sang the song for years. Then her mother died, at 59, of ovarian cancer. When Borzynski attempted to sing the song, she recalled, “my voice literally broke.”
When 75-year-old Melbourne resident Des Flannery was in his late 60s, he got into a fight with his best friend, Max. They made up when Des sent Max a written apology, Des’ daughter, Breanna, told me. In his note, Des quoted the opening lyrics from “For Good.” When Max died several years later, Des eulogized him, reciting the lyrics that had helped bring him and his friend back together.
“He wasn’t confident he could get through it without becoming a wailing mess,” his daughter, Breanna Flannery, said. “So reading it seemed the best way to get it out.” (Afterwards, women mourners crowded around Des to praise his bold, emotional writing, unaware that he had been quoting Wicked.)
Drew Wutke, a pianist at Marie’s Crisis, the famed Broadway musical singalong bar in the West Village, is used to looking up from the piano during “For Good” and seeing drinkers crying into their tequila sodas.
“It is the friendship anthem of the last 25 years,” he said.
“I don’t know another way to say it other than: it is a heaven-blessed song,” he said. “The hope that soul-friendship exists, that chosen family exists — those are the wires that get tripped when that introduction starts,” he said, humming the song’s opening notes. “Even though it is lyrically nonsensical at times.” One lyric often maligned even by fans is, “Like a seed dropped by a sky bird, in a distant wood.”
“A skybird! Please!” said Wutke. “We could have workshopped that lyric.”
I’ve heard it said…but what does it mean?
As with the rest of the musical, the universality of “For Good” is both a strength and weakness. Wicked is a musical about a woman who faces cruelty and discrimination because of her skin color. It has been called a parable about fascism, and an allegory for racism and ableism. But no Black actress played Elphaba full-time on Broadway for the musical’s first 22 years. And though one character in Wicked uses a wheelchair, the first time a wheelchair user ever played Nessarose was in last year’s movie.
Though the Wicked movies have been released during a time of rising authoritarianism, the movie’s stars and creators have limited themselves to comments like the joint statement Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande made recently, which spoke of “times like these that feel so divided, as if we’re reading from different pages and different books.”
Though the song is deeply meaningful to listeners, the meaning those listeners derive is not consistent. “At its core, ‘For Good’ is about hineni — ‘here I am’: standing fully present in relationship,” said the cantor, Michaels. “It is the musical embodiment of the Jewish belief that who we become is inextricably shaped by the people who walk beside us.” The song, he argued, “echoes the teaching that every person you encounter teaches you something, that chevruta (sacred partnership) shapes the soul, and that human connection is one of Judaism’s most powerful agents of transformation.”
No one religion or perspective has a monopoly on interpreting Schwartz’s message. Ali, a friend of mine, and a 31-year-old interior designer from Los Angeles, grew up singing songs from Wicked with her friend Brittany. “She would always be Elphaba and I would always be Glinda, even though I secretly wanted to sing the Elphaba part,” Ali said.
Ali was active in the Catholic church, and the girls were often asked to perform at fundraisers and other events. They reserved “For Good” for the finale. “It’s about connection and sisterhood, and friendship,” Ali said. “It was a tearjerker.”
As 14 year olds, the two girls were summoned to perform in a hotel ballroom for a group of about “200 nuns and other women,” Ali remembered. After the song, the nuns thanked them profusely for lending their voices to their cause. The two girls exited the stage to wild applause, then sat down to eat lunch and when they looked back up, “they were literally showing fetuses on the screen and just spewing anti-abortion rhetoric,” Ali remembered. The shift was shocking, she said. “From sisterhood and friendship to hating other women for having abortions.”
Changed for good? Or just good at singing?
“For Good” is usually performed in the context of honoring another person. No matter how tragic or poignant an event is, though, for a theater kid it’s also an opportunity to perform “For Good.” If that sounds cynical, it comes from personal experience: Your author performed the Elphaba part at her high school graduation. I knew that it was my job to move the audience to tears, but my thoughts were largely about how to achieve vocal clarity and resonance. Also, my ankle was broken, and my secular high school had rented out a synagogue for graduation, so I sang the song on the steps of the bima, mindful of the fact that my cast was wider than the steps and if I gestured emotionally during the “like a comet pulled from orbit” harmony I could roll forward and crash to the ground.
But Victoria, 21, who sang the song just a few years ago at her high school graduation in Port Richey, Florida, begs to differ. “I think that vocally, it is not an extremely challenging song,” she said. The real challenge, she said, is allowing yourself to feel the meaning of the song, and conveying that depth of feeling to the audience. “I couldn’t help but really internalize the lyrics I was singing,” she said.
“I was reflecting on all of the relationships I had made with my fellow students, as well as my teachers,” Victoria said. “And I knew then that they had changed and helped create the person I am today, because I knew them.” Among masses who will see Wicked: For Good in the coming weeks, there will be many who weep throughout the title song, and many who call the song saccharine and sentimental. The second group is missing the point. “For Good” is meant to be saccharine. It takes on the most cringe-inducing, embarrassing topic in the world: human connection. If you love it, it probably came into your life for a reason.
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EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements
(JTA) — The European Union could be leaning toward banning trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Foreign ministers debated various tactics to respond to the settlements on Monday at their monthly council meeting in Brussels, against the backdrop of rising violence by settlers and efforts by the Israeli government to expand settlements in Palestinian territories.
In a press conference following the meeting, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said one possibility had stood out.
“The option that got the most support was banning the trade with illegal settlements,” she said. All 27 member states consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank to violate international law.
Kallas added, “We tasked the ambassadors to take this work forward, and probably will also have an extraordinary meeting on this.”
No decisions have yet been made, and the path forward is uncertain. Some EU member nations favor aggressive action against the settlements, while others are unlikely to back any measures that take aim at Israel. A number are in the middle and have not decided whether they support trade bans.
The level of agreement between European governments needed to enact a partial or full trade ban on Israeli settlements remains an open question. Kallas said it was the European Council’s legal opinion that voting on trade issues called for a qualified majority, meaning that 15 out of 27 states would have to vote in favor, representing at least 65% of the EU population.
But she also acknowledged that legal experts disagreed about how much backing was needed for a trade ban. “You can always find different lawyers who come up with different ideas,” she said.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Kallas of an “obsessive campaign against Israel” in a post on X. “There was no consensus. There was no qualified majority. In fact, there was no majority at all,” he wrote, adding, “Tricks like this do nothing to advance our shared interests.”
The EU has hotly debated measures against Israel as settlements in the West Bank have expanded and settler violence has sharply intensified over recent years. The Israeli NGOs Peace Now and Kerem Navot said in a report last week that “the current Israeli government has advanced de facto annexation of the West Bank at an unprecedented pace.”
The ministers considered measures including a stricter export licensing system, higher tariffs and a partial or outright ban on goods produced over the pre-1967 lines. The options were first presented in a paper last week by the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, as pressure mounted from European governments.
Kallas said these potential moves were not “options against Israel,” but “options against the illegal settlements that undermined the two-state solution.” She told reporters before the meeting that member states had been pressing for a trade ban on Israeli settlements, saying, “Everyone agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable.”
In May, the EU sanctioned Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians after Hungary’s new government, led by Peter Magyar, gave its approval and allowed the states to reach a consensus.
To protest the Gaza war, the commission last year proposed suspending the EU’s free trade agreement with Israel as set out under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the cornerstone of economic and political cooperation between Europe and Israel. The proposal was not advanced because it lacked the majority support of 15 member states.
The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 33.1% of its imports and 29.4% of its exports in 2025, according to a summary on the European Commission website, which did not provide data on settler goods. The free trade agreement does not apply to goods originating from Israeli businesses located over the pre-1967 lines.
Revoking the association agreement requires unanimous approval from the EU’s 27 member states, while a partial suspension, such as freezing the free trade agreement, calls for a qualified majority. Germany, Italy, Hungary and Czechia have consistently opposed such suspensions.
Israel’s most vocal critics in Europe, including Ireland and Spain, have pushed for suspending the association agreement along with proposing their own import bans at the national level. Ireland now holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, a six-month term that ends in December 2026.
The legal basis of trade restrictions on Israel lies at the heart of debates in the EU. Support from a qualified majority is sufficient to enact a commercial policy, while changes in the common foreign and security policy — such as sanctions — require unanimity.
Some legal scholars have argued that an EU ban on imports from Israeli settlements should be imposed as a trade measure rather than a sanction, making it easier to pass.
A group of 40 scholars said in an open letter last month to Kallas, trade chief Maroš Šefčovič and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen that a blanket ban on settlement imports had a legal basis under the EU’s common commercial policy. Claims that unanimity was needed for the prohibition were “grounded in political rather than legal considerations,” they said.
The scholars also referenced an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in 2024, which said that Israel’s military control of Palestinian territories in the West Bank constituted an illegal occupation.
“In that regard, it should be noted that the EU Court of Justice has ruled that, in its acts, the EU is ‘bound to observe international law in its entirety,’” they said.
Daniel Mariaschin, Honorary CEO of the pro-Israel Jewish advocacy organization B’nai Brith International, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that reducing trade “would only weaken one of Europe’s most important partnerships in the region.”
“There are those within the EU who are looking for any way to undercut Israel’s international standing, and this is yet another example,” Mariaschin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
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Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide
(JTA) — The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.
The document is titled “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide” and is also known as Kairos II, after the Palestinian Christian movement Kairos Palestine that produced it. It describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide, states that Israel is a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” and says decades of “occupation,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vote on Monday does not adopt the accusations as church doctrine but says the church should hear the documents as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” and to engage with them in order to better understand the conflict.
Ahead of the debate in York, several Jewish organizations expressed concerns, and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis asked Synod members to reject the amendment. Mirvis called Kairos II “deeply concerning” and that it “risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building” between Christians and Jews.
“It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood,” he said.
Afterwards, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, issued a statement calling the passage of the motion “highly problematic.”
“Kairos Palestine may come from a place of genuine pain, but the falsehoods and distortions of Kairos II, including its erasure of Jewish identity and experience, is a prescription for more division and not the answer to conflict in the Middle East,” he said.
“This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people. As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers — a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she said.
She added, ”I also hear the concerns of the chief rabbi, the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Board of Deputies, and I thank them for their honesty.” She said the church remained opposed to antisemitism and committed to safety for Israelis as well as Palestinians.
The Synod debate followed Mullally’s visit to the West Bank in June, where she met Palestinian Christian communities in Birzeit. During the visit she said, “I will use my role as Archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”
The debate marks the ascendance of Israel-related issues in another major church, after the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV angered Jewish groups soon after being elected last year by endorsing an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
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