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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.
We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.
“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.
Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.
Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived.
Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material.
Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known.
“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”
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He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution?
A Texas race that would normally focus on oil wells, pipelines and energy policy has spilled into accusations of antisemitism.
In a fundraising email last month, Bo French, the Republican nominee for the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, circulated an AI-generated image of Jon Rosenthal, his Jewish Democratic opponent, smiling inside the room where Russia’s Romanov royal family was killed after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Rosenthal has “much in common with the Marxist revolutionaries who brutally executed the Romanov family,” the email reads. “My opponent has spent his time in office mocking Christianity, the Virgin Birth, and Christian Communion, while voting against religious liberty and for the spread of Islam.”
The text “Radical Rosenthal” with a blood-red outline overlays the black-and-white image.
“I do see it as antisemitic,” Rosenthal, the only Jewish member of the Texas statehouse, told the Forward. “Look at the history of the Bolsheviks and how the Jews were scapegoated. To invoke that here and now is disturbing.”
French did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
The message echoes the antisemitic conspiracy theory “Judeo-Bolshevism” that Jews created or controlled communism to undermine Western society. It became central to the Nazi propaganda used as a justification for violence against Jews. The fundraising email was first reported by Texas Monthly magazine.
“This is something that Jews have faced in the arena forever,” said Arthur Pronin, the Jewish president of the Meyerland Area Democrats Club in Houston. “This sort of thing that ‘They’re not one of us. They’re communists. They don’t have allegiance to the values of this country.’ It has a very specific resonance.”
Rosenthal, 63, was raised as a Reform Jew in an interfaith family, with a Jewish father and Christian mother. When Rosenthal was 14, he spent a year in Israel attending school in Hebrew and learning to speak the language while his father taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He later became a mechanical engineer and worked in the oil and gas industry for 30 years before entering politics in 2017. In 2018, Rosenthal was elected to the state legislature, taking his oath of office on a Torah he received as a bar mitzvah gift.
In an interview with the Forward last year, Rosenthal said that he has at times faced antisemitic comments from members in the state legislature, including stereotypical remarks about Jews and money.
“Antisemitism is alive and well in Texas,” Rosenthal told the Forward.
Last year, he led opposition to a bill requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, which was signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in May 2025.
To underscore what he considered hypocrisy of self-identified Christian nationalists who supported the legislation, Rosenthal introduced an amendment to require the display of both the Jewish and Roman Catholic versions of the Ten Commandments, a measure that failed.
Rosenthal ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for Railroad Commissioner. He is seeking to become the first Democrat in more than three decades to win a seat on the three-member commission, created in 1891, that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry. (Despite its name, the Railroad Commission stopped regulating railroads in 2005.) Members are elected to serve six-year terms.
Rosenthal, who previously flipped his district in northwest Houston from red to blue, is making a case that his victory would “rebuke the politics of hate.”
A recent poll of 1,200 likely voters, with a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.8%, showed French with a slim three-point lead over Rosenthal. Rosenthal could benefit from the competitive U.S. Senate race, as other polls show Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton locked in a dead heat.
French’s past antisemitism accusations
It’s not the first time French, who previously served as a GOP leader in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has been accused of antisemitism. Last June, he posted a social media poll asking “Who is a bigger threat to America?” and gave two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.”
After backlash, French deleted the poll and apologized, writing that “Some people clearly misunderstood the intent.” Ignoring calls to resign from high-ranking Texas Republicans, he announced in November 2025 that he was stepping down to run for railroad commissioner.
He narrowly won the Republican primary in May against the incumbent railroad commissioner, Jim Wright, with 50.5% of the vote.
Rather than focus solely on traditional regulatory issues in his campaign, French has infused culture war themes. His campaign website says he will end “the influence of radical Islam and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) in Texas oil” and strengthen the railroad commission’s “partnership with our allies like Israel.” In March, French called on the U.S. to deport 100 million people and for Texas Republicans to more openly condemn Islam.
“To be fair, he seems to be a pretty equal opportunity hater,” Rosenthal told the Forward. “He says antisemitic stuff, but he’s also Islamophobic and anti-immigrant.”
The state’s top Republicans — Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows — had all endorsed Wright in the primary. Now, all three are backing French.
Others won’t embrace French but see his victory as inevitable. Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based Jewish Republican donor who supported French’s rival in the primary, said the controversial campaign talking points are unrelated to the commission’s work on regulating gas and oil.
“I mean, I’m dead set against all that, and that’s why I worked against him,” said Zeidman, who serves as chairman of the board of Petroflow Energy, an independent oil and gas production and consulting firm. “Would I vote for him? Probably not. But he’s going to win. He might be effective at what he’s doing.”
The GOP support for French alarms Jewish Texans like Pronin, who said the candidate’s social media poll alone should have disqualified him.
The July fundraising email “should be roundly condemned by the Democratic Party, but also by Republicans,” Pronin said. “They’ve had a history of saying French is not acceptable. So why is it acceptable now?”
The post He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution? appeared first on The Forward.
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‘An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies’
There is something surreal about Israel’s confrontation over Haredi education, which is rapidly coming to a boil. A dispute that has simmered for decades over whether ultra-Orthodox schools should be required to provide a basic secular education has become a test of something much larger: whether the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is still capable of governing in the interest of society when doing so threatens his own political survival.
At the center of the fight are the two major Haredi education networks, which educate most Haredi elementary-school children and receive full state funding in return for an obligation to teach the full core curriculum. For years, however, the state has largely failed to enforce that bargain, and the schools taught mainly religion.
The High Court in February demanded that the government explain why full funding continues despite failures to teach the required subjects. Still waiting for an answer, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara several days ago took the next logical step, declaring that continued funding will depend on schools actually teaching the core curriculum, employing qualified teachers, participating in national assessments and accepting meaningful state supervision.
The immediate fight is about schools and money, but there is a larger story.
The stakes are considerably larger than the argument over a few hours of mathematics or English. They concern whether Israel can remain the kind of modern state it has spent three-quarters of a century building.
Haredim already constitute almost a sixth of the population, their fertility rate remains around six and a half children per woman, and they account for more than a quarter of elementary-school pupils. On current demographic projections, their share of the population will continue rising dramatically for decades.
That might not in itself pose a national problem if the community were being equipped to participate fully in a sophisticated 21st-century economy. But among Haredi men especially, low employment, low earnings and weak proficiency in the basic skills demanded by the modern labor market remain profound problems.
A smaller proportion of highly productive workers would increasingly be asked to finance a larger population, sustain an advanced technological economy, support an expensive welfare state and pay for one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.
At some point the math becomes strategic. An Israel that becomes substantially poorer will find it harder to finance cutting-edge weapons, intelligence, research, universities and the other institutions on which its military superiority depends. An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies.
Clearly this cannot continue. But the Likud-led right has spent years avoiding decisions that might antagonize indispensable Haredi coalition partners. When the moderates were in power they had little stomach for this fight, preferring to kick the can down the road as they focused on a resolution with the Palestinians.
That left the attorney general, the courts and the civil service to enforce rules that elected politicians have proved unwilling to defend.
It is important to note that in Israel the attorney general is a very powerful civil servant. Indeed, curtailing this power has been at the center of Netanyahu’s attempted “judicial reforms.”
Baharav-Miara has effectively ruled that one cannot demand the full financial benefits of the state system while rejecting the obligations that accompany them.
For years Israel has managed to avoid confronting this contradiction by maintaining requirements on paper while tolerating a political system in which they were weakly supervised, inconsistently enforced or simply ignored.
The numbers suggest how hollow enforcement became. Research by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only a small fraction of Haredi boys’ schools failing to meet core-curriculum requirements actually suffered budget reductions. It was a failure to make the rules mean anything.
The political explanation is not difficult to discern. Haredi parties have become indispensable to governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by cementing this alliance. Thus their bargaining power has allowed questions of education, avoiding military service and ever-growing public subsidies to become matters of coalition arithmetic rather than coherent national policy.
Governments understood that enforcing requirements could provoke a confrontation with parties on which their parliamentary survival depended, while postponing enforcement carried almost no immediate political cost – until now. It is the demographic reality caused by the Haredi birthrate that is transforming the argument over mathematics and English into an argument about Israel’s future.
Judging by statements from Israel’s leading opposition politicians, a new Israeli government led by them would address the issue of a core curriculum and take significant steps to end the Haredi draft evasion.
Meanwhile, even if Netanyahu somehow wins, continuing the status quo will be hard, as the High Court and the Attorney-General are now forcing the issue. The rulings mean that schools must demonstrate that they are teaching the required curriculum, employ appropriately trained teachers, participate in assessment programs, cooperate with supervision and enforcement mechanisms and comply with reporting requirements.
This, of course, intersects with Israel’s larger and increasingly poisonous argument about the power of judges, legal advisers and civil servants. There is a legitimate democratic concern when unelected officials acquire enormous influence over public policy. Neither judges nor attorneys general should be treated as infallible guardians whose decisions are beyond criticism. But there is another danger, and Israel has spent years demonstrating it: elected politicians can become so dependent on organized political interests that they cease to perform some of the basic functions for which they were elected: to protect the country from great dangers. In this case the dangers are internal – and for all the regional wars of the past several years, the main coming conflict in Israel will be the one within.
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When Harry met ‘Hava Nagila.’ Belafonte’s lifelong love affair with Jewish culture
When Harry Belafonte let loose the word ”Day-O” in Webster Hall in 1955, it echoed a storied past.
He was in the ballroom recording “The Banana Boat Song,” a working man’s cry for reprieve, taken from the Caribbean’s banana loaders, who worked nights to escape the scorching heat, for his album Calypso.
Decades earlier, in the same, acoustically-blessed venue founded by a Jewish immigrant named Charles Goldstein, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America formed in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Emma Goldman, who encouraged a young Communist named Paul Robeson, later to become Belafonte’s mentor in politics and performance, gave speeches about anarchism and women’s rights there.
Belafonte’s song was a kind of call-and-response with history, and a Jewish one at that. He was no stranger to Jewish culture and would come to evangelize it. When he was a struggling actor, operating a burger joint in the Village at the height of the folk era, a local cantor wandered in and taught him a tune he’d make world famous: “Hava Nagila.”
“Harry’s affinity toward Jewish culture and for Jews was a huge part of his life,” said Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, the author of Daylight Come, a new biography on Belafonte.
Jelly-Schapiro first interviewed the late singer, actor and activist when he was a grad student writing his dissertation on the influence of Caribbean culture. He didn’t have a book in mind, but over the years he’d catch up with Belafonte at events around the globe. Jelly-Schapiro even scored invites to his birthday parties. An earlier book proposal was scuppered by news of Belafonte’s memoirs, but in the years since his death in 2022, Jelly-Schapiro wanted to tell the larger story of how he reshaped American culture, in the pre-Civil Rights era and in the dead center of the movement.
Daylight Come is a fascinating look at Belafonte’s extracurriculars. Outside of his tenure as a matinee idol, and the first solo act to crack 1 million LPs sold, Belafonte’s best friend was Martin Luther King, Jr., for whom his West End Avenue apartment served as a kind of New York headquarters for the Civil Rights leader. He had the ear of John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby. He mobilized movie stars for the 1963 March on Washington and bankrolled much of the campaign to desegregate the South. Among his other contributions was an early break he gave to a young Jewish Minnesotan looking to make it in the music industry (Bob Dylan’s first professional recording was as a harmonica player on the title track of Belafonte’s 1962 album Midnight Special).
I spoke with Jelly-Schapiro about Belafonte’s enduring connection to Yiddishkeit and the exceedingly strange film where he plays a Jewish angel on work probation. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The way you put it in the book is that Harold Bellanfanti, Harry’s dad, “said his father was a Dutch Jew from Martinique.” That makes me think it hasn’t been verified.
There’s no way to confirm it empirically, but that’s certainly the family story. Many family trees in the Caribbean are very mixed and hard to track because they involve mixtures of enslaved people from Africa and traders and others from the edges of Europe. He had this very mixed sort of family, but probably even more important is his growing up in New York around lots of Jews.
His mother worked as a domestic and a tailor. This Jewish tailor was kind to her and would give her these cheap suits that she dyed blue. But he also said in an interview once “I came to know the Irishman by knowing the culture of the Irish. I came to know the Jew by knowing the culture of the Jew.” He was quite literally around synagogues. He heard cantors sing. He was really taken as a young man with the stories of Sholem Aleichem and traditions of Yiddish storytelling and drama. That was a big part of his formation, and he talked about it.
He served in the Navy during World War II. Like many people of this generation, of all backgrounds, he was really shaped by this understanding of the Shoah and of the fight against Hitler.
I didn’t realize that he sang “Hava Nagila” in Berlin in 1958, so soon after the war; obviously the significance couldn’t have been lost on him there.
And “Hinei Ma Tov.” He made them a part of his repertoire. Germany is a fascinating moment. Here’s this Black Caribbean entertainer landing in Germany and singing “Hava Nagila” and really impressing on German folks who loved him — they absolutely adored Harry. He was a huge star in Germany, an even bigger star there than he was here — really conveying the sense of Jewishness as a culture and not just an identity. It’s an incredible fact that he was the conveyor of Jewish humanity and culture.
He took a break from making movies, but then right after MLK and Bobby Kennedy were shot, he comes back with this movie The Angel Levine, based on a Bernard Malamud story and co-starring Zero Mostel. Why do you think the material spoke to him at that moment?
In the late 1950s, he’d essentially turned his back on Hollywood. He had really scaled the heights of fame, and he appeared in some very big movies, but made this one called Island in the Sun in particular, which is a big blockbuster. But he hated the edit because basically they sort of neutered the interracial love affair that was at the center of it. They just had him drink out of the same coconut with Joan Fontaine. He was really soured on Hollywood. Did not want to take on roles or projects that, to his mind, were just designed to make whites comfortable, or that didn’t fit his politics. He was also hugely involved in the Civil Rights movement — I mean, he was making records, and he was still incredibly busy, but he was not making movies.
In this very dark, interesting time after the assassination of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, he was a little bit adrift personally and politically, but he decided to re-enter — make another movie, but on his own terms. The impetus for it was that he was really interested in the relationship between Blacks and Jews. He was interested in these old ideas about the human family and who gets to count as human, and mutual recognition of humanity of humans recognizing humans. But then you have this angel, so it adds this odd other element that’s really kind of interesting and strange. To me it’s an amazing thing that they just made that movie and it had national distribution because it’s so New York and so ethnic, for lack of a better term. This is way before Seinfeld made New York Jewishness hit the heartland. It was an experiment in trying to make movies that followed his politics, also in the sense of who was involved in the production.
He had all these interns of color; he wanted to integrate the entertainment industry and the film business. He also hired Bill Gunn, a very quirky Black screenwriter who’s kind of a genius. And Zero Mostel, who was blacklisted and then gave this memorable testimony in the House. An amazing character and a fellow denizen of the Upper West Side, he was a friend and a political ally of Harry’s. It’s a flawed and strange film, but it’s also a deeply touching one because it really gives it some of the complexities of the kind of deeply intimate and intertwined relationship between Blacks and Jews in New York, and also memorably features the Commandment Keepers up in Harlem, which is a synagogue of Black Jews of whose existence many people are ignorant outside New York or outside Harlem.
Belafonte was critical of the U.S. not participating in the 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa. This was the summit where a number of delegates declared Zionism as racism and singled out Israel for rebuke. He was asked about it on the Today Show the morning of 9/11, before the first tower was hit. I know that Harry had a relationship with Israel. He obviously was very supportive of the boycott of South Africa. People are pushing to boycott Israel. What do you think he’d think of Israel now?
His identification with Israel and with the cause of protecting Jewry and Jewish people was hugely important to him, and so he absolutely identified with Israel through much of his life in that way. I think certainly his politics were deeply anti-imperial, deeply anti-colonial, deeply skeptical of American foreign policy, and I think it, as evinced by that interview he gave on the morning of 9/11, he was developing a serious critique of American foreign policy and support for certain aspects of Israeli policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians. Like many American lefties of his generation, as his life went on, I think his critiques of Israel grew. By the time the current catastrophes unfolded in that part of the world, he was leaving public life. He didn’t speak concretely on them.
But he had very close relationships with the activists and the lefties and the causes that he really identified with in the last couple decades of his life — people involved with the prison abolition movement, certainly Black Lives Matter, but people like Angela Davis, Cornel West, these people who have obviously become extremely critical of Israel, and he was very close to many of these people in political formations. I think that was a journey for him.
The American Jewish Historical Society has an exhibit up now and it’s 75 objects about Jews in U.S. history, and one of them is a picture of Harry and Julie Robinson, his Jewish wife, at a march in the section on Civil Rights. The text says he was part Jewish.
He would joke he was the most popular Jew in America. It was not lost on him that many of the most important allies and backers of the Civil Rights movement were Jewish, and he was extremely close with Stan Levison, who was really kind of King’s chief strategist. His involvement, both in show business but also really vitally in the Civil Rights movement, involved a deep identification with a tradition of Jewish political engagement with progressive causes, and certainly his wife Julie, who was sort of a red diaper baby raised by Jewish Marxists, was part of that as well.
In the same way we talk about how he popularized a folk tune like “Day-O,” he introduced a lot of the country and the world to “Hava Nagila.” I don’t think someone who looks like an Old World cantor could have made quite the same impression with it
He gave a platform to Jewishness also being a deep well of folk culture. And he did the same for the Caribbean.
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