Uncategorized
How a Don McLean Concert Gave Me Insight Into the Torah
The American singer-songwriter Don McLean at the Oxford Union, May 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Last Saturday night, I went to a Don McLean concert at the Saban Theater. Yes, that Don McLean, icon of popular culture, poster child of whimsical 1970s music. As the lights dimmed and a palpable buzz of excitement murmured through the crowd, I felt the nostalgic anticipation bubble within me, knowing exactly why I was there.
You don’t attend a Don McLean concert to hear something new, and you certainly don’t go for a sound-and-light show. You go to pay tribute to a musical hero, to show up for someone who occupies a real, almost mythic place in the popular culture of your youth.
Don McLean isn’t merely another aging performer touring on old hits. He’s a cultural marker. His No. 1 hit, “American Pie,” isn’t simply a song — it’s a time capsule. Eight and a half minutes meditating on the loss of American innocence: the death of Buddy Holly, the shattering of postwar optimism, the uneasy coming-of-age of an entire generation.
People have been arguing about its meaning for decades — precisely because it meant something. Deeply.
Then there’s “Vincent” — better known as “Starry, Starry Night” — a song about Vincent van Gogh so restrained and tender it somehow made a 19th-century painter’s inner torment feel intimate to late-20th-century listeners.
Very few songwriters have managed to do this without tipping into cloying, overcooked sentimentality. McLean did it effortlessly — no theatrics, no emotional manipulation — and it worked. To this day, “Starry, Starry Night” is played regularly at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, quietly soundtracking the experience of standing before the real thing.
Don McLean, born and bred in the bedroom town of New Rochelle, NY — hardly a breeding ground for folk-music greatness — has somehow come to embody the American folk tradition. Mentored and befriended by legends like Josh White, he absorbed the moral seriousness that defines folk music: the sense that songs can carry memory, protest, grief, and conscience all at once.
And he did it without tipping into angry remonstration or cloying sentimentality. Mclean was never flashy, and certainly never cool in the trendy sense. But he mattered. And for many people, he still does.
There is also something meaningful about the fact that McLean has long been openly supportive of Israel, without apology and without hedging — a position that has become increasingly rare in the showbiz world.
At one point, his significant other was Israeli, a connection that deepened his ties to the country. He has written a song about Jerusalem and another — “Dreidel” — built around the familiar Hanukkah game, and he has never been coy or evasive about where he stands.
Unashamedly pro-Israel and a genuine friend of the Jewish community, McLean belongs to that rare group of artists — including, sadly, only some Jewish ones — who don’t feel the need to hide in the herd, and are openly positive about the miracle of Israel.
So, when I walked into the packed theater — a full house, brimming with goodwill toward an 80-year-old legend of American pop music — I wasn’t just going to a concert. I was acknowledging a nostalgic moment in my own life. A time when songs didn’t merely play in the background but actively framed how I understood the world. Which is precisely why the letdown was such a disappointment.
McLean is long past his sell-by date. His energy was low. The singing was often flat and unenthusiastic. Long stretches felt labored and passionless, as though he was simply going through the motions. Even the comb-over hairstyle — epic in its own stubborn way — felt like an unintentional symbol: a refusal to surrender to time, even when time has clearly won.
And then came “American Pie” — the showpiece, the emotional climax, the song everyone had been waiting for — and it simply didn’t land. You could feel the audience willing it to work, wanting to be generous, desperate to preserve the magic. But there was no magic.
We clapped respectfully. We reminded ourselves that legends age, and that memory is often kinder than reality. And we were forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: maybe some things are better left in the mind’s eye as pristine nostalgia.
Maybe seeing a hero of your youth in a diminished state doesn’t deepen the experience — it diminishes it. Walking out of the theater, that was the thought that lingered most.
And that’s when it hit me: our Jewish sourcebook, the Torah, does something very similar to us — almost intervention-style — in Parshat Mishpatim. This is the portion that comes immediately after the revelation at Sinai, the greatest spiritual moment in Jewish history: thunder and lightning, followed by God speaking directly to His newly born nation.
We’re swept into a moment that is dazzling and overwhelming, the kind of experience every believing Jew would love to freeze in time and relive.
But we barely have time to savor it before the Torah pivots sharply. There’s no lingering on the drama, and no attempt to recreate the high. Instead, we’re dropped straight into the mundane reality of law: damages and injuries, loans and workers’ rights, lost property and personal responsibility.
Mishpatim is dry. It’s technical. And, on the surface at least, it’s deeply uninspiring. The juxtaposition feels like a comedown — a real downer.
But that whiplash is entirely deliberate. Inspiration is always a flash. Even the greatest moments in time are just that: moments. Sinai, like a great song or the vigor of youth, cannot be sustained indefinitely. You can’t live forever in a suspended state of awe, and you certainly can’t build a day-to-day life on peak experiences.
Reality is the true engine of our lives. And reality includes fatigue, complexity, disappointment, human weakness, and long stretches that feel decidedly unremarkable. But it is in these moments that there’s a chance for everyday holiness. The Torah, unlike nostalgia, refuses to pretend otherwise.
Mishpatim is the reminder that the spectacular visions that may once have animated our faith are incapable of sustaining us once those moments have passed.
The Torah is teaching us a crucial life lesson: you were inspired — now let’s see what you do with it. Not when God’s voice is thundering from the mountain, but when you’re arguing over financial liability and damages. Not when everything feels elevated and transcendent, but when life is stubbornly ordinary.
Inspirational experiences define moments. But moments age badly if that’s all they are. Which is why Judaism doesn’t try to recreate the emotional experience of Sinai.
There is no commandment to feel revelation. Instead, the Torah translates revelation into structure — into obligations that don’t depend on energy, charisma, or being at your peak. What ultimately matters is how we conduct our lives once inspiration has faded.
God doesn’t want Sinai to be remembered as an unattainable peak, a moment so overwhelming that everything afterward feels like decline. It was never meant to become the yardstick by which all future religious experience is judged, or the excuse for disengagement from the present.
Sinai only has meaning if it translates into better people, expressed through our loyalty to the laws of the Torah that were given there.
So maybe it was good to go to that concert after all. Not because it preserved the magic — it didn’t — but because it clarified something deeper. I don’t need Don McLean to be great now for his impact on my life to remain meaningful now.
The music fades, the voice weakens, the moment passes. What remains is whether what once inspired me is strong enough to shape how my life is lived once the applause has died away.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
Uncategorized
Congress removes deadline for Holocaust-looted art claims, setting stage for more restitution battles
(JTA) — A new U.S. law removing a deadline for laying claim to art looted during the Holocaust has gone into effect after President Donald Trump signed it on Monday.
The 2025 Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act, or HEAR Act, expands on a 2016 law, signed by President Barack Obama, that permits victims and descendants of victims of the Holocaust to lay legal claim to works of art looted by the Nazis or sold to the Nazis under false pretenses.
That law included a controversial “sunset clause” that required all claims of artwork looted by the Nazis to be filed by the end of this year. That clause has been removed, and the revised act permits families to file a lawsuit within six years of the discovery of looted artwork.
The law also further protects those seeking to retrieve their family’s looted property by preventing the current holders from using certain legal tactics unrelated to the subject matter — such as requesting to switch courts — during proceedings.
“For years, the sunset clause cast a shadow over every survivor and family whose stolen art is still missing,” Joel Greenberg, president of Art Ashes, a nonprofit that helps families recover their looted art, said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Now they can seek due process without the pressure of time and deadlines.”
Hundreds of thousands of pieces of fine art were looted from their Jewish owners by the Nazis, often by forced sales in the early years of the Nazi regime. Efforts to reunite the works with their owners or their descendants have been guided by an array of laws governed by an international compact including nearly two dozen countries. Restitution claims frequently ignite extensive legal battles.
The family of the cabaret artist Fritz Grünbaum, who was murdered in the Holocaust, for example, was able to recover works by Viennese Expressionist artist Egon Schiele that were in Grünbaum’s vast personal collection in 2018 after decades of efforts. The family has since continued to file legal action to reclaim Grünbaum’s works under the HEAR Act.
Watchdogs say the sunset clause may have caused those owning looted works to obscure them from public view.
“It was extremely important that Congress eliminated the sunset clause because it incentivized museums and others holding looted art to keep those works under wraps until the sunset period ended,” Greenberg said. “Now, that change and the other provisions ensure claims will be heard and decided on the merits and means that the commitment Congress made to survivors ten years ago when they first passed the HEAR Act is finally being honored.”
Both the original law and the new revision received bipartisan support. But the Republican Jewish Coalition credited Trump with its enactment, saying in a statement, “President Trump has consistently proven to be the best friend of the Jewish people ever to occupy the Oval Office, and his signature today ratifies the truth: the passage of time can never diminish the injustice of crimes committed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust.”
The revision goes into effect just days after one of the most significant recent rulings in the restitution space. Last week, a judge ruled after a decade-long legal battle that a painting by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, once valued at around $25 million, must be returned to the descendants of its original owner, who was forced to sell the painting to the Nazis. The painting had been in the possession of a prominent New York-based real estate and art dealer family since 1996.
The post Congress removes deadline for Holocaust-looted art claims, setting stage for more restitution battles appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Holocaust Remembrance Day Marked in Poland, Germany Amid Nazi Displays, Rising Antisemitism
Participants with Israeli flags look at the landmark Birkenau extermination camp gate in Auschwitz Museum – former Nazi German Concentration Camp during the International March of the Living (MOTL) in Oswiencim, Poland on April 14, 2026. Photo by Dominika Zarzycka/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Eighty-one years after the Holocaust, antisemitism remains rampant in the heart of the former Third Reich, with incidents in both Poland and Germany underscoring a disturbing resurgence of Nazi-linked provocation and hatred across Europe — even as Jews and Israelis around the world marked Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday.
Polish far-right lawmaker Konrad Berkowicz sparked outrage in Warsaw after displaying a modified Israeli flag during a parliamentary debate, replacing the Star of David with a Nazi swastika.
Berkowicz’s act was widely condemned as a deeply troubling distortion of Holocaust memory and a provocative example of “Holocaust inversion,” weaponizing Nazi imagery to target Israel in a manner that promotes hateful rhetoric.
The European Jewish Congress (EJC) strongly condemned the incident, calling on government officials to take swift and decisive action to address the matter, deter similar acts, and uphold public accountability.
“This act constitutes a clear example of Holocaust inversion, distorting the memory of the Shoah, and trivializing its victims,” EJC wrote in a post on X, using the Hebrew word for referring to the Holocaust.
“The use of Nazi symbols in this context is not only offensive, but represents a serious form of antisemitic provocation, particularly on a day dedicated to remembrance,” the statement read. “Preserving the integrity of Holocaust remembrance and ensuring that antisemitism is not tolerated in public institutions is essential.”
Polish MP Konrad Berkowicz displayed an Israeli flag bearing a swastika during a parliamentary debate in Warsaw on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
This act constitutes a clear example of Holocaust inversion, distorting the memory of the Shoah and trivialising its victims.
The use of… pic.twitter.com/zeyRN5yG6T
— European Jewish Congress (@eurojewcong) April 14, 2026
The latest antisemitic incident came as Holocaust survivors from around the world joined thousands of participants in the 38th March of the Living, held at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in remembrance of the 6 million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany during World War II. The annual march goes from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were killed.
During a ceremony, Revital Yakin Krakovsky, deputy chief executive of the International March of the Living organization, warned that antisemitism continues to endure today despite the lessons of the Holocaust, stressing that its warning signs are once again becoming impossible to ignore.
“Since Oct. 7, antisemitism has surged and is spreading everywhere,” Krakovsky said, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. “The scale and normalization of this hatred echoes the dark times we have seen before and, today of all days, we know how it ended.”
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Poland has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Germany has also experienced a marked surge in antisemitism, with Jewish communities and Israelis facing an increasingly hostile climate and a growing number of disturbing public provocations.
On Tuesday, workers at the Eggenfelden tax office in Bavaria, southern Germany, discovered a structure over a meter high on the premises, allegedly designed to resemble a crematorium and adorned with a swastika and SS runes. The structure also had the inscription “Zyklon B,” the pesticide used by the Nazis to carry out the mass murder of Jews in gas chambers at Auschwitz.
This latest incident coame just three weeks after a replica of the Auschwitz concentration camp gate, also covered in swastikas, was placed in front of the same tax office.
Eggenfelden’s mayor, Martin Biber, strongly condemned the incident, calling it a deeply disturbing provocation that has shocked the community.
“This shocks me. It’s also a huge disappointment that someone here is so cowardly. Quite apart from the fact that an object that is presumably meant to resemble a crematorium represents a horrific act,” Biber told the German newspaper BILD.
Local law enforcement has launched an investigation into the incident, treating it as a serious suspected extremist provocation.
The incident coincided with a commemoration held by the Israeli Embassy in Germany for the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis at the Sachsenhausen Memorial in Oranienburg, in eastern Germany.
During the ceremony, Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor called for the resolute protection of Jewish life, warning that “antisemitism is not a relic of the past but remains visible and on the rise.”
He also emphasized that confronting the spread of terror by Iran is not solely Israel’s responsibility, warning of its expanding global reach and ideological influence.
“The mullahs are already part of the war in Europe. Their drones are falling in Ukraine. Their networks operate across continents – and their deadly ideology is spreading faster than any missile,” the Israeli diplomat said.
“Once again, Israel is on the front line. But the free world, especially Germany and Europe, has not only the responsibility, but the duty to confront this deadly ideology that threatens Europe from within,” he continued.
Andreas Büttner, the Brandenburg commissioner against Antisemitism, was also in attendance at the ceremony, where he reaffirmed the urgent need to confront and counter rising antisemitism.
“Antisemitism is not a shadow of the past. It is an open fire burning among us. And this fire is being stoked from various sides – by the extreme right, by the extreme left, and by those who disguise their hatred of Israel as moral concern,” the German official said.
According to newly released figures, the number of antisemitic offenses in the country reached a record high in 2025, totaling 2,267 incidents, including violence, incitement, property damage, and propaganda offenses.
By comparison, officially recorded antisemitic crimes were significantly lower at 1,825 in 2024, 900 in 2023, and fewer than 500 in 2022, prior to the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Officials warn that the real number of antisemitic crimes is likely much higher, as many incidents go unreported.
Uncategorized
Mossad Chief Says Iran Campaign ‘Will Only Be Complete When This Extremist Regime Is Replaced’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, with Mossad chief David Barnea in July 2025. Photo: Israeli Government Press Office (GPO)
The head of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad declared on Tuesday that the Israeli military campaign against Iran will end only with the collapse of the Islamist regime in Tehran.
David Barnea’s comments during a speech at a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony came as a fragile ceasefire teetered on the brink of collapse and prospects for renewed negotiations remained uncertain.
Israel secured “significant achievements” after 40 days of intense fighting against “those who have made the destruction of the Jewish state their guiding principle,” said Barnea, who noted that the campaign had reshaped the regional security landscape.
“The Iranian threat grew stronger before our eyes, before the eyes of the world, almost without interruption,” he continued. “We repeatedly warned of the nuclear danger as an existential threat, and time and again we warned about the quantities of ballistic missiles that threaten Israeli citizens across the country, as well as the danger posed to us by the Iranian regime.”
Barnea said that Israel and its close ally the US took matters into their own hands for the good of the entire world and warned that, at least for Jerusalem, the mission isn’t done until the Iranian regime collapses.
“Finally, we took our fate into our own hands and entered two wars out of necessity. Alongside us, in firm alliance and historic cooperation with the world’s most powerful nation, we fought together for the values of justice and freedom,” the Israeli official continued. “Our commitment will only be complete when this extremist regime is replaced.”
Since Feb. 28, when the US and Israel launched joint strikes, Israeli officials have repeatedly said that, in addition to degrading Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, they aim to “create the conditions” for the regime in Iran to collapse, weakening the government to the point that the Iranian people can revolt.
US officials have not publicly adopted regime change as a declared war goal. However, President Donald Trump has at times suggested that Iranians should rise up once the airstrike campaign ends.
During Tuesday’s ceremony, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz also delivered a speech, saying that the US and Israel had “defined the removal of enriched material from Iran as a threshold condition for ending the campaign.”
“Iran’s regional proxies — from the collapsed Syrian regime to Hezbollah and Hamas — have been dealt heavy blows and have lost their capacity to pose a strategic threat to Israel,” Katz said. “There remains the task of confronting the rest of their power, and we are doing so — and will continue to do so — with full commitment and full force.”
On Monday, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir approved plans to escalate the military campaign against Iran and advance expanded operational planning across multiple arenas in the region if the ceasefire ends, signaling continued pressure on Tehran’s military and strategic infrastructure.
“We are facing a multi-theater campaign unprecedented in the history of our people and of nations — against both immediate enemies on our borders and distant adversaries seeking our destruction,” Zamir said. “We are striking Iran and its proxies, inflicting heavy blows and significantly degrading their military capabilities.”
With the ceasefire deadline approaching in a week and regional tensions escalating, Trump said the White House has received a request from “the appropriate parties” to resume talks, adding that the Iranian regime is seeking to renew negotiations and reach an agreement.
“Iran will not have nuclear weapons. We agreed on a lot of things, but they did not agree to that. And I think they will agree to that. I am sure of it. If they do not agree – there will be no agreement,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
According to The New York Times, US officials have proposed a 20-year halt to Iranian uranium enrichment, which Iranian negotiators countered with a five-year suspension that Washington rejected, while also reportedly insisting that Iran dismantle major enrichment sites and surrender more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has offered to host another round of US–Iran negotiations in Islamabad in the coming days before the ceasefire expires, as diplomatic efforts intensify to prevent a renewed escalation.
The Trump administration has also stepped up pressure on Tehran to accept its demands by imposing a naval blockade on vessels entering or leaving Iranian ports through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global shipping chokepoint for energy supplies.
Since the start of the war, Iran has used control over the Strait of Hormuz as a major source of leverage, militarizing the waterway and sharply restricting maritime traffic through one of the world’s most critical shipping corridors.
Iranian officials warned they would retaliate against any US naval blockade targeting their ports, calling the move illegal and warning that Gulf shipping routes would no longer remain secure if Iranian access were restricted.
Responding to Iranian threats in a post on Truth Social, Trump said, “If one of these boats approaches the blockade, it will be eliminated immediately, using the same elimination method that we use against drug smugglers at sea. It will be fast and brutal.”
Iran has also signaled it intends to maintain control over the Strait of Hormuz even after the war ends, potentially imposing transit fees framed as compensation for wartime damage.
Following the latest escalation at sea, Israel had instructed its forces to maintain a high level of alert and prepare for the possibility of an immediate collapse of the ceasefire agreement, remaining on heightened readiness in case the truce breaks down and talks do not resume.
Israeli officials have said they do not rule out that Iran may be using the ceasefire to rebuild damaged air defense systems and restore military capabilities, while also attempting to bring weapons and sensitive technologies back into the country through overland smuggling routes.
Meanwhile, Iran appears to still be targeting Gulf states despite the ceasefire, with Bahrain intercepting seven Iranian drones in the past 24 hours in what officials described as a clear breach of the agreement.