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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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Peter Beinart’s ‘Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza’ wins PEN America award
(JTA) — Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart has won the 2026 PEN America Literary Award for nonfiction for his latest book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.”
Beinart, who has long been an outspoken critic of Israel, is the editor-at-large of the leftist Jewish Currents magazine and a professor at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. His book offers a harsh critique of the American Jewish community’s relationship with Israel and response to the war in Gaza.
“This book is about the stories Jews tell ourselves that blind us to Palestinian suffering,” Beinart wrote in a Substack post announcing the book’s release in September 2024. “It’s about how we came to value a state, Israel, above the lives of all the people who live under its control. And it’s about why I believe that Palestinian liberation means Jewish liberation as well.”
In a statement, the judges of the PEN America award said the book “offers a model for writing a new story when inherited narratives no longer hold.”
The award offered the latest evidence of a shift for PEN America when it comes to Israel, which has polarized the literary and cultural world in recent years.
Founded in 1922, PEN America is a writers’ and free-expression advocacy group that defends the rights of authors and opposes censorship. The group has long opposed cultural boycotts of Israel, including in a December 2023 letter calling on art institutions “not to police speech nor deprive audiences of artists’ work,” earning it increasing ire from progressives. The group’s CEO left amid tensions in 2024, and last year it published a report accusing Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza.
The group named two new leaders in February, who ran into nearly immediate challenges when the group took fire for defending an Israeli comedian, Guy Hochman, who had performances canceled in Canada. The group took the unusual step of rescinding its defense of Hochman.
Now, the award to Beinart offers a signal that the group is supportive of his brand of Israel criticism. Recipients of the PEN/Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, which includes a $10,000 prize, must have published a book in the last calendar year that possesses “notable literary merit and critical perspective that illuminates important contemporary issues,” according to the PEN America website.
Beinart has also faced some of the free-speech challenges that are PEN America’s raison d’etre. Last year, appearances to promote his book in Israel drew calls for cancellation from both voices on the right, who believe his positions cross at times into antisemitism, and from left-wing allies who said he should commit to boycotting Israel. Beinart apologized to his left-wing critics for speaking in Tel Aviv.
Beinart’s award is the latest example of a book sharply critical of the West’s response to the war in Gaza gaining major literary recognition, following a similar nonfiction winner at the National Book Awards in November.
The announcement of Beinart’s selection for the prestigious award comes as the war in Gaza has reverberated across the literary world, sparking protests against some pro-Israel writers and debate among Jewish writers and institutions over the best way to respond.
Earlier this month, dozens of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish authors lit into the Jewish Book Council for having a “bias toward centering Israeli and Zionist voices.”
In recent years, the award has been given to “In The Shadow of Liberty” by Ana Raquel Minian, which documents the history of immigrant detention in the United States, and “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning,” by Eve Fairbanks.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Trump, in absentia, becomes first non-Israeli to receive Israel’s top civilian honor
(JTA) — Donald Trump officially became the first non-Israeli to receive the Israel’s top civilian prize on Wednesday — but he wasn’t on hand to receive his honor.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Trump would get the Israel Prize after meeting with him at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, in December.
“We decided to break a convention, or create a new one, and that is to award the Israel Prize, which in almost our 80 years we’ve never awarded to a non-Israeli, and we’re going to award it this year to President Trump,” Netanyahu said at the time. He added, “It’s going to be awarded to President Donald J. Trump for his tremendous contributions to Israel and the Jewish people.”
Israel’s education minister, who oversees the prize, extended the invitation officially in early February. But even though Trump indicated at one point that he could attend the award ceremony, held annually on Independence Day, he was absent on Wednesday when it took place.
Trump has delighted in his support from Israelis, many of whom have viewed him as unusually willing to go to bat for Israeli interests. A video played at the ceremony in Jerusalem showed him meeting with Netanyahu, speaking to the Israeli parliament last year and announcing the historic normalization deals with Arab countries negotiated during his first administration.
But conditions changed sharply since Netanyahu announced the prize. In February, Trump joined Netanyahu in launching a war on Iran that has been unpopular in the United States. Reports that Netanyahu persuaded him to enter the war, which Trump has ceased despite not achieving the varied goals he offered, have deepened anti-Israel sentiment among Americans, including Trump’s base.
Trump reportedly planned at one point to accept the prize with a videotaped address, but he did not offer one during the ceremony.
The award for Trump came amid Independence Day festivities that featured an unusual honor for a different non-Israeli head of state. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, who has been a vocal defender of Israel, became the first foreign leader to light a torch as part of the celebrations.
The only other non-Israeli citizen to be honored with an Israel Prize did not receive the standard one, but instead got a designation for non-citizens. In 1992, Zubin Mehta, the non-Jewish longtime music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, won a special prize for his contributions to the state. This year, Mehta announced that he was canceling his upcoming appearances in Israel, citing “of my objection to Mr. Netanyahu’s way of treating the whole Palestinian issue.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Maestro Michael Tilson Thomas, celebrated conductor and Yiddish Theater royalty, dies at 81
Michael Tilson Thomas, composer, conductor and longtime music director of the San Francisco Symphony, died Wednesday April 22. The cause was brain cancer. He was 81.
Thomas, the recipient of 12 Grammy Awards, a Peabody and Kennedy Center Honor, was born Dec. 24, 1944, the son of Ted Thomas, a stage manager and producer for Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre and Roberta Thomas (née Meritzer), a middle school history teacher and a founding staff writer for Newsweek. On his father’s side, his grandparents were the legendary Yiddish Theater actors Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky.
“They were like Taylor and Burton, basically, of Yiddish theater,” Tilson recalled in a 2025 interview on CBS Sunday Morning. Their sex appeal, he told Lesley Stahl, sometimes got the pair in trouble.
Thomas was a musical prodigy, working with Igor Stravinsky and Jascha Heifitz as a young pianist. In his telling, no one wanted him to pursue the arts as a career.
“Nobody, absolutely nobody, wanted me to go into show business or into anything remotely connected with performing arts,” Thomas said. “They didn’t want me to be exposed to such vagaries of the uncertainty of being a show biz person.”
But Thomas made his mark in the world of classical music as a conductor, pianist and composer. In 1969, before he graduated from the University of Southern California where he studied piano, composition and conducting, he won the Koussevitzky Prize for outstanding student conducting at Tanglewood. Soon after, he became a pianist and assistant conductor for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Much like Leonard Bernstein, to whom he was often compared, Thomas’ reputation grew when, at 24, he stepped in to replace a more established maestro, taking the baton mid-performance from the Symphony’s music director William Steinberg in a 1969 performance in New York. (Steinberg took ill after conducting Brahms’ Second Symphony.) In 1971, not yet 30, he became music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic.
Thomas’ theater pedigree was in evidence in his conducting philosophy. He told The New York Times in 2014 that he tended “ to think of an orchestra more like a repertory theater company.”
Thomas was known for pushing boundaries within a sometimes stuffy orchestral world. He was openly gay when virtually no one else in classical music was. He strived to make the music accessible for everyone as a co-founder of the New World Symphony in Miami and, in the internet age, through his work with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, whose members auditioned via video. Leading the San Francisco Symphony from 1995 to 2020, he highlighted the work of American composers through the American Mavericks Festival concert series.
Accomplished as an educator and conductor, Thomas was a prolific composer, often on Jewish themes. He wrote the 1990 cantata From the Diary of Anne Frank (he won a 2021 Grammy for a recording of the work) and 1995’s Shówa/Shoáh, which lamented both the tragedy of the Hiroshima bombing and the Holocaust.
In 2005, Thomas paid tribute to his theatrical forebears in Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater, which debuted at Carnegie Hall, and later aired on PBS. He was a regular on public access television, hosting the series Keeping Score, which explored the work of composers and geared toward school-age audiences.
Thomas, who was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021, gave his final performance on April 26, 2025 at the San Francisco Symphony in honor of his 80th birthday. He was aware the performance would be his last, describing it as a “generous and rich” coda.
“At that point, we all get to say the old show business expression,” Thomas wrote on his website. “‘It’s a wrap.’”
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