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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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Palestinian Authority TV Denies Holocaust for Second Time in a Month
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Two weeks ago, Palestinian Media Watch exposed that Palestinian Authority (PA) television hosted a journalist who insisted the gas chambers “narrative” could be dismissed with “very simple evidence.”
Now, PA TV has done it again. This time, the channel invited a Syrian journalist who said the war in Gaza is the “real” holocaust while the history of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews is a “game that Israel plays”:
Senior Syrian journalist Mustafa Al-Miqdad: “It is incumbent upon the Palestinians today and those who support them to show the extent of the holocaust and genocide that the Palestinians have experienced for two years and almost a month in the Gaza Strip …
[They] were subjected to this holocaust, the real one- Regarding the Holocaust of the Jews there are many question marks from the Westerners, and not from our side that we deny it. Even from the West in general there are many stories that refute the accuracy of the [Jewish] narrative even if they talk about part of it, they talk about this [lack of] accuracy. This is the game that Israel plays.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals, Nov. 16, 2025]
Antisemitism and demonization of the Jews constitute a core ideology of the Palestinian Authority and pave the way for it to incite and justify terror against Israelis. A key PA strategy towards this end is to delegitimize the Jewish people and their history, while replacing it with a fabricated story.
Whether denying Jewish history in the Land of Israel to brand Jews as “colonialists” — or denying and appropriating the Holocaust — official PA TV consistently broadcasts content designed to cultivate hatred of Jews and Israel.
It is difficult to comprehend how any Western government, particularly France with all that it went through in World War II, can still speak of the Palestinian Authority as reformed or of its chairman as “charting a course toward a horizon of peace” when PA media continues to broadcast shocking forms of Holocaust denial and appropriation.
Yet French President Macron and others insist on rewarding the Palestinians with a state governed by this very PA. Instead of demanding the most basic moral prerequisite for statehood — ending institutional antisemitism — Western leaders turn a blind eye.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.
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Norway Government Budget in Peril Over Oil, Wealth Fund’s Israel Investments
A general view shows Norway’s parliament in Oslo, Norway, Sept. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Tom Little
Norway‘s Labour government failed to win backing for its 2026 draft budget by an end-November deadline but talks will resume in parliament to find a compromise over oil drilling and the wealth fund’s Israeli investments, a negotiator said on Monday.
The Norwegian parliament is due to vote on the budget on Friday, and Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere could be forced to call a vote of confidence if no agreement is reached by then, putting his minority government on the line.
The Labour Party narrowly won a second term in a September election, but the result left it reliant on four small left-wing parties to pass the budget, with only two of those, the agrarian Centre Party and the far-left Red Party, agreeing so far.
“It is surprising this is happening so soon after the election,” Jonas Stein, a political scientist at UiT the Arctic University of Norway, told Reuters.
“The Greens in particular had promised during the election that they would back Stoere as prime minister and now he could fall two-to-three months after the election.”
The climate-focused Green Party, which wants a gradual phaseout of the oil industry by 2040, walked out, as did the Socialist Left over its objections to investments by Norway‘s sovereign wealth fund in Israel.
“We must continue our work to secure a majority for this budget by Friday,” parliament’s finance committee Chair Tuva Moflag of Labour told public broadcaster NRK on Monday.
Stoere has said that Norway, Europe’s biggest supplier of gas and a major oil producer, should continue to explore for hydrocarbons to sustain the country’s biggest industry.
The government also objects to demands that Norway‘s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund should divest from all Israeli firms, arguing that only companies involved in the alleged occupation of Palestinian territories should be excluded.
“Norwegian politics have become a bit more adversarial and a bit more polarized,” Johannes Bergh, a political scientist at the Oslo-based Institute for Social Research, told Reuters.
“It might be more comparable to what’s happening in countries like Belgium or the Netherlands, where the political landscape is very fragmented. It has become very fragmented here as well.”
Parliament is elected for a fixed four-year term, with the next vote due in 2029, making it difficult for parties on the right to challenge Stoere’s government. It is not possible to call early elections or dissolve parliament.
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South Koreans Arrested in Iran on Smuggling Charges, Seoul Says
People walk near a mural of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, amid the Iran-Israel conflict, in Tehran, Iran, June 23, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
South Korean nationals have been arrested in Iran on suspicion of smuggling, South Korea’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Monday, but declined to confirm the number of people arrested.
“Our diplomatic mission team in Iran has been communicating the matter with Iranian officials and will continue to provide necessary consular assistance to the Korean nationals,” the ministry said.
The ministry declined to confirm other details including their occupation or the exact nature of the charges.
Local Yonhap News separately reported two South Korean nationals were arrested, including one who works at a public institution.