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Nathan Chavin, Jewish ad exec who wrote a raunchy country western hit, dies at 78
(JTA) — In a 30-plus-year career in advertising, Nathan Chavin wrote everything from signs on construction site scaffolding to classified ads to campaigns for several Trump properties, including Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago.
But he was perhaps best known for the raunchy country music songs he wrote and recorded for a novelty album, “Country Porn,” released in 1976 by the nascent Penthouse Records label.
The album sold more than 100,000 copies, and included a minor hit, “Asshole from El Paso,” a parody of Merle Haggard’s 1969 song “Okie from Muskogee.” It was covered by Willie Nelson and Richard “Kinky” Friedman — Chavin’s old friend from the University of Texas — and Friedman’s band, The Texas Jewboys.
In the days before digital downloads and the internet, “Country Porn” was sold through the mail. The songs on the record had sexually explicit lyrics and, even 40 years before #MeToo, the record was criticized as puerile and misogynistic.
But for a brief moment it made Chavin a member of a tiny fraternity of popular Jewish country-and-western musicians, including Steve Goodman, Ray Benson and Friedman, his actual fraternity brother at UT.
“Chinga went way over the line, [saying things] that people didn’t think he should be saying,” Friedman said last week, using Chavin’s nickname. “Anything that was not suitable was perfect for Chinga.”
Chavin, also known as “Nick,” died in Boca Raton, Florida on March 15. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Brandi Chavin, who said the cause of death was uncertain but that many of his organs were failing. He was 78.
Chavin’s advertising career brought him into contact with some of New York City’s major real estate moguls. He became very close friends with Robert Durst, when he was still better known as the scion of the Durst real estate family rather than a convicted murderer. Durst hung around Chavin’s band when Chavin first came to New York, said Michael Bart, a bandmate who also worked with Chavin in the advertising industry. Bart attended the bris for Chavin’s son, at which Durst jokingly brandished a butcher’s knife.
“Durst thought that was hysterically funny,” recalled Bart.
Chavin and Durst started running around New York together in the early 1980s and, according to Rolling Stone, partied at the Plato’s Retreat sex club and the Mudd Club, the seminal punk rock venue. In a deposition given a year before Durst’s murder trial in 2020, Chavin told the court that Durst had confessed to killing their mutual friend, Susan Berman, the crime for which Durst would be convicted. And Chavin said that before she died, Berman told him that Durst had admitted killing his wife.
Chavin was born in Chicago on July 3, 1944. His parents, Muriel and Irving Chavin, moved to El Paso when Chavin was in the eighth grade.
Chavin took the nickname Chinga because he liked the alliteration and, no doubt, because it was Spanish slang for the act of sexual intercourse.
As an undergraduate at the University of Texas, Chavin was thrown out of Tau Delta Phi, one of four Jewish fraternities at the university at the time, according to Friedman. Friedman proudly recalled that during their time as members the fraternity they tried to admit African-American students, an effort that was ultimately thwarted. Chavin and Friedman graduated in 1966.
Chavin moved to California where he earned a graduate degree in creative writing at San Francisco State College. He lived in the Haight Ashbury district during the Summer of Love in 1967.
“Every other word out of his mouth was, ‘Far out man,’” recalled Ken “Snakebite” Jacobs, another Tau Delta Phi fraternity brother who ended up playing in Chavin’s “Country Porn” band.
Bart, who said he worked for Chavin for “eight or nine years,” remembers that Chavin had a flair for one-liners.
“He just had this ability to come up with great stuff on the spot,” said Bart. “He came up with a lot of it in crosstown cab rides and told our clients it took six months to create.”
His daughter Brandi said Chavin was quite proud of a slogan he thought up for a new shopping center on Sixth Avenue, now known as the Manhattan Mall: “Something’s Coming Between Macy’s and Gimbels.” The mall is located between Macy’s at Herald Square and the building that once housed Gimbels department store.
And he could write poetry.
“He wrote pretty good poetry in college,” said Friedman, reached at his ranch in Texas. “Might have been some of his best work.”
But for many of his friends, Chavin’s finest hour was that parody, “Asshole From El Paso,” which he co-wrote with Jacobs when they were living in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Haggard’s hit criticized the counterculture and anti-Vietnam War protests; Chavin’s version mocked its reactionary narrator.
“We wrote the song in the car coming back from a recording session,” Jacobs recalled. “We were in hysterics.”
Larry “Ratso” Sloman, a friend of both Chavin and Friedman, said, “Chinga was always dying to get up on stage. That was his first love. He was never able to parlay it into a [performance] career, though.”
But Chavin often did have a ball sitting in with Friedman and his band when they came to New York and played the old Lone Star Café in Greenwich Village or B.B. King’s in Times Square.
Friedman said of his Jewish frat brother: “He’s a guy who had a lot to offer. He really walked his own road.”
Chavin is survived by his wife Teresa Weldon, his sons Maxfield and Drew, his daughter Brandi and his first wife, Marsha Parker.
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The post Nathan Chavin, Jewish ad exec who wrote a raunchy country western hit, dies at 78 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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US Justice Dept. to Seek Death Penalty for Man Accused of Murdering 2 Israeli Embassy Staffers
Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim who were shot and killed as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum, pose for a picture at an unknown location, in this handout image released by Embassy of Israel to the US on May 22, 2025. Photo: Embassy of Israel to the USA via X/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – The Justice Department will seek the death penalty for the man accused of murdering two staff members of the Israeli Embassy in Washington outside a Jewish museum, prosecutors said in a court filing Friday.
Elias Rodriguez faces federal hate crime and murder charges in the killings of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, the couple he shot execution-style as they left an event at the museum last May. Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” during the shooting and later told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”
The indictment includes a hate crime resulting in death and notice of special findings, which allows prosecutors to pursue the death penalty.
“My message to anyone who seeks to commit political violence in this district — D.C. is not the place. You will be held accountable and you will face the full wrath of the law,” Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, said on Friday.
Prosecutors described the killing as calculated and planned, saying Rodriguez flew to the Washington region from Chicago ahead of the event at the Capital Jewish Museum with a handgun in his checked luggage.
Rodriguez went inside the museum after murdering his victims and said, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza, I am unarmed,” according to court documents. He also told interrogators of his that he admired Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty Air Force member who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in February 2024, describing Bushnell as “courageous” and a “martyr.”
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Israel Kills Hamas Armed Wing Leader Haddad in Gaza Strike
People carry a body identified by mourners as Hamas’ military wing commander Izz al-Din al-Haddad, who was killed in an Israeli strike on Friday, during a funeral, in Gaza City, May 16, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
An Israeli airstrike on Gaza killed the chief of Hamas’ military wing, the most senior official from the Palestinian terrorist group killed by Israel since an October US-backed ceasefire agreement that was meant to halt fighting.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that Izz al-Din al-Haddad was killed in what it described as a precise strike on Gaza City on Friday. Israel has repeatedly carried out strikes on Gaza since the ceasefire started.
Hamas confirmed in a later statement that Haddad, who was born in 1970, was killed along with his wife and daughter. It described him as a central figure in directing combat operations and accused Israel of trying to achieve politically through killings what it had failed to achieve militarily.
At Al Aqsa Martyrs Mosque in central Gaza, a joint funeral was held on Saturday for Haddad, his wife and their 19-year-old daughter.
CASUALTIES MOUNT DESPITE CEASEFIRE
In a joint statement with his defense minister on Friday, announcing the military had targeted Haddad, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Haddad was an architect of the October 7, 2023 attacks that precipitated Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Haddad, who became the group’s military chief in Gaza after Israel’s killing of Mohammad Sinwar in May 2025, “was responsible for the murder, abduction, and harm inflicted on thousands of Israeli civilians (and) soldiers,” they said.
Nicknamed “the Ghost,” Haddad had survived multiple assassination attempts by Israel, according to Hamas sources. Israel’s military says that he was one of Hamas’ longest-serving commanders, rising through the ranks from the group’s early establishment in the 1980s to hold several senior positions.
Israel and Hamas remain deadlocked in indirect talks to advance US President Donald Trump’s post-war plan for Gaza that is meant to end more than two years of fighting.
Israel has stepped up attacks in Gaza in the weeks since halting its joint bombing with the U.S. in Iran, redirecting its fire back on the devastated Palestinian territory where the military says Hamas fighters are tightening their grip.
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Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him
Piers Morgan’s online debate about Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed containing allegations of Israeli dog rape was loud, chaotic and unenlightening — and I couldn’t stop watching it.
That’s a problem. Morgan’s format is a trap. On his YouTube talk show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, he pits people holding intransigent, often extreme positions against each other, goads them to yell at one another across Zoom, and positions himself as the voice of reason in the middle. It’s hateporn — addictive, and not reflective of reality.
And yet Piers Morgan Uncensored and many similar YouTube- and social-media based news programs are where people increasingly get their information and engage with controversial issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
These programs rack up views by persuading viewers there is no middle ground, no moderate position, no alternative to conflict. And their strategy is working.
The Kristof episode, which racked up 340,000 views in a day, is titled, “Torture Does NOT Work!” — all Morgan show names have one word in all caps and end in an exclamation point.
It begins with people shouting. “You are not a journalist!” Ana Kasparian, a commentator on another YouTube show, shouts at podcaster and online anchor Emily Schrader — before Morgan comes on to introduce the segment.
He quickly recaps the lurid details from Kristof’s New York Times oped, “The Silence That meets the Rape of Palestinians,” and a newly issued nearly-300 page Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence.
“As far as I’m concerned, the only cause is basic human decency,” Morgan says in his cool British accent, “If your first instinct about either report is to look for ways to smear them, you might have run out of that yourself.”
Yet the six deeply partisan guests spend the next 45 minutes smearing the reports, and each other.
Morgan’s introductory call for human decency is not a plea, it’s a ploy. He plays the mature voice of reason standing between the extremist pro-Israelis and the pro-Palestinians — not to persuade them to come to a moderate position, but rather to exploit the most virulent voices in order to generate clicks, while still claiming the cover of journalism. This approach causes real harm by giving extremists a megaphone, and a degree of exposure that all but guarantees that people actually trying to build a better future go unheard.
A recipe for drama
Morgan repeats this formula over and again. In an episode entitled, “Netanyahu CONNED Trump!” Dave Smith, a sidekick to Joe Rogan, accuses Israel of dragging the United States into the Iran war. In “I’m SICK of it!” commentator Megyn Kelly launches into a similar attack on Israel.
Morgan has had long interviews with white supremacist and proud antisemite Nick Fuentes (“What a crock of S***!”). In “STAND for Dead Soldiers!” Morgan hosted four Israelis at the extreme ends of the political spectrum and watched them fight when one refused to stand as a siren sounded to honor Israel’s fallen soldiers.
Not extreme or dramatic enough? How about the time Morgan hosted Crackhead Barney, a Black pro-Palestinian street activist, to explain why she harasses celebrities to get them to say, “Free Palestine.”
“I’m truly shocked/disgusted that @piersmorgan would have this nutjob & clearly unwell person to go on his show and even remotely try to talk about Palestine or the war,” wrote the Gazan-born activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
Alkhatib is a moderate Palestinian who works for a peaceful solution to the conflict. He has, unsurprisingly, not been on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Instead, Morgan’s choice of guests is calculated for maximum friction, a function of an attention economy that monetizes the time people like me spend watching the fights.
From ‘Animal House’ to Piers Morgan
Luring viewers this way isn’t exactly new. President Ronald Reagan called The McLaughlin Group, a current affairs program that ran on public television for 34 years beginning in 1982, “the political equivalent of Animal House”— more drunken frat house than graduate seminar. McLaughlin begat Crossfire, a CNN political debate program hosted by a younger Tucker Carlson that Jon Stewart once compared to pro-wrestling.
In 2025, Morgan, who came up in British tabloids before a long stint at CNN, moved away from traditional broadcast TV and went all in on social media and his YouTube channel.
His success on that platform is part of a larger shift in media from major institutions to independent personalities, and from actual news — the dutiful and expensive process of finding out and relaying what’s actually happening in the world — to opinion that spins itself as reporting, which is far cheaper and more entertaining.
That shift has come as audiences have moved from loyalty to long established institutions to following enterprising, independent personalities. The podcaster Joe Rogan has 20.9 million subscribers; Carlson has 5.6 million; Morgan’s show has 4.42 million subscribers and over 1.36 billion total views.
In other words, Morgan is not some guy some people watch now. He is what people will be watching in the future.
A bias toward extremes
That prospect should alarm us. Morgan’s shows rarely feature people working toward compromise or reconciliation. A Piers Morgan Uncensored discussion spotlighting the many civil society groups in Israel working toward coexistence? A show where he sits down with Arab and Jewish Israelis who share a vision for a common future? A segment that highlights the actual, albeit rare, instances of cooperation?
Pipe dreams. All that is also happening in Israel and the West Bank — but Piers Morgan Uncensored effectively censors it.
Compare that to Jon Stewart, who on The Daily Show last month conducted a long interview with the Palestinian and Israeli co-authors of The Future Is Peace, a book that calls for moving beyond violence and stalemate to a shared future. Same approach — a streaming interview on a hot-button topic, with an eye toward entertainment — but radically different editorial choices.
That episode garnered a mere 400,000 views. Morgan’s comparative millions of eyeballs may, in his mind, justify his guttersweeping approach to international conflict. And in his defense — and mine, for watching — it’s never boring. He can be a thoughtful and provocative interviewer, and his not-ready-for-primetime, self-created show allows him, when he so chooses, to platform voices that more mainstream venues overlook, like former Israeli Speaker of the Knesset and longtime peace activist Avrum Burg.
Alas, he stuck the erudite former statesman with a diehard evangelical and a firebreathing American Jewish conservative pundit. That episode is called, “A SHAME on Judaism!”
Whatever this is, it’s not journalism. But it is the future.
The post Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him appeared first on The Forward.