When I first heard Neil Sedaka had died at the age of 86, I posted a Sedaka song on social media. I’m a Gen-X alternative rock fan, which is not exactly Sedaka’s lane, but it’s hard not to tip your hat to a pop culture legend. I posted “Standing on the Inside,” from 1973, and told people to wait for the chorus. Then, in the comments, my friend Beth Tichler Mindes from my Camp Tranquility summer camp days, wrote a sentence that stopped me: Neil and her dad had been in a band together when they were teens in the Catskills. She’d known Neil her whole life. I asked if I could talk to her 86-year-old father, Howie Tichler, and when I got him on the phone, he told me about the time in the spring of 1958 when he first met Neil Sedaka.

I first met Neil at the Kingsway Theatre on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. I was standing in the back near the popcorn. He was next to me, wearing a high school band sweater. I asked him what school he went to, and I told him I was a musician too. He said he was a piano player and that his band was auditioning for a saxophone player for a Catskills summer gig. I said, great, I’m in. It was that quick. He told me to come down to the basement and audition.

Honestly, I was at the theater to meet girls, not to watch the movie. That’s why I was hanging out in the back.

Before the audition, I spoke to my uncle, Sid Cooper. He was a saxophonist and woodwind player with the Tommy Dorsey band and later at NBC, playing with the Tonight Show band during the Jack Paar years and into the Johnny Carson era. He made sure I was ready. I needed a rhumba, a cha-cha, a foxtrot, a jitterbug. In those days you had to know the dances.

The audition was for a four-piece band. Neil wasn’t even the leader. He was just the piano player. The job was in the Catskills, at a hotel in Monticello called the Esther Manor. Esther ran the place, and her daughter, Leba Strassberg, worked behind the front desk. Neil would later marry Leba.

I don’t remember exactly how we got there. Maybe my father drove. Maybe someone in the group had a car. But we packed everything in and drove up.

When we arrived, we were told to introduce ourselves to the owner using only our first names. Half the band was Italian. In most places in the 1950s, people were hiding Jewish heritage. In the Catskills, Italian last names apparently wouldn’t go down so well. So, Eddie Caccavale became just Eddie. Paul Delova became Paul.

There were sometimes four of us, sometimes five. The group was called The Nordanels. My name wasn’t in the title because I joined a little late. The name came from Norman, David, and Neil. N-O-R-D-A-N-E-L-S.

If it was a wedding or a bar mitzvah, we wore white tuxedos. Sometimes black. At the hotels, it depended on the night of the week.

We worked six days a week, and this is no exaggeration. Afternoons, we played poolside for cha-cha lessons. Then we’d run back to our rooms, change, and play in the lobby as guests came in for dinner. After that, we played dance music before the stage show, then read the charts for the acts — usually, a dance team, a singer, or a comedian.

I was making about $85 a week, plus room and board. I wouldn’t exactly call it a room as I slept near the chicken coops. We didn’t get tips, either — unless you count being seated at dinner with the single girls.

I was born in 1939, so you can do the math. I was 18 when I started at Brooklyn College. By 1961, I was headed to Temple University in Philadelphia for dental school.

The Catskills gig helped pay for all of it as I could save every summer. Brooklyn College tuition was $15 a year, and they even threw in the textbooks. Dental school was another story. So the band gig felt like a gift.

People think of Dirty Dancing when you say Catskills. That came later. The movie is set in 1963, at a fictional resort called Kellerman’s. But the atmosphere was already there in the late 50’s and early 60’s. It was smoky. It was loud. It was hopeful.

At Esther Manor, single girls came up with their parents for the summer, and at dinner they would sometimes seat the musicians with the guests. So there we were, night after night, at long tables with our instruments nearby. We were in heaven. So were the girls.

I did this for six or seven summers. It wasn’t a one-time gig. I kept playing through my third year of dental school. After Carol and I were married, and I graduated, that era ended. From then on, I focused on dentistry. I’m a retired orthodontist, and I practiced on Long Island for about 45 years, and now I teach at Columbia. We originally lived on Long Island near my practice. My wife became a social worker and psychotherapist and opened a practice in Manhattan, so we moved halfway to the city. Once the kids flew the coop, we moved into Manhattan.

During the pandemic, we did something that still makes me laugh. Back when everything was masks, masks, masks, Carol and I were stuck in our apartment one day, and we wrote new parody lyrics to one of Neil’s songs. The original was “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” We turned it into “Masking Is Not Hard to Do.” I called Neil and told him we’d written these lyrics, and I emailed them over.

“Don’t take your mask away from me.
Don’t put my health in jeopardy.
If you don’t, then I’ll be blue,
Because what I am asking is not hard to do.
Remember when you held me tight.
We can’t do that now, but that’s all right.
Thinking safe will get us through,
Because masking is not hard to do.
They say that masking up is a difficult task.”

The next day we found out he’d posted it on Facebook. During the pandemic, he was doing this daily thing where he would sing three songs, and he introduced us and said we wrote the lyrics, and then he played it.

I guess I wasn’t so shocked when I heard he died, as when I spoke to him about a week ago, he was frailer than I ever heard him. But when we talked, we were right back to music.

We always talked about gigs we did together, about musicians who were on the job, and about little details he might have forgotten. For example, the last time we spoke, just two weeks ago, he said, you know that album I recorded that wasn’t very successful, where I sang a bunch of standards? I said sure, I remember it; I still have it. And he said, who was the piano player on that gig?

Our conversations were brief on family, and then we’d get into the details of the cool things we did together. It was always a walk down memory lane.

What I truly admired about Neil was his humility. He understood the unspoken thing between musicians. He knew my limitations, and he never judged my playing. He also knew I was an orthodontist. I had patients, not jam sessions. I wasn’t able to keep up my chops the way a full-time musician could, and he never made me feel like I was anything less than part of the band.

About 15 years ago, Neil called me up and said, “I’m on tour, and I have a gig at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven. My saxophone player is stuck in Montreal. Can you come do the show with me?”

I said, “Sure, but you realize you’re asking an orthodontist to sit in with an eight-piece orchestra.”

He said, “No problem. I’ll fax you the music.” Fax. That’s how long ago this was.

So the music starts flying through my fax machine, half of it unreadable. I called Neil and said, “I’m doing the gig, but don’t expect me to be reading those charts. I’m going to do it by ear.” And he said, “Great.”

I drove up the night before because we had soundcheck the next afternoon. The band was there, Neil wasn’t even there yet, one of the other musicians was running the rehearsal. I’m standing in this magnificent old theater in the middle of New Haven, and I walked up to the guys and said, “Hi, I’m Howie Tichler. I’m really an orthodontist. So go easy on me.” And the guy says, “Neil told us everything. Don’t worry about a thing. Come on up. We’ll rehearse.”

They put me right behind Neil, so the spotlight wasn’t only on him. It was on me, too. The air conditioning was blasting, and it kept blowing my sheet music off the stand, so I’m trying to keep the pages from taking flight while also pretending I belong there.

Neil was incredibly gracious. He introduced the band and he said, “This is my friend Howie Tichler, who is really an orthodontist, and he came to help me out.”

And when I left the theater, I’m walking out with my saxophone on my shoulder, and a woman stopped me and said, “Can I talk to you for a second?” I thought she was going to compliment my playing.

Instead she asked me if she needed braces.

Right now, I’m mostly thinking about the good times. Whenever he came to Manhattan we’d meet up. We went to museums together — the Met, the Guggenheim. It wasn’t always about music. Sometimes it was just two old friends walking around looking at art.

He also came to visit us on Fire Island. Within half an hour, everyone in Fair Harbor knew he was at our house. Not because of an announcement, because of his voice. We had a little portable piano, and he’d sit down and sing. Someone walking by would hear it, stop, and then word would spread.

I actually sang on his first hit, “The Diary.” It’s a doo-wop song, and they couldn’t afford, or maybe couldn’t find, backup singers, so I became the backup singer on Neil Sedaka’s first record.

But the thing I keep coming back to isn’t the credit. It’s the sound of him in the room, that voice carrying out the window. In Fair Harbor you could hear him before you saw him.

The post Before I became an orthodontist, I was my good friend Neil Sedaka’s saxophonist appeared first on The Forward.

This is the first Arab-Israeli war in history in which the Arabs and the Israelis are on the same side.

This striking, remarkable fact is a hopeful sign for a more peaceful Middle East, and for Jews around the world. The sad story we Jews tell ourselves about ourselves — that we are a people that dwells alone, spurned and unsupported — is playing out much differently on the news, and on the ground.

When Israel and President Donald Trump launched “Operation Epic Fury” on Feb. 28 the Iranian regime responded by launching missiles at the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The targets were not just U.S. military bases, but civilian areas as well. A missile struck a suburban home in Amman, exploded over Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and killed an Asian national in the UAE, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

These attacks make clear that this is not Israel’s war alone, though arguably Israel has always been the primary target of the Iranian regime. That regime will lash out at any country threatening its hold on power, and even, or especially, at its own citizens.

Even if these Arab nations don’t officially engage against Iran, they have already been cooperating, opening up airspace to U.S. and Israeli jets, providing intelligence and staging areas. Azerbaijan, a majority Shia country bordering Iran, has been instrumental to Israel’s success against the regime.

That cooperation is not sudden, either. Leaked documents from October 2025 show that even as Arab states were publicly condemning Israel over the Gaza War, some were cooperating with it and the U.S. in creating a “Regional Security Construct” to thwart their common threat, Iran.

The solidity of that construct no doubt encouraged the current attack. Israel knew it wouldn’t have to go it alone. Not only did it have the tacit cooperation of most of its Arab and Gulf neighbors, it had the backing of the United States itself — the most potent military force in history.

A ‘People that dwells alone,’ really?

All of this runs counter to the stubborn story Jews tell themselves that we are without friends and allies in the world, facing terrorists and antisemites on our own. The war broke out just days before Purim, when Jews in ancient Persia — Persia! — faced annihilation at the hands of a vicious antisemite, Haman.

The Purim story frames Jews as anomalous and alone. They are, “a certain people scattered and dispersed among the peoples…whose laws are different from every other people,” Haman tells King Ahasuerus in his pitch to destroy them.

This Shabbat, called Shabbat Zachor, or the Shabbat of Remembrance, only reinforces the theme. The Torah passage in Deuteronomy depicts the evil attacker Amalek as preying on a weak, vulnerable and isolated People of Israel.

“You were faint and weary,” the passage states, “and he did not fear God.”

We have internalized these images, as well as Balaam’s words from the Book of Numbers — “a People that dwells alone” — and weaponized it against reality.

Yes, there are multitudes of real enemies and haters out there. My social media feed has already filled up with posts from the left and right accusing Israel of forcing Trump to fight its war.

“This is Israel’s last chance to blow up Iran with America’s military,” Tucker Carlson, the most insidious of the haters, posted two days ago, ignoring decades of the United States’ own fraught history with Iran. When the war broke out, Carlson called it “absolutely disgusting and evil.”

The far-right influencer Candace Owens announced that she “stands with Iran,” blamed Israel for this war and said that Charlie Kirk was assassinated “for this war.”

But the ferocity of these voices shouldn’t obscure the fact that in this war, Israel is far from alone.

How not to blow it

Of course how things begin is not always how they end. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, which Iran was instrumental in helping fund and plan, many countries voiced support or sympathy for Israel.

As Israel’s retaliatory attack ground on, that support evaporated. It was unclear how the war’s destruction matched its legitimate cause.  Allyship is always conditional.

The worst-case scenarios of this war are evident to anyone who remembers the Iraq War: America dragged into a grinding war as Iran implodes into factional violence, with Israel blamed for it all.

In the best-case scenario, Israel and the U.S. narrowly target the regime and its  military assets and take them out. Then Israel capitalizes on this military cooperation to seek close diplomatic ties with a new Iranian leadership, along with the Arab states that joined in its defense. That, of course, would entail compromises on the hardline, irredentist dreams of some of Israel’s own leaders.

In other words, how Israel emerges from this war will depend in part on its own actions, during and after the immediate conflict. But for now, the irrefutable truth is, we are not a people that dwells alone.

The post A war with Israel, not for Israel appeared first on The Forward.

i24 News – Satellite images published Saturday by The New York Times show heavy damage at the Tehran residence of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, with plumes of black smoke and multiple buildings destroyed or partially collapsed.

The images, captured by Airbus satellites, indicate that facilities used to host senior Iranian officials were among the structures hit.

Israeli sources said the strikes were carried out as part of Operation “Roaring Lion,” targeting senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Among those named was General Mohammad Pakpour, the current commander of the Guard forces, who assumed the role after his predecessor Hossein Salami was killed in an earlier operation. The sources added that Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and former council secretary Ali Larijani were also potential targets.

In light of the scale of the destruction, Israeli officials are assessing multiple scenarios, including the possibility that Khamenei himself may have been at risk during the strikes. Iranian authorities have so far denied that Khamenei, the president, or other senior officials were injured.

Preliminary assessments suggest the strikes may have significantly disrupted the Revolutionary Guard’s strategic command capabilities, delivering a direct blow to its senior leadership structure. Officials in Israel and the United States are continuing to monitor developments closely as they await confirmation on the status of the Iranian figures believed to have been targeted.