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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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Artist alters Whitney Museum display screens to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza
The Whitney Museum of American Art has over 27,000 pieces in its collection. On July 3, artist Jonathan Allen tried to add a couple more to call attention to what he considers “Israeli atrocities.”
Late that night, Allen vandalized two electronic displays outside the Whitney, a contemporary art museum in Manhattan, plastering them with posters accusing Israel of genocide and targeting Palestinian children.
Staff soon removed the posters after being notified of the vandalism, the museum said in an emailed statement.“I think it’s important artists take risks and use private property and unconventional spaces towards political and social ends,” Allen told the Forward.
Whitney Director of Communications Ashley Reese wrote, “The Museum maintains a zero-tolerance policy for vandalism, harassment, discrimination, or bias of any kind.”
This is not the first time a pro-Palestinian protest has targeted the Whitney. Last year, the museum planned to hold a performance mourning Palestinians killed during the Israel-Hamas war. When footage surfaced of a performer telling audience members to leave a previous performance if they “believe in Israeli in any incarnation,” the Whitney canceled the event.
Shortly afterward, the group Writers Against the War on Gaza held a protest at the Whitney, passing out brochures demanding “the removal of board members tied to genocide, militarism and apartheid.”
Allen’s installation is part of his Interruptions series, where he puts translucent poster-size vinyl stickers with political messages atop digital advertising screens to create a flickering effect.
Since 2019, Allen has installed over 400 interruptions, which began with traditional paper posters. When New York City and the MTA added more digital ad displays, he transformed the posters into their current iteration, most recently featuring quotes from public figures that criticize either Trump or Israel. Allen installs most of his interruptions on city-owned property, such as sidewalk ads or subway monitors — even the children’s entrance of the Brooklyn Public Library.
He acknowledges his project “is temporary vandalism, technically,” but explains that the pieces are very easily removable and don’t damage the displays underneath.
For his most recent interruption, Allen used monitors owned by the Whitney without authorization from the museum. Allen chose the Whitney because he believes it “is the contemporary corporate sphere of the art industry.”
“I feel like bringing attention to this sort of issue in that context was important,” he said.
A joint Instagram post by Allen and Eye on Palestine said the installation highlights the findings of a recent UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry report.
The Israeli government has heavily criticized the report, calling it “defamatory” and a “libellous sham,” and from its inception has accused the commission of bias. Israel did not provide any information to the commission for the investigation.
“The Israeli security forces have deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children,” one poster says. Another poster stated: “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”
Critics of the installation echo the Israeli government’s criticisms. Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and content creator, called the display “blood libel.” The StopAntisemitism campaign also criticized the display on X. “they don’t care about Palestinian children,” they wrote. “The goal is to vilify Jews.”
Allen believes this is a mischaracterization. “I fully support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and I support Israel, insofar as its right to exist,” he said. “I don’t think the discussion about what’s happening in Gaza hinges at all on that.”
Though Allen’s installations are typically removed “within hours,” he says each one “has a second life, because it lives on social media, which is where it tends to get the most attention.”
The post Artist alters Whitney Museum display screens to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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European leaders downplayed the Holocaust. Now Trump is using their tactics against the Smithsonian
A new White House report accusing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism,” and demanding the museum revise its exhibitions to elide the darker elements of the nation’s past, mirrors a troubling trend in Europe, where right-wing nationalist governments have spent the past decade forcing museums to minimize their countries’ roles in the Holocaust.
The 162-page report, issued this past weekend, faults the Smithsonian museum for dwelling, in the administration’s eyes, too heavily on slavery, and for teaching about race and gender in ways that President Donald Trump’s administration considers to “divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” It follows a 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that directed federal institutions to purge “improper ideology” from their exhibits.
Reasonable people can disagree about specific details in museum exhibitions. But there is a difference between engaging in productive disagreements about historical emphases and demanding a national museum be solely devoted to make citizens feel good about their country. And the way that the latter approach has been used to downplay crimes against Jews in Europe should give American Jews, in particular, pause about it being deployed in their own country.
Propaganda in Poland
In 2017, Poland opened a permanent exhibit at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, which delivered a multi-layered account of the war. The exhibit highlighted Polish suffering under Nazi occupation as well as the Holocaust and the pogroms Poles carried out against their own Jewish neighbors, including the infamous 1941 Jedwabne massacre, in which several hundred Jews were burned alive in a barn by their fellow townspeople.
The right-wing Law and Justice party, known as PiS, called the exhibit “not Polish enough,” forced a merger that replaced the museum’s director, and altered the exhibition to foreground Polish heroism while softening material on Polish complicity in the extermination of three million Polish Jews. Five hundred eminent historians labeled those changes an attempt to turn the museum into a “propaganda institution.”
The following year, the Polish parliament went further, criminalizing any claim that Poland bore responsibility for Nazi crimes, with penalties of up to three years in prison. Yad Vashem warned that the law “jeopardizes the free and open discussion of the part of the Polish people in the persecution of the Jews at the time.” Under international pressure, Poland later dropped the criminal penalty, but the campaign to legislate a flattering national story had made its point.
Hungarian ahistoricism
The nation of Hungary offers an even starker case.
Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government spent years developing the House of Fates, a Holocaust museum on the site of the Budapest rail station from which 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in a matter of weeks in 1944. Yad Vashem and Hungary’s largest Jewish federation, Mazsihisz, boycotted the project, warning that its planned narrative would leave visitors believing “the citizens of Hungary were essentially blameless for what was inflicted upon their Jewish neighbors.” In fact, Hungarian gendarmes rounded up and deported their Jewish neighbors with minimal direct German involvement.
Orbán separately made efforts to rehabilitate Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s Nazi-allied wartime ruler, as an “exceptional statesman,” and backed a Budapest statue honoring Holocaust victims that was widely seen as covering up Hungary’s role in the deportations by depicting the country as an angel attacked by a Nazi eagle. The implication: all Hungarians were equal victims of the Nazi occupation, an idea that conveniently overlooks the fact that the Nazis had many Hungarian collaborators.
The museum sat empty for years amid the dispute. Jewish leaders in Hungary have only recently reported progress toward a version that names Hungarian, and not just German, responsibility for atrocities against Jews.
The dangers of whitewashing
The recent histories of Poland and Hungary demonstrate that when a government decides that its national story shouldn’t include honest examinations of what its people did to vulnerable minorities, the nation’s integrity as a whole is imperiled.
This is the same demand the Trump administration has issued to the Smithsonian. The White House report does not claim that the museum has facts wrong; rather, it objects that the museum treats history as a tool for “social justice.” The administration demands, instead, “patriotic history” — exactly the same ultimatum issued by governments in Warsaw and Budapest.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III says his institution’s goal is scholarship, not partisanship. The administration’s answer is that scholarship itself is the problem, if the story it tells is not celebratory enough.
The kind of “patriotic history” the administration wants entails, instead, a thinner historical accounting, built to avoid making visitors uncomfortable with the actions of their ancestors. A country pressured to foreground its heroism while pushing its failures to the margins is one that shows its own people that, effectively, minorities do not belong.
When Poland won’t discuss Jedwabne, or Hungary won’t acknowledge its own role in the deportation of Hungarian Jews, they send the message that they don’t see Jewish citizens as fully human — in either the past or the present. A U.S. that treats discussing the facts of slavery — or the immigration quotas that helped trap Jews in Europe — as a betrayal of national values is one that suggests the people it wronged, and their descendants, don’t matter.
A serious national museum has to depict a nation’s failures and achievements in the same frame. What the White House is proposing for the Smithsonian is very different, and very dangerous. Jews have watched this play out before and seen where it leads. A nation’s museums are essential to its capacity to reckon with the worst of its history. This is a capacity worth defending in Gdańsk, in Budapest, and now in Washington.
The post European leaders downplayed the Holocaust. Now Trump is using their tactics against the Smithsonian appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani more popular than Netanyahu among U.S. Jews, new poll shows
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose outspoken criticism of Israel has made him a frequent target of Jewish and pro-Israel advocates, is viewed more favorably by American Jews than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of 1,022 Jewish adults nationwide, conducted from June 11 through June 17, found that 44% of American Jews hold a favorable opinion of Zohran Mamdani, compared with 39% who view him unfavorably. By contrast, just 32% of respondents said they have a favorable opinion of Netanyahu, while 59% said they have a negative view of the longtime Israeli leader
The poll suggests that Mamdani’s positions on Israel have not prevented him from maintaining a net-positive image among American Jews overall.
Mamdani won just 26% of the Jewish vote in last year’s mayoral election. Since taking office, he has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country. He has also pledged to order the arrest of Netanyahu if he visits the city on his watch, complying with an ICC arrest warrant. That will be tested in September when Netanyahu arrives to speak at the United Nations General Assembly.
Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade, where participation is a longstanding tradition for New York City leaders, and he also called for divestment from Israel’s economy. In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani actively campaigned for candidates who made inflammatory statements on Israel.
Netanyahu, who has been in office since 2009 except for an 18-month hiatus from 2021 to 2022, has seen his standing with Americans erode in recent years despite longstanding ties to the United States. He spent part of his childhood in the Philadelphia area, attended college in Boston and served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s. Netanyahu has often spoken directly to American audiences, giving frequent interviews to U.S. television networks more often than he has spoken to Israeli media.
The AP survey, which had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, also found that American Jews are increasingly critical of the Israeli government’s conduct in the Gaza war and its handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While a majority of American Jews — 73% — said Israel’s initial military response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack was justified, just 42% said they supported the continued military operations in Gaza through last year’s ceasefire. The survey also found that, similar to the broader American public, 30% of American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
The post Mamdani more popular than Netanyahu among U.S. Jews, new poll shows appeared first on The Forward.
