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Harry Belafonte, singer and civil rights activist who popularized ‘Hava Nagila’ in the US, dies at 96
(New York Jewish Week) — Barrier-smashing singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who once boasted of being “the most popular Jew in America” because of his rendition of a Hebrew classic, died Tuesday at his longtime Upper West Side home. He was 96.
The New York City native was the one of the first Black artists to achieve widespread commercial success in the United States, and while he was raised Catholic, his life frequently dovetailed with Jewish causes, values and people. Among Belafonte’s many Jewish connections — which included brokering a meeting between Nelson Mandela and Jewish leaders in 1989 — was his marriage to his Jewish second wife, dancer Julie Robinson. The couple, who were married from 1958 to 2004, raised two children, Gina and David.
In 2011, Belafonte revealed in his autobiography, “My Song: A Memoir” that his paternal grandfather was Jewish. Belafonte’s parents were both Jamaican immigrants: his mother, Melvine, was the child of a white mother from Scotland and a Black father, and his father, Harold George Bellanfanti, who later changed the family name, was the son of a Black mother and white Dutch-Jewish father. In his book, Belafonte describes his paternal grandfather, whom he never met, as “a white Dutch Jew who drifted over to the islands after chasing gold and diamonds, with no luck at all.”
Belafonte was born Harold George Bellanfanti Jr., in Harlem on March 1, 1927. His father was largely absent during his childhood; his mother, who struggled with finding work, forged a relationship with a Jewish tailor who taught her how to mend garments. “That tailor gave me my first sense of kinship with Jews, which would deepen over time,” Belfonte wrote in his memoir. He spent a portion of his childhood with his grandmother in Jamaica, but he returned to New York to attend George Washington High School in Washington Heights — where Alan Greenspan and Henry Kissinger were also educated — before dropping out.
Following a stint in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Belafonte was bitten by the acting bug when, working as a janitor’s assistant, he was given a pair of tickets to the American Negro Theater as a gift. “It was there that the universe opened for me,” he told NPR in 2011. “I decided with any device I could possibly find, I wanted to stay in this place. What I had discovered in the theater was power: power to influence, power to know of others and know of other things.”
In the late 1940s, Belafonte enrolled in acting classes, where he met his lifelong friend Sidney Poitier. The impoverished pair would often share a single theater ticket, trading places at intermission. He also befriended Jewish actor Tony Curtis, writing in his memoir: “He lived in the Bronx with his family; why live downtown, he’d say, when he could live uptown for free? And who cared if they still greeted him up there as Bernie Schwartz?”
He and Curtis frequently went to parties together, he wrote, sometimes with the actress Elaine Stritch, “who swore more colorfully than any sailor I’d known,” and “the blunt Jewish comic” Bea Arthur, “who’d start matching wits with Elaine until the two of them had everyone in uncontrollable laughter.”
To pay for acting classes, Belafonte began dabbling in singing at nightclubs, and it was there that a true superstar was born. One of Belafonte’s early successes were his performances of the Hebrew dance hit “Hava Nagila” at the classic downtown folk club the Village Vanguard. His rendition, Belafonte joked to The New York Times in 2017, made him “the most popular Jew in America.”
In that same interview, Belafonte recalled the tough uptown streets of his childhood, and how he was drawn to the fast money his uncle’s number-running business earned. “Everybody in that world were role models in how to survive, how to be tough, how to get through the city, how to con, the daily encounters,” he said. “But my mother saw to it that unless I wanted to live life absent of testicles, she wasn’t going to have me follow her brother Lenny. Somewhere in there is a Sholem Aleichem — a rich story to be told of the lore of that time.”
With his 1953 breakthrough album, “Calypso” — which included his most iconic work, “The Banana Boat Song” — Belafonte “almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music,” according to The New York Times’ obituary. “Calypso” climbed to the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release and stayed there for 31 weeks; it is reported to be the first album by a solo artist to sell more than a million copies. By 1959 he was the most highly-paid Black performer in history, according to the Times.
Known around the world as the “King of Calypso,” Belafonte recorded and performed a wide range of global and folk classics throughout his wide-ranging musical career — Jewish standards among them. In 1959, he performed “Hine Ma Tov” in England, with what appears to be an Israeli military choir; his 1963 album, “Streets I Have Walked,” includes a rendition of “Erev Shel Shoshanim” (“Evening of Roses”), a popular Jewish wedding song.
Belafonte’s greatest passion, however, was neither acting nor singing — it was civil rights activism. There, too, he worked closely with many Jewish activists, as part of the historic Black-Jewish civil rights alliance of the 1950s and 1960s. But, as he recalled in his memoir, it was racism delivered by a Jewish TV executive that first inspired him to take on racial segregation in the United States.
The executive, a Jew from Montreal named Charles Revson, asked Belafonte to stop hosting white dancers on his performance show, citing the preferences of Southern viewers. Belafonte said he rejected the instruction and let Revson cancel the show. He realized, he wrote, that TV could only reflect societal attitudes, not change them. “To change the culture you had to change the country,” he concluded.
Through his civil rights activism, Bellafonte befriended Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956; the pair remained close until King’s assassination in 1968. “My apartment was a retreat for him,” Belafonte told NPR of King and his 21-room apartment in 2008. “He had his own entrance, his own kitchen. The home became, for him, a place where he could think and reside, take his shoes off, have his collar open and be him.”
Belafonte helped provide the seed money to launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and he was one of the lead fundraisers for that organization and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was “deeply involved” in the 1963 March on Washington and helped fund the Freedom Rides.
Belafonte’s commitment to social justice endured throughout his long life and career. In the 1980s, he helped organize the Live Aid concert, and he served as UNICEF’s goodwill ambassador after Jewish entertainer Danny Kaye pioneered the role. He was also a co-chairman of the Women’s March on Washington in January 2017, along with Gloria Steinem, though ill health kept him from attending.
Though primarily famous for his singing, Belafonte continued to make movies throughout his career; in 1970 he produced and co-starred in “The Angel Levine” alongside the original “Fiddler on the Roof” star Zero Mostel. Based on a story by Bernard Malamud, Belafonte starred as the titular Jewish angel. (The “project had a sociopolitical edge,” the Times noted, as the entertainer’s Harry Belafonte Enterprises hired 15 Black and Hispanic apprentices to work on the film’s crew.)
The cause of Belafonte’s death was congestive heart failure. He is survived by his two children with Robinson; the two children he had with his first wife Marguerite Byrd, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte; and eight grandchildren. After divorcing Robinson in 2004, he married photographer Pamela Frank in 2008; Frank also survives him, along with stepchildren Sarah Frank and Lindsey Frank and three step-grandchildren.
“There’s just so much left that’s in my basket of possibilities,” Belafonte told The New York Times ahead of his 90th birthday in 2017. “I’m not as young as I feel, or as young as I would consider myself to be. The 90 figure is a blur. But I do know that if there’s anything left for me to do, I had best hurry up and do it, because time is not an ally.”
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The post Harry Belafonte, singer and civil rights activist who popularized ‘Hava Nagila’ in the US, dies at 96 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Judea Pearl: What Reason I Find for Hope After October 7
Supporters of Israel gather in solidarity with Israel and protest against antisemitism, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terror group Hamas, during a rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Nov. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
Judea Pearl’s new book, Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl, 2002–2025, compiles the author’s writings on topics such as Israel, Zionophobia, antisemitism, the October 7 massacre, and his son, Daniel.
Below is an excerpt from the book, which serves as its epilogue:
Epilogue: The Crater of October 7
Science tells us that the extinction of dinosaurs occurred approximately sixty-six million years ago, when an asteroid struck the Earth, forming a huge crater in the Yucatán Peninsula. An enormous dust cloud blocked the sun, cooled the planet, and disrupted food chains, ultimately leading to the extinction of about 75 percent of all plant and animal species, including the dinosaurs.
Science tells us much about disasters that occurred millions of years ago, but, sadly, it tells us almost nothing about how our lives will be shaped by the giant crater created by the blow of October 7. Looking into its depths, we find ourselves clueless and bewildered about what future might emerge from the dust cloud that still obscures our sun — and what species, movements, or ideas will perish or evolve from the darkness, winter, and confusion it has left behind.
Some say they were surprised by the brutality and hatred of October 7. Others were shocked by the scale of the operation and how close it came to its goal.
As a native Israeli, raised on the stories of the Hebron Massacre (1929) and haunted by the horrific images of the Ramallah lynching (2000), I was not surprised by the brutality and savagery of Israel’s enemies. Nor was I surprised by the depth of their hatred and inhumanity — a reality I painfully experienced in the murder of my son, Danny. Likewise, I already saw the early and deep infiltration of Hamas’ ideology into Western thought. Indeed, this book documents my premonitions about this process and the extent to which Hamas’ ideology mirrors the essential Palestinian mindset: “From the river to the sea.”
What, then, shocked me about the crater of October 7?
I was shocked by how swiftly Zionophobia — the absolute denial of Israel’s right to exist — became normalized, mainstream, and even respectable in Western discourse, precisely at Israel’s moment of greatest vulnerability.
I’ve witnessed many personal attacks on Israel before, but they always followed her victories and achievements. Those attacks I could understand; people instinctively side with the underdog. But the post-October 7 attacks were different. This time, they were driven by a wholehearted desire for Israel’s demise — with all its genocidal implications. The scent of blood, it seems, triggered a hunger for more. Hordes of predators emerged from their ideological tunnels, rushing to indict, sentence, and lynch Israel in the finest tradition of herd madness.
Can the Jewish people survive this madness? Can Western civilization endure the dangers rising from these tunnels?
Ideologies, once metastasized, are deadlier than the sword. We have heard Western intellectuals brand the Bibas family as “settlers,” thus, legitimate targets. Others went even further, labeling them “Nazi guards of a concentration camp.” A civilization capable of generating such images has lost all moral bearings and may not endure for long.
Yet I refuse to say that we are doomed.
Not because the threats aren’t real, but because alongside the spreading moral decay, I have also found islands of moral clarity, primarily among my fellow Jews, my students, and my academic colleagues. The crater of October 7 has created a deeper appreciation of Israel’s centrality in Jewish life, along with a sharper understanding of the outbreak of Zionophobia in its aftermath. This renewed awareness encompasses not only Israel’s historical, cultural, and spiritual significance to Jewish identity, but also its role as the embodiment of Jewish “normalcy.” In these islands of moral clarity, the existence of Israel is now understood to be essential to ensuring that Jews everywhere are treated as equals — not as a unique, tolerated, respected, or admired minority, but as equals. In short, no Jew can be truly equal in the family of man before Israel stands equal in the family of nations.
I cannot end without evoking the victims. I see them, the children of Western civilization, sons and daughters of Isaac and Prometheus: my son, Danny, Ilan Halimi, the Bibas family, the one thousand two hundred murdered on October 7. I imagine them standing up, waiting for me, for us, to say something meaningful. All I can say is Yitgadal Ve’Yitkadash Shmai Rabah — the Jewish prayer of mourning recited in memory of the dead. A prayer that does not mention death or mourning, but glorifies God and expresses hope for a good life and universal peace. It is a humble confession of our inability to comprehend God’s cruel ways of playing with human lives and world order.
I sang this prayer at Danny’s funeral. I said to Danny: “I’ll sing it to you in the special melody that your great-grandfather chanted on Yom Kippur.” It’s a melody that rattles the gates of Heaven and pleads for mending our broken world order.
Yitgadal Ve’Yitkadash Shmai Rabah
Judea Pearl is Chancellor’s professor at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation.
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He documented a changing Jewish world, and the Jewish world changed him
“I have to tell you,” Bill Aron told me as he walked around The World In Front of Me, a retrospective of his photography at the American Jewish Historical Society. “My photography allowed me to walk into rooms I might never have otherwise walked into.”
We had just looked at some of his work documenting Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s and 80s: a sofer bent over a Torah scroll, a glowering rabbi with imposing eyebrows, a Hasidic wedding in the Bobover movement. Each photo begat the next; when he showed a reticent subject the results of his film, they would invite him back to take more.
Aron has become known for his work documenting Jewish communities around the world — his first book, From the Corners of the Earth, shows Jewish life in New York, Los Angeles, Cuba and the then-Soviet Union. His next, Shalom Y’all, was the result of a decade spent in the lesser-known Jewish communities of the American South.
His images are joyous and warm, portraits of resilience and invention, not dour investigations of poverty and antisemitism, offering respect to each subject he was able to meet through his work.
But his camera didn’t just change his access to the communities he documented. It changed Aron’s own experience of his Judaism.
A series of photographs shows scenes from the New York Havurah, a lay-led, egalitarian Jewish religious movement: A rabbi stands in reverent contemplation under his tallit in a misty forest, a child smiles from her father’s shoulders during a Shabbaton. Aron was a member in the 70’s, which is how he found himself in the middle of those scenes. But, he said, he didn’t grow up observant, and without his camera, while he might have been a member, he would have been “a much more passive one,” he said.
These photos are anything but passive. People smile or glower directly into the camera, and proudly present their life to the lens — a handful of shrimp from a Jewish man who built a business selling the shellfish to New Orleans restaurants, a woman showing off a bowl full of her famous chopped liver, a woman grinning as she carries a Torah on Simchat Torah. There is a clear symbiosis between Aron and his subjects, in which they each shaped and enlivened each other.
This, Aron said, was not the style of street photography at the time he came up. People were not supposed to document their own communities, nor were they supposed to engage with their subjects.
“It was frowned upon to study your own community — you were supposed to go out,” he said. “Street photography was supposed to be dispassionate.”
But of course people saw the camera and reacted to it, so he embraced that fact, spending hours talking to his subjects and learning their stories. Now that he has bequested his work to the AJHS, those stories are now preserved not only in images but also in a podcast accompanying the exhibit, in which Aron is able to preserve the memories behind each photograph.
The stories come through in the images alone, too; each shot is redolent of Aron’s affection for his subjects. An Israeli soldier in Jerusalem’s Old City makes flirtatious eye contact with a woman as his companions smirk. An elderly man on a bench dives in to kiss his wife on the cheek. Holocaust survivors beam out from full color photos, not reduced to the numbers on their arms but presented as “people who lived lives, lived beyond their nightmares, had families where they could, given back to their communities,” Aron said.
Not every image, on its surface, seems Jewish — there isn’t always a yarmulke or a lulav or a Torah scroll in frame. Nevertheless, Aron manages to find the sense of Jewishness that knits these images into the tapestry of Jewish life.
In a photo of a couple embracing at the liquor store they ran in Arkansas as part of the Shalom, Y’all series, Aron told me that only the husband was planning to be photographed, because his wife wasn’t Jewish. The photographer invited her anyway, and the couple ended up explaining that an Orthodox rabbi had performed their marriage ceremony. This seemed wrong to Aron — Orthodox rabbis don’t perform intermarriages — so they produced their marriage certificate to show him. As they pulled it out of the envelope, he recounted, another slip of paper fell out in which the rabbi had written that the wife had consented to become a member of the people of Israel and was now a Jew, a fact she was unaware of but delighted, Aron recalled, to discover.
“I loved interacting with people while I was photographing,” he said, “and the people became part of the portrait.” Aron did too.
The World in Front of Me is showing now through June 4 at the American Jewish Historical society. More information is available here.
The post He documented a changing Jewish world, and the Jewish world changed him appeared first on The Forward.
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Prosecutors charge Capital Jewish Museum shooter with terrorism
Federal prosecutors added two terrorism charges to the indictment against Elias Rodriguez, the Chicago man accused of killing two Israeli embassy employees outside a networking event held at the Capital Jewish Museum last May.
The new indictment, filed on Wednesday, claims that Rodriguez murdered Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, with the intent to both influence government policy through “intimidation” and that he sought to “coerce a significant portion of the civilian population” of the United States.
“These additional terrorism-related charges carry a mandatory life sentence under D.C. Code, while also reflecting the reality that this act was in fact an act of terror,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said in a statement.
Rodriguez, 31, who prosecutors say flew from Chicago to carry out the attack, allegedly shot Lischinsky and Milgrim repeatedly after they left a Jewish young professionals reception at the museum, hosted by the American Jewish Committee.
He then entered the museum and shouted, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
While prosecutors previously charged Rodriguez with national origin-based hate crimes, they have focused on the political dimension of the attack and the indictment quotes at length from social media posts and a manifesto that law enforcement sources attribute to Rodriguez.
“I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do,” the manifesto stated. “Free Palestine.”
Lischinsky, a German-born Israeli, worked as a research assistant at the Israeli embassy while Milgrim, who was American, worked in its department of public diplomacy.
It remains unclear whether Rodriguez, who has pleaded not guilty, intentionally targeted the young couple, who were planning to get engaged on an upcoming trip to Israel. Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter initially said that Rodriguez had identified Milgrim and Lischinsky as embassy employees while mingling with attendees at the event and then waited outside for them to leave.
But other accounts say Rodriguez never made it inside the event prior to the shooting, and the Israeli Embassy later said that Leiter was merely floating “a theory that law enforcement officials are investigating.”
Prosecutors said at a September hearing that they had more than 1.5 million pages of evidence against Rodriguez, while one of his defense attorneys described receiving “trillions of gigabytes” of data from the government.
The post Prosecutors charge Capital Jewish Museum shooter with terrorism appeared first on The Forward.