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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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‘Path to Normalization’: Lebanese President Turns on Hezbollah, Calls for Israel Talks
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun looks on during a meeting with Cyprus’ President Nikos Christodoulides at the Presidential Palace in Nicosia, Cyprus, July 9, 2025. Photo: Petros Karadjias/Pool via REUTERS
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun on Monday accused Hezbollah of dragging Lebanon toward becoming a “second Gaza” with its rocket attacks on Israel and called for negotiating a full ceasefire with Jerusalem, saying the launches served “the Iranian regime’s calculations” and risked “collapsing” the country.
Aoun’s remarks, among the most direct criticism of Iran-backed Hezbollah by a Lebanese president in years, accused the Islamist terror group of launching rockets as an “obvious trap” to lure his country back into a conflict with Israel.
“Whoever launched those rockets wanted to secure the fall of the Lebanese state, under aggression and chaos, even at the price of destroying dozens of our villages and the fall of tens of thousands of our people. For the sake of the Iranian regime’s calculations,” Aoun told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa in an online meeting.
Earlier this month, he added, the Lebanese government made “a clear and irrevocable decision” barring any military or security activity by Hezbollah.
An Israeli coalition of former diplomats, security experts, and business leaders called Aoun’s remarks a “courageous” and potentially “historic” opening by a Lebanese government seeking to disarm Hezbollah.
“Israel must seize the moment to create the necessary conditions for shaping a negotiated reality along the northern border — one that would constitute a significant strategic victory against Iran and further isolate it,” the Coalition for Regional Security said in a statement.
The group praised the “anti-Iranian Lebanese government” for seeking to disarm Hezbollah, but warned that “it is unable to accomplish this task alone.”
According to Lianne Pollak-David, the coalition’s founder, the current US-Israeli strikes on Iran were creating more space for Beirut to confront Hezbollah openly.
“The more Iran is weakened and isolated, the more the Lebanese government feels confident going directly and publicly against Hezbollah,” she told The Algemeiner.
But Pollak-David argued the Lebanese government could not disarm Hezbollah on its own and would need help from outside powers, including Israel. That, she said, would force Israel to walk a “very tricky fine line” to break Hezbollah on the one hand, without leaving Beirut to absorb the blowback by itself.
She called for “collaborating with the Lebanese government, leveraging all the regional coalition that has been formed around this war, and, under [US President Donald] Trump’s leadership, pushing for a new reality in Lebanon.”
Iran’s military and political incapacitation could even open the way to more regional peace agreements, she said.
“Everything is connected,” Pollak-David said. “The more Iran is isolated and the more its proxies are weakened, the more we’re seeing all the moderate forces in the region coordinating and collaborating,” increasing the chances of “Israel-Lebanese normalization and Israel-Arab normalization altogether.”
But Hezbollah expert Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi offered a far more skeptical view, questioning whether Aoun’s remarks signaled any real change on the ground.
“I don’t see the difference between Aoun’s remarks now and his remarks when he was elected, except for the willingness to have direct negotiations with Israel,” she told The Algemeiner.
When Aoun took office in January of last year, he said Lebanon must eventually ensure weapons are held only by the state, but he also said repeatedly that this had to happen through dialogue, not confrontation.
“The biggest question at stake, which I don’t get an answer to, is whether Aoun’s army is willing to clash with Hezbollah, because that is what it will take to disarm it,” Zehavi said, noting Aoun’s fear that such a clash could lead to civil war.
She pointed to reports from Monday that Hezbollah operatives arrested while transporting weapons south were released almost immediately on token bail of $20, which she said showed how little appetite Beirut had demonstrated for a real confrontation with the terrorist group.
Zehavi, who founded the Alma Center — a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — said Aoun would need to do far more than denounce Hezbollah or talk about state authority over weapons before Israel could treat his government as a real partner. The first step, she said, was for his government to formally outlaw Hezbollah and take concrete action against it.
“I will be much more convinced in Aoun’s good intentions if he designates Hezbollah as a terrorist entity,” she said. “Meanwhile, I don’t think we should negotiate with this Lebanese government.”
Until then, she said, Israel should keep up its attacks on Hezbollah, particularly south of the Litani River, located roughly 15 miles from the Israeli border.
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College Republicans Appoints Anti-Israel, Nick Fuentes Associate to Political Director Role
Kai Schwemmer speaks at pro-life rally. Photo: Screenshot
The largest Republican youth organization in the United States has named as its new political director a far-right social media personality and streamer with strong anti-Israel views and ties to antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes.
The move has fueled ongoing concerns that young Republicans are increasingly embracing antisemitic conspiracy theories and turning against Israel, the closest US ally in the Middle East.
College Republicans of America on Thursday announced that it tapped Kai Schwemmer to serve as the group’s next political director. The announcement was met with immediate backlash by many observers who have previously accused Schwemmer of advancing antisemitic and anti-Israel narratives.
We are proud to welcome @KaiSchwemmer as our new Political Director of CRA! pic.twitter.com/vvDJZgxm9e
— College Republicans of America (@uscollegegop) March 5, 2026
Despite the controversy, College Republicans of America President Martin Bertao defended the decision to hire the firebrand on X.
“Over the last day I have done a lot of reflecting on my decision to appoint Kai as CRA’s political director. And in that reflection I have came to the decision that I would like to apologize … to absolutely NOBODY, CRA will never back down to the WOKE mob!” he posted.
In the two and a half years following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, Schwemmer has established a reputation online as a staunch critic of the US relationship with the Jewish state. Schwemmer has appeared in and hosted various online debates over the US-Israel alliance.
In January, Schwemmer appeared in a debate hosted by popular right-wing commentator Michael Knowles, in which he argued that the so-called Zionist wing of the Republican Party (GOP) is not “concerned with what’s best for America.” He argued that the pro-Israel coalition within the GOP advances policies which strangle free speech to suppress dissent around Israel.
During another January debate against pro-Israel commentator Cam Higby, Schwemmer cast more doubt over the US relationship with Israel, claiming that “Jewish” and “Zionist” defense contractors benefit from striking lucrative arms deals with the Jewish state.
“And so you see a kind of collection of, you know, the contracts going back to Zionists in America who no matter what are going to be supportive of, whether it’s just militarily or monetarily, they’re going to support US involvement and US support for Israel, and so I think there’s a problem in in you know coalescing all of that funding into the same interests,” Schwemmer said.
“Are you telling me that the Jewish CEOs of Boeing, Raytheon, and other defense contractors are not looking out for Israeli interests? And do you think that’s not a part of their calculus?” Schwemmer asked during the debate.
He has also provoked criticism over his connections with Fuentes, an avowed antisemite and Holocaust denier. Schwemmer has complimented Fuentes multiple times, claiming that he agrees with his views and calling the white supremacist and 27-year-old self-described virgin as “cool.”
This is Kai Schwemmer, the new political director for the College Republicans of America, with Nick Fuentes.
The Republican Party should be put on notice that real conservatives will not tolerate groypers from taking over our party. pic.twitter.com/CjbrvVZCfZ
— Justin (@JustinUSA) March 9, 2026
Schwemmer has been spotted wearing a blue baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan “America First.” The cap and slogan were created by members of Fuentes’ fanbase to signal support for the antisemitic “Groyper” movement. In 2022, Schwemmer appeared as a featured speaker at Fuentes’s white nationalist “America First PAC.”
His presence at a Turning Point USA debate regarding Israel, hosted at the University of Delaware, drew protests over his connection to Fuentes.
“Schwemmer is a disciple of Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist who was a key leader of both the deadly ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville and the January 6 insurrection,” a flyer passed out at the event read.
In June 2025, Schwemmer criticized Israel’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear program and suggested that conservatives should sympathize with Tehran.
“There’s something extremely unsettling about all the conservative influencers saying things like ‘God Bless Israel today and in the coming days’ after seeing Israel’s preemptive strike on Iran. What should God be blessing them for? Starting a war?” he posted on X.
College Republicans, one of the oldest youth organizations affiliated with the Republican Party, plays an important role in the GOP ecosystem, serving primarily as a pipeline for future political staffers and campaign volunteers rather than a driver of party policy. The group helps recruit and mobilize young conservatives on college campuses and often supplies doorknockers and organizers to Republican campaigns coordinated with the Republican National Committee. Several prominent Republican figures, including former House Speaker Paul Ryan and longtime strategist Karl Rove, got their start in the organization, underscoring its role as a training ground for the party’s next generation of operatives.
Schwemmer’s ascendance comes as the GOP continues to reckon with a perceived rise in antisemitism among its youngest cohorts.
Last month, for example, a survey by Irwin Mansdorf, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, and Charles Jacobs, president of the Jewish Leadership Project, found that 45 percent of Republicans under the age of 44 said Jews pose a threat to the “American way of life.”
In December, the Manhattan Institute, a prominent US-based think tank, released a major poll showing that younger Republican voters are much less supportive of Israel and more likely to express antisemitic views than their older cohorts.
According to the data, 25 percent of Republicans under 50 openly express antisemitic views as opposed to just 4 percent over the age of 50.
Startlingly, a substantial amount, 37 percent, of GOP voters indicate belief in Holocaust denialism. These figures are more pronounced among young men under 50, with a majority, 54 percent, agreeing that the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” Among men over 50, 41 percent agree with the sentiment.
Last week, the Miami Dade County Republican Party came under fire after leaked group chats revealed extensive racism and antisemitism throughout membership. The local GOP, Turning Point USA, and College Republicans casually said “ni—er,” denounced women as “whores,” and spoke rapturously about Adolf Hitler.
Ian Valdes, the president of Florida International University’s chapter of Turning Point USA, wrote, “I would def not marry a Jew lmao.” Other participants referred to Jews as “k—kes.”
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Antisemitism in Switzerland Hits Alarming Levels as Online Incidents Surge, Reports Warn
A pro-Hamas demonstration in Zurich, Switzerland, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: IMAGO/dieBildmanufaktur via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in Switzerland surged to alarming levels last year, with two reports released on Tuesday warning that hostility and violence targeting Jews are intensifying across the country amid the broader fallout from war involving Israel in the Middle East.
On Tuesday, the Intercommunity Coordination Against Antisemitism and Defamation (CICAD) released its 2025 annual report on hate crimes, documenting a 36 percent rise in antisemitic incidents against the local Jewish community in French-speaking Switzerland compared to 2024.
With a total of 2,438 antisemitic acts last year, CICAD’s latest report marks the highest level of such incidents since the organization began monitoring them in 2003.
Based on the latest data, the association warned of a worsening trend, with incidents classified as “grave and serious” rising 16 percent — from 109 cases in 2024 to 127 in 2025.
This week, the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG), in collaboration with the Foundation Against Racism and Antisemitism (GRA), also released their annual report on antisemitic outrages in German-, Italian-, and Romansh-speaking Switzerland for the past year.
Their latest data also shows that antisemitism “remains at a persistently high level” across the country, with tensions further fueled by the ongoing war in the Middle East.
“Since Oct. 7, 2023, the war in the Middle East has been the main long-term trigger for antisemitic incidents in Switzerland,” the organizations wrote in their report, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel more than two years ago.
“This influence remained significant in 2025. No return to pre-Oct. 7 levels has been observed to date,” they continued.
SIG and GRA’s latest report found the biggest surge of antisemitic activity in online spaces, with 2,185 incidents recorded in 2025 — an increase of nearly 37 percent from 1,596 the previous year.
Most incidents took place on the Telegram messaging app, with online newspaper comments coming in second, and the bulk of the reported content centered on conspiracy theories.
With such figures, the report warned that antisemitism is no longer an isolated occurrence but a structural issue, cautioning against the normalization of antisemitic rhetoric.
Even though the study found that real-world antisemitic incidents fell to 177 in 2025 from 221 in 2024 — a decrease of roughly 20 percent — the number remains about three times higher than levels recorded before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
The GRA and SIG urged local authorities to ensure the sustainable protection of Jewish life in Switzerland, calling for long-term security measures, increased investment in prevention and education, and a stronger commitment to monitoring antisemitic threats.
“Effectively combating antisemitism is not a one-off task, but an ongoing responsibility of the state and society,” the report said.