Uncategorized
Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
—
The post Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
For Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday, an 85-minute playlist
Nobel Prize-winning song-poet Bob Dylan turns 85 on Sunday, May 24. In order to celebrate the august occasion, we have put together an 85-minute playlist featuring one minute of music for every year Dylan has been alive. This playlist isn’t meant to summarize or stand in for Dylan’s overall body of work, which numbers well over 600 songs, nor is it intended to suggest that these are his best songs. Rather, this is a journey through Dylan’s vast songbook, purposely avoiding the tried-and-true in favor of highlighting almost two dozen lesser-known but wholly worthy gems.
Happy 85th birthday, Bob Dylan!
Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues (1962)
One of the first original songs Bob Dylan wrote and performed in his early coffeehouse days, “Talkin’ Hava Negeilah Blues” gives the lie to the notion that Dylan consciously tried to hide his Jewish background by changing his name (from Zimmerman to Dylan) and making up stories about his past (e.g., that he traveled with the circus). If there was any truth to that, then why did he kick off his career with a riff on that most recognizably Jewish of songs?
Mixed-Up Confusion (1962)
Recorded in the fall of 1962, this rockabilly single recontextualizes (or gives the lie to) the common but false narrative (perpetuated in the film A Complete Unknown) that Bob Dylan “went electric” on his 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home, and in subsequent concerts the following summer and fall. In fact, Dylan was a rock ‘n’ roller dating back to high school, where the quote appearing beneath his photo in his class yearbook read, “To join Little Richard.” On “Mixed-Up Confusion,” he was already stretching his rock ‘n’ roll muscles several years before the notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival where he performed with an electric band, much to the horror of the moldy figs of folk music.
4th Time Around (1966)
As early as 1964, the Beatles’ John Lennon began to show signs of having been influenced by Bob Dylan’s songwriting on numbers such as “I’m a Loser” (1964) and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (1965), in which Lennon goes so far as to imitate Dylan’s nasal rasp. Bob Dylan was hip to this trend, and after the Beatles released the Dylanesque “Norwegian Wood,” Dylan responded in song with “4th Time Around,” whose melody strongly echoes that of “Norwegian Wood.” Dylan scholar Sean Wilentz wrote in Bob Dylan in America that “4th Time Around” sounds “like Bob Dylan impersonating John Lennon impersonating Bob Dylan.”
Blind Willie McTell (1983)
Unaccountably left off the 1983 album Infidels for which it was originally intended, “Blind Willie McTell” is one of Bob Dylan’s American epics, as it invokes New Orleans, East Texas, bootleg whiskey, plantations, “the ghost of slavery ships,” an unnamed war, and “power and greed and corruptible seed.” Be sure to play it on the 4th of July.
I Want You (1966)
Only Bob Dylan could write such a surrealistic narrative — replete with a guilty undertaker who sighs, a lonesome organ grinder who cries, a drunken politician who weeps, and a child in a Chinese suit — in the form of a bouncy, three-minute pop song that indeed made it into the Top 20 in 1966, when it was released on his greatest (double) album, Blonde on Blonde.
We Better Talk This Over (1978)
“We Better Talk This Over” is one of several numbers on Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street-Legal that seem to want to bring closure to what Dylan began revealing about his crumbling marriage on 1975’s Blood on the Tracks. Whereas Dylan portrayed himself in pain and bereft on Blood, on this oft-overlooked propulsive number he is ready to put the past behind him and move forward. “The vows that we kept are now broken and swept / ’Neath the bed where we slept,” he sings, somewhat resignedly. Dylan also seemingly reveals an internal spiritual struggle when he sings, “I’m exiled, you can’t convert me,” just a little over a year before he announces to the world his so-called born-again experience on 1979’s Slow Train Coming.
Most of the Time (1989)
An acute, heart-piercing, devastating post-breakup song, featuring an unreliable narrator denying he still hurts but betrayed by his over-the-top insistence that he has gotten over her, in a song featuring a slow emotional and sonic build.
Day of the Locusts (1970)
Poor Bob Dylan. It turns out that the day in 1970 on which he received an honorary degree from Princeton University turned out to be one of the worst days of his life, judging from this song. Nature, a Biblical plague, and David Crosby (in an unnamed cameo, playing the man standing next to Dylan whose “head was exploding”) all conspired against the college dropout to make him fear he might not have gotten “out of there alive.” He could have just transferred to Wesleyan and everything would have been fine.
Everything Is Broken (1989)
In the aggressive, blues-rocking “Everything Is Broken” Bob Dylan recounts the Kabbalistic creation story about the klippot, the broken vessels of divine energy that were left behind everywhere and which point to our ultimate task as humans — to repair the brokenness permeating creation through acts of inherent goodness, otherwise known as mitzvot, in an oft-misunderstood process called tikkun olam. All this in a three-minute song blending New Orleans swamp-rock and classic Chicago blues.
You’re a Big Girl Now (1975)
Another of Bob Dylan’s post-breakup songs of desperation, this from Blood on the Tracks, a recording often referred to as Dylan’s “divorce album.” In “You’re a Big Girl Now,” Dylan drops all anger and defenses in favor of raw emotion: “I’m going out of my mind / With a pain that stops and starts / Like a corkscrew to my heart / Ever since we’ve been apart.”
Positively 4th Street (1965)
Featuring one of the greatest opening lines of all time: “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.” It’s all downhill from there, my friend.
The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar (1981)
“The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” is a blistering, urgent missive, with reports of phones out of order and the killing of nuns and soldiers (evocative of American military involvement in Latin America at the time the song was written). Nevertheless, each verse ends with the title refrain, “The groom’s still waiting at the altar,” which I hear as a statement retracting his declaration of conversion.
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? (1965)
In September 1965, Dylan nearly hit the top of the pop charts when “Like a Rolling Stone” went to #2; it was kept from the top spot by the Beatles’ “Help!” But Dylan didn’t give up in his quest for the chart-topping hit that had so far evaded him. Songs he recorded and released in coming months that bore musical similarities to “Like a Rolling Stone” included “Positively Fourth Street,” “One of Must Know (Sooner or Later),” and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window,” the only studio track recorded with the Hawks — later to become the Band. The single presents the backup group at its fiercest. And Dylan quotes himself when he sings “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend,” a line from “Positively 4th Street.”
Going, Going, Gone (1974)
From 1974’s Planet Waves, the only studio album Bob Dylan recorded with the Band, “Going, Going, Gone” stands out on the album for its moody, unsettled nature (surrounded as it is by songs of domestic bliss and naked nostalgia). Robbie Robertson’s evocative electric guitar leads pepper the ballad, saying as much with their clipped notes and anguished tone as Dylan does with lyrics like “I’m closin’ the book / On the pages and the text / And I don’t really care / What happens next.”
Series of Dreams (1989)
An outtake from 1989’s Oh Mercy, this is one of Dylan’s big statement songs that unaccountably got left on the cutting room floor, until demand grew so strong from those who had heard it via bootleg recordings that Dylan’s record company assented to the inclusion of the track on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. Dylan could be alluding to the Shoah when he describes his dreams:
In one, numbers were burning
In another, I witnessed a crime
In one, I was running, and in another
All I seemed to be doing was climb.
One More Cup of Coffee (1976)
This hypnotic if unassuming number off the early-1976 album Desire, featuring Dylan’s only authentic cantorial singing and aided and abetted by Scarlet Rivera’s klezmer-via-Gypsy violin, a relentless minor key, and Emmylou Harris’ harmonies is an overlooked gem. As the song says, its “heart is like an ocean, mysterious and dark.”
Dignity (1989)
Like “Series of Dreams,” the song “Dignity” was an outtake from the Oh Mercy sessions that was first released on Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume 3 in 1994. And like “Series of Dreams,” this song also seems to refer to the Shoah, when the narrator — bereft at the astounding loss of dignity — refers to “a crowded room full of covered-up mirrors,” as in a Jewish house of mourning, and “steps goin’ down into tattoo land.”
Dark Eyes (1985)
To many, the 1985 album Empire Burlesque introduced one of the low points in Bob Dylan’s recording career, including the two follow-up albums Knocked Out Loaded (1986) and Down in the Groove (1988). Empire Burlesque was a desperate attempt by producer Arthur Baker to update Dylan’s sound to blend in more with the mid-1980s dance music aesthetic. But Baker knew that the album needed a dynamite closer, and he suggested that Dylan write an old-style, solo acoustic ballad. In a fit of inspiration, Dylan stayed up all night and came up with this stunner: sharp, intimate, personal, where the singer looks around himself at a chaotic world from which he is totally alienated — “I feel nothing for their game where beauty goes unrecognized / All I feel is heat and flame and all I see are dark eyes.”
Heart of Mine (1981)
“Heart of Mine” stands out on the 1981 Shot of Love album as a raucous, joyful bit of R&B music (which flavors most of the album). But it’s a Bob Dylan song, so it has that subversive touch. The narrator addresses the song to his own heart — “Don’t let her see / Don’t let her see that you need her / Don’t put yourself over the line / Heart of mine” — and warns it that only trouble lies ahead if this is the path he (his heart) decides to pursue. The recording’s impressive instrumental lineup — all of whom are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — includes Ringo Starr on drums, Ronnie Wood on guitar, and Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass, meaning Dylan was backed on this track by a Beatle, a Rolling Stone, and a member of the Stax house band, also known as the M.G.’s, as in Booker T. and the M.G.’s. Not too shabby.
Congratulations (1988)
This is a bit of a cheat stuck into this list to demonstrate that as much as he has always been a solo artist and an iconoclast, Bob Dylan has also always longed for the companionship — musical and otherwise — of a steady band. He came close to achieving this with the Hawks (later the Band) from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, and allegedly asked Jerry Garcia in the late-1980s if he could join the Grateful Dead (which was essentially a Dylan tribute band). But it wasn’t until George Harrison persuaded his friend and sometime songwriting partner to join him — along with Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne — in an “anonymous supergroup” called the Traveling Wilburys in 1988, that Dylan took the plunge and subsumed himself into a collective. In most cases, as with “Congratulations,” you could easily tell one lead singer from the other, and in general that person wrote the song. We’re turning this one — an over-the-top expression of post-breakup bitterness (the first line is “Congratulations for breaking my heart”) — back on Dylan on the occasion of his birthday.
My Back Pages (1964)
Along with “It’s All Over Now (Baby Blue),” the song “My Back Pages” is often heard as a transitional statement: out with the old Dylan, in with the new, if you will. Included on the 1964 album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, which eschewed topical protest for more personal and poetic concerns, “My Back Pages” found the 23-year-old singer-songwriter looking back just a few years at his more serious self and judging him thusly: “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” A 1967 version of the song by the Byrds made it into the Top 30 and inspired the all-star version of the song rendered at the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration in 1992, which featured George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Neil Young, and Roger McGuinn trading verses alongside Dylan.
The post For Bob Dylan’s 85th birthday, an 85-minute playlist appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Don’t dismiss Israel’s most rage-baiting minister as fringe
As Israel drifts toward another election campaign, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir this week offered voters — and the world — a grotesque glimpse of where a large branch of Israeli politics is heading.
Touring a detention facility holding activists from a Gaza-bound flotilla intercepted by Israel, Ben-Gvir waved a large Israeli flag before rows of bound detainees forced to kneel, mocked them as cameras rolled, and declared Israel was “in charge here.”
The images sparked domestic and international outrage. European governments summoned Israeli ambassadors. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, a staunch supporter of the Israeli right, charged on X that “Ben-Gvir betrayed” the “dignity of his nation.” Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a rare move, publicly rebuked his own minister.
That rebuke should not be taken as a signal that Ben-Gvir may fade in power. Because while many Israelis still prefer to think of the controversy-courting minister as a fringe embarrassment attached awkwardly to an otherwise respectable nationalist movement, he is the true face of the Israeli right today.
A week ago, Ben-Gvir ascended the Temple Mount in Jerusalem — one of his many violations of longstanding norms governing the holy site — as tens of thousands of ultranationalist Israelis marched through the Old City in an annual celebration of its 1967 capture, many chanting “Death to Arabs.” The rabble rouser — whose multiple convictions include support for terrorist groups — recently celebrated his 50th birthday with two cakes adorned with nooses, a nod to the death penalty legislation for terrorists that he played a major role in getting passed. No surprise: The law is worded in a way that makes clear it is aimed at Palestinians only. Legislators allied with his camp wore noose-shaped lapel pins while promoting it.
This madness is not some accidental byproduct of the right-wing movement Netanyahu has led for decades, but its natural consequence.
For years, the mainstream nationalist camp, with Netanyahu as its most prominent figure, has sold Israelis an illusion: Israel can permanently control the West Bank — and perhaps Gaza, once more, as well — while forever suppressing Palestinian national aspirations, and still somehow remain both democratic and fully accepted by the democratic world.
The terminology changes: “managing the conflict,” “security control,” “economic peace.” But the underlying proposition remains the same. And it is a fantasy.
A country that indefinitely controls millions of disenfranchised people — where almost half the population does not have the right to vote — does not remain a true democracy. A state ruling another nation forever does not remain democratic either, even if elections formally continue among the population allowed to vote.
There are now roughly 15 million people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. About half are Jews, and half are Arabs. That demographic reality sits at the center of every serious discussion about Israel’s future. Yet much of the Israeli right pretends this reality barely exists, and ignores the increasingly brazen Jewish terrorism and the illegal seizing of outposts in the West Bank. Netanyahu himself speaks the language of caution, realism and statecraft, striving to reassure centrists and foreign governments alike that Israel remains fundamentally part of the democratic West.
Not Ben-Gvir.
Ben-Gvir speaks for those on the right who see only two possibilities when it comes to Palestinians: permanent Israeli domination without equality, enforced by as much violence as needed — or expulsion. Officially, much of the far-right prefers the former; once the cameras stop rolling, almost all of them predict the latter.
I was speaking to one prominent right-winger the other day, and asked what they had in mind for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. “Those who don’t want to destroy Israel can stay,” they said.
Obviously, that definition might include none of them, I noted. “Then get the trucks,” was the reply.
That wasn’t moral, I said. The reply: “Is it moral to force my children to fight forever?”
Ben-Gvir’s outrageous behavior is meant to appeal to people with this mindset. And it’s working. Polls show his Otzma Yehudit party expected to get perhaps 13 seats in the next Knesset — more than double their current six.
Moreover, Netanyahu’s Likud party itself has undergone a gradual shift to the right, with many of its Knesset members starting to sound little different from Ben-Gvir. That is why Ben-Gvir was able to ram through the disgraceful bill mandating the death penalty for terrorists.
This political calamity was not unexpected. The occupation of the West Bank, like unchecked power everywhere, was always bound to corrode political culture over time. The sleight of hand of non-annexation is growing old — in part because of Ben-Gvir’s influence, the number of settlements is expanding rapidly — and much of the Israeli right, consumed by hubris, wants to rip off the mask. Ben-Gvir is the most authentic expression of that transformation.
That is the dark reality hanging over the coming election, and the flotilla episode revealed the zeitgeist in its purest form. Israel already had complete control over the activists. They posed no meaningful threat. The performance was about domination, a theatrical display for a domestic political audience increasingly drawn to the aesthetics of vengeance and submission.
Challenged on Israel Radio about the wisdom of such a stunt at a time when Israel is facing a crisis in global public opinion, Yitzhak Kroizer, a Knesset member from Ben-Gvir’s party, offered this: “We’re done bowing our heads and apologizing.” He said the flotilla members were terrorists themselves for wishing to harm Israel, and that there is “great public support for an uncompromising stand.”
He’s right on that last point. Israel faces genuine enemies and genuine trauma. Hamas massacred civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. Hezbollah and Iran openly seek confrontation. Israelis have every reason to fear for their security.
But those realities still leave unanswered a central strategic question: What kind of country emerges from such prolonged conflict?
Ben-Gvir has given us one unsettling answer.
In 1995, a teenage Ben-Gvir famously brandished the hood ornament ripped from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car and declared on Israeli television: “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too.” Weeks later, assassin Yigal Amir did just that, and murdered Rabin.
Today, the target in Ben-Gvir’s sights isn’t Israel’s leader, but instead all of Israeli democracy.
The post Don’t dismiss Israel’s most rage-baiting minister as fringe appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Gaza and Israel go unmentioned in Democrats’ 2024 election autopsy report
(JTA) — Gaza and Israel go unmentioned in the Democrats’ 190-page autopsy of Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential election loss that the Democratic National Committee released to CNN on Thursday.
Critics of the Biden administration’s support for Israel during the war in Gaza that began on Oct. 7, 2023, have alleged that the party was suppressing its internal findings about the election, which returned President Donald Trump to office, because it would show that Biden’s stance was deeply unpopular.
Axios reported in February that the top Democrats who worked on the report concluded that Harris “lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza.”
If that’s the case, it’s not reflected in the document that CNN published on Thursday morning. Portions of the document were not included, however, with notes saying that the executive summary and conclusion had not been shared by the authors.
The report points to 10 different “strategic implications” for Democrats, including that “anti-Trump sentiment has limits,” male voters “require direct engagement,” and that voter demographics are not enough to determine which candidate they’ll prefer.
CNN reported that the document was written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and annotated by the DNC. The DNC released the document following questions raised by CNN, the network reported.
DNC Chairman Ken Martin told CNN that the report was not yet ready to be publicly released, but concluded that withholding it would create a larger distraction than releasing an incomplete version. “I sincerely apologize,” he said.
“For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” Martin said. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”
Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said she’d expected to see analysis related to Gaza and Israel in the report.
“As soon as it arrived in my inbox I immediately searched for the word ‘Gaza’ expecting there to be an entire section focused on this issue,” Soifer said in an interview. “So I was surprised that, in fact, there was nothing — on Gaza, Israel, Jewish voters, non-Jewish voters, it was just nothing.”
Though rumors had swirled about the role that Gaza played in the autopsy, Soifer said she heard from a DNC official that there was “never” a section focusing on the issue, “at least not in writing in this report.”
Meanwhile, the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a pro-Palestinian nonprofit, called on Martin to release “the information that the author of the autopsy told us clearly and unambiguously, which is that DNC officials’ review of their own data found Biden’s support to be a net-negative for Democrats in 2024.”
Rivera, the report’s author, met with the IMEU and told them that the war in Gaza hurt Democrats in the 2024 election, according to reporting by Axios.
Soifer said the JDCA was not contacted by Rivera, and did not meet with him.
The pro-Israel lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel also said it had not met with Rivera. “Our current leadership has not met with the author and hasn’t been contacted,” communications chair Rachel Rosen told JTA.
While Soifer was surprised by the report’s omission of Gaza and Israel, DMFI took it as a sign that support for Israel does not have a detrimental effect on Democrats’ chances in elections.
“We need to learn the lessons of 2024 so we can be successful in 2026, 2028 and beyond,” said Brian Romick, DMFI’s president.
“What is clear — autopsy or not — is a majority of Americans, including Democrats, support the U.S.-Israel relationship, and that support was not the reason Vice President Harris lost the election,” he said.
A DMFI staffer pointed to polling from last fall showing that a majority of Democrats support the U.S.-Israel relationship.
And Soifer pointed to a poll published Friday by the Jewish Voters Resource Center, a nonpartisan firm, that found that more than two-thirds of Jewish voters plan to vote for Democrats this November — suggesting that Israel was not significantly moving votes in one of the demographics most likely to be invested in the issue.
“The poll also demonstrated that the top issue driving the Jewish vote in 2026 – just as it was in 2024 – is the future of democracy, followed by the cost of living. While 70% of Jewish voters have an emotional attachment to Israel, 55% opposed Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza,” she said. “There is little evidence that the war in Gaza has impacted the Jewish American vote.”
A spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition pointed to the episode as an example of infighting among Democrats.
“The Democrats are tearing themselves apart as they appease the ascendant far-left extremists in their party, from Maine to Pennsylvania,” wrote Sam Markstein, alluding to candidates Graham Platner and Chris Rabb.
“It’s bad policy and it’s bad politics. The GOP is the only party where it’s safe to be proudly Jewish and pro-Israel,” Markstein wrote. “Republicans are righteously taking on the tough fights and winning, while Democrats continue to whistle past the political graveyard.”
The post Gaza and Israel go unmentioned in Democrats’ 2024 election autopsy report appeared first on The Forward.