# JewsRock
> Challah… Fame. Jews. Rock. The Whole Spiel.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).
## Pages
### The Contributors
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/contributors-2/
Last updated: 2026-08-17T02:29:20.000Z
The writers behind the essays — where they were then, and what they’re up to now. Years mark when each piece first ran on JewsRock.org (2005–2006).

**Ari Abramowitz** — “Naked City” (2006)

Ari Abramowitz is a music writer and the author of The Pockit Rockit Music Finder.

**Spencer Ackerman** — “Don't Fear the Rockdots” (2005)

Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning national-security journalist, author of Reign of Terror, and writes the Forever Wars newsletter.

**Steve Almond** — “Heavy Shtetl” (2005)

Steve Almond is a bestselling author and writing teacher; his recent books include Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow.

**Al Aronowitz, z”l** — “A Night in the Life” (2005)

Al Aronowitz (z”l) was a pioneering rock journalist — the man who introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles. He died in 2005.

**Eli Attie** — “A One for the Money, a Two for the Money” · “Raising Hell” (2005)

Eli Attie is a television writer and producer (The Diplomat, Zero Day) whose credits also include The West Wing, House, and Billions.

**Kara Baskin** — “Unfortunate Son” (2005)

Kara Baskin is a journalist for The Boston Globe and Boston magazine and the author of Generation Yes.

**Craig Bromberg** — “The Situationist” (2005)

Craig Bromberg is an author and content strategist; he wrote The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren.

**Ethan Brown** — “The Godfather of Everything That Moves” (2006)

Ethan Brown is an investigative journalist and author (Murder in the Bayou) and a senior editor at Deep South Today.

**Mark Caro** — “Talmud” (2005)

Mark Caro is an author and host of the Caropop podcast, and a former Chicago Tribune reporter. This essay originally ran under the joke byline “Ben Fong-Torahs.”

**Bob Cook** — “Super Session Man” · “The Spirit of Rand” (2005–06)

Bob Cook is a sports and culture writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, NBC News, and the Chicago Reader.

**Sean Daly** — “Have Yourself a Jewish Little Christmas” (2006)

Sean Daly is a broadcast journalist at ABC Action News in Tampa and a former pop-music critic for the Tampa Bay Times.

**Rabbi Justin David** — “Any Major Dude” (2005)

Rabbi Justin David is a dean at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and formerly led Congregation B’nai Israel in Northampton.

**Eddie Dean** — “Nudie and the Technicolor Jacket” (2005)

Eddie Dean is a Washington, D.C.–based journalist and music historian.

**Paul Farhi** — “That Land Is Your Land” (2005)

Paul Farhi is a journalist and retired media reporter for The Washington Post.

**Marc Fisher** — “Rock, Radio, Riot” (2005)

Marc Fisher is a veteran journalist and author who spent four decades at The Washington Post.

**Franklin Foer** — “The Real Names of Jewish Rockers” (2005)

Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Last Politician.

**Jeff Garlin** — “Jeff Garlin on the Partridges” (2005)

Jeff Garlin is a comedian, actor, and stand-up known for Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Goldbergs.

**Jeffrey Goldberg** — “Subterranean Homeland Blues” (2005)

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and a co-founder of JewsRock.org.

**Izzy Grinspan** — “Stage Names of Jewish Rockers” (2005)

Izzy Grinspan is a digital editor at Harper’s Bazaar and previously edited at The Cut.

**Wil Haygood** — “Funny, He Didn't Look Jewish” (2005)

Wil Haygood is an author and Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University; his books include The Butler and Colorization.

**Anya Kamenetz** — “Rocking the Catskills” (2006)

Anya Kamenetz is an author and journalist, a former NPR education correspondent, and a senior advisor at the Aspen Institute.

**Jonathan Karp** — “The Holy Trinity of Brooklyn Rock” (2005)

Jonathan Karp is the publisher of the Simon Six imprint and the former president and CEO of Simon & Schuster.

**John Kelly** — “His Sharona” (2005)

John Kelly is a retired Metro columnist for The Washington Post, where he wrote “John Kelly’s Washington.”

**Dave McKenna** — “Riffed Off” (2005)

Dave McKenna is a staff writer at Defector, and previously wrote for Deadspin and Washington City Paper.

**Seth Rogovoy** — “Talkin' Hava Nagilah Blues” (2005)

Seth Rogovoy is an author and cultural critic who publishes The Rogovoy Report and writes for The Forward.

**David Segal** — “And the Dreidel Will Rock” · “The Ballad of Curly Oxide” (2005)

David Segal is a reporter for The New York Times and a co-founder of JewsRock.org.

**Doree Shafrir** — “The Yeshiva of Indie Rock” (2005)

Doree Shafrir is an author and host of the Forever35 podcast; she was previously a senior editor at BuzzFeed News.

**Emily Yoffe** — “Who's Your Mama?” (2005)

Emily Yoffe is a senior editor at The Free Press and the former “Dear Prudence” columnist at Slate.

---

*“z”l” (zichrono livracha, “of blessed memory”) follows the name of a contributor who has passed away.*
### About
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/about/
Last updated: 2026-09-06T19:13:44.000Z
Welcome, or welcome back, to Jewsrock.org.

In the early 2000s, David Segal, a music critic at the *Washington Post* who now writes for *The New York Times*, and Jeffrey Goldberg, then at *The New Yorker* and now the Editor-in-Chief of *The Atlantic*, asked their talented writer friends to contribute essays to an archive that would detail the Jewish contribution to popular music — specifically Rock and Roll.

The idea started with a 2001 interview David did with Scott Ian of Anthrax — born Scott Rosenberg — during the anthrax scare, natch, when he thought about the number of rock and rollers who grew up going to Hebrew school.

Perhaps the bigger mission, beyond answering “Billy Joel: Jew or not a Jew?", was to provide a cultural touchstone — to give Jews a source of pride in the outsized role our Tribe played in creating the soundtrack to everyone's lives.

This earnestness could have been viewed as almost naive back in 2005, when the collection of essays was first published online as the Jewish Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Twenty years later, the need for this exercise in cultural connection is not a “nice to have.” It is a necessity.

For two decades, great writing sat buried.

Around the original launch, we were attacked on a number of fronts that we didn’t see coming. The very name of the enterprise, the Jewish Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, became an existential crisis: each of us was sued for $100,000 for trademark infringement, and then the website was overwhelmed by malware making it inaccessible.

## The lawsuit

We innocently called it the Jewish Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Had we run a trademark search first, maybe we wouldn't have crossed the machers in Cleveland—with their grandiose $100M I. M. Pei–designed temple. Not quite the spirit of the Cavern Club, CBGB, or the Whiskey.

A little research would have unearthed that a few years before they came for us, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had sued a Cleveland photographer named Charles Gentile for trademark infringement, for selling a poster of the Rock Hall caught at sunset. Although they lost, it would have told us exactly what we were up against with the litigious Goliath on Lake Erie.

First they went after a guy named *Gentile*, and then they came for the Jews.

![Lawsuit Cover.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f1/f1/f1f13d17-9ec4-46fe-8eef-2d2d10c38fd7/content/images/2026/08/Lawsuit-Cover.jpg)  
They sued us in federal court on the theory that people might confuse their institution with our modest operation running out of our basement. When word of the lawsuit got out — had they never heard the admonition not to pick fights with guys who buy ink by the barrel? — we were inundated with offers to help.

It seemed as if every Jewish intellectual-property (IP) lawyer in America emailed offering to represent us, pro bono. We were grateful to all of them, and we went with a friend.

## Andy

Our lawyer was Andy Katz, z”l, an excellent IP attorney with a huge heart who loved music as much as anyone I’ve known. He had also been playing our game since the time he learned who was behind the makeup at his first 1970s concert — Kiss.

The irony was that had Cleveland simply asked nicely, we would have changed the name in a heartbeat. Violating their IP was an innocent mistake. But once they outed themselves as bullies, Andy’s commonsense counsel to us was to enjoy it, reap the PR benefits, and maybe cause them a bit of agita.

After what seemed like an appropriate amount of time for their white-shoe attorneys to be billing them at $800 an hour, we capitulated. Andy called their lawyers to say they’d won — we were renaming the enterprise “JewsRock.org.”

Andy died young on October 14, 2016\. Every year his friends and family run as Team Rave On in the WXPN 5K to raise money for [Musicians On Call](https://xpn.org/wxpn-musicians-on-call/?ref=jewsrock.org), which brings live music to the bedsides of people in the hospital.

## Henry

David and Jeffrey, besides being exceptional writers, are true mensches. At their direction, the original JewsRock.org was dedicated to the memory of my son, Henry Strongin Goldberg, z”l.

Henry was born in 1995 with a Jewish genetic disease, Fanconi anemia. As a little kid, he patiently sat through some of our earliest Jewish Rock and Roll organizing meetings at Firehook Bakery in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C. He was a beautiful boy who lit up any room he entered — a friend once described it best, saying he had a smile bigger than his face.

At four years old, he was also a real music fan with excellent taste.

In the spring of 2000, our family drove 1,200 miles to Minneapolis for Henry to have a bone marrow transplant, and we made the trip on his music. One of the CDs on repeat in the minivan was by the Americana hero Todd Snider, and one of the songs was his “Beer Run” — a very funny tune about some frat boys in Texas trying to scrounge up “a ten and a five-er, a car and key and a sober driver.” Henry and his little brother Jack learned to spell off of it, hollering “B-E-E-R-R-U-N, beer run” alongside Todd from the back seat.

Another song on repeat that trip came from our neighbors to the north, Barenaked Ladies. We played “If I Had a Million Dollars” over and over — maybe that’s what taught the kids math, or how to dream. The band’s co-founder and lead vocalist, Steven Page, grew up Jewish in Toronto, and their album *Barenaked for the Holidays* includes the traditional songs “Hanukkah, Oh Hanukkah” and “I Have a Little Dreidel,” plus an original, “Hanukkah Blessings.”

I put all of these in rotation on Radio Hanukkah, back when I was the producer of that groundbreaking channel on XM Satellite Radio. Besides spinning the Hanukkah hits, Radio Hanukkah featured a JewsRock talk show with Jeffrey and David interviewing Jewish artists like Matisyahu and Kinky Friedman.

## Todd

Henry’s mom, Laurie, later wrote a book about him — *Saving Henry* — and quoted “Beer Run” in it. Todd read the book and wrote to Laurie: *“what a story, what a family, what a kid… and man oh man am i ever honored to have been in that car with y’all on the way up to minnesota… let me know if the cause ever needs a folk singer.”* So we took him up on it, and Todd came and played a benefit concert in Washington, DC for the [Hope for Henry Foundation](https://hopeforhenry.org/what-we-do/meet-henry/?ref=jewsrock.org), which Laurie and I started in Henry’s name to bring some normalcy and a little joy to seriously sick kids and their families.

Every cause needs a folk singer. And according to Laurie: "For one night, we had the best there was."

Todd Snider died in November 2025\. He was 59.

## Why now

We started JewsRock.org for a pretty simple reason: to give people — especially kids — a sense of connection to being Jewish. Something to feel good about. Inspiration.

That feels more important now than it did then.

So it’s back — the essays, the puns, the shtik, all of it. Big thanks to Izzy Grinspan who pulled together the A-Z Challah Fame and Kara Baskin who edited much of the original content. Before you roll your eyes about who isn't included in the Challah Fame or maybe some dated references, remember that this is being republished in its original 2004-2005 form.

Thanks for being here.

Allen Goldberg *(no relation to Jeffrey — but in his words, “we’re all related”)*
### The Challah Fame
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/challah-fame/
Last updated: 2026-08-17T15:27:52.000Z
Long before anyone counted, Jews were shaping rock and roll — writing the songs, spinning the records, and, now and then, standing center stage with a guitar. As the original Challah Fame put it: if it weren't for a pair of Jewish songwriters, Elvis's hips might never have been censored, and if it weren't for a Jewish DJ, that joyous anarchy might never have been given the name "rock and roll."

What follows is our roll call — a hundred and fifty-odd bios of the players, from folk to punk to prog to funk, including a few who could take credit for inventing punk rock, a few more who lay claim to glam, and a surprising number who are children of Holocaust survivors. The original compendium was written by Izzy Grinspan.

## A

### Kenny Aaronson

Bassist Kenny Aaronson has played with a long list of rock luminaries, among them Bob Dylan, Hall & Oates, Rick Derringer, Foghat, Sammy Hagar, Billy Idol, Joan Jett, and the Rolling Stones. In the early seventies he was a member of the band Stories, which scored a number-one hit with the interracial love song "Brother Louie" in the summer of 1973\. Aaronson was raised in Brooklyn.

### Paula Abdul

Former cheerleader for the L.A. Lakers, now the arbiter of our country’s talent on "American Idol." Abdul began her career in music choreographing for Janet Jackson, but when Jackson complimented her voice, she used the earnings from her dance work to record "Forever Your Girl." Four of the album’s tracks went to the top of the charts: "Straight Up," "Cold-Hearted," "The Way That You Love Me," and "Opposites Attract," which may be the only number-one hit ever to have a video co-starring a large animated cat in suspenders. Paula Abdul is often counted among the many half-Jewish American celebrities, but she’s actually one hundred percent: her father is a Syrian Jew, while her mother is Jewish and French-Canadian. The Forgotten Exodus, a campaign on the behalf of Jews who have had to flee Arabic countries, uses her image on one of its posters.

### Lou Adler

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the man who brought *The Rocky Horror Picture Show* to the American screen was also a rock manager. Lou Adler began his career working with Herb Alpert, fellow member of the tribe, as co-manager of the surf group Jan and Dean. Soon he and Alpert were writing songs together under the name Barbara Campbell, but the partnership ended in 1964, when Adler founded his own record label, Dunhill Records. Dunhill found some success with the song "Eve of Destruction," by two songwriters on the label, but its real triumph was in signing the Mamas and the Papas. Ever-foresighted, Adler eventually sold Dunhill to ABC in order to focus more on planning (and recording) the Monterey Pop festival. The recordings made him a rich man, and he went on to found the label Ode, signing Carole King and producing her album Tapestry. In 1974 he brought over the British theatrical version of Rocky Horror and produced it as a film; not long after, he began managing the careers of two stoner humorists named Cheech and Chong.

### Aerosmith

Rumors abound (mostly on neo-Nazi websites) about the Jewish background of Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler, but whether or not Liv’s dad is a chosen person, it’s certain that drummer Joey Kramer was once a nice Jewish boy. Kramer, who counts Jon Bonham as a major influence, was born in the Bronx. As one of the few Jewish kids in a predominately Italian school, he hung around a group of tough older boys for protection; these bigger kids eventually inspired him to take up the drums. He hit upon the band name "Aerosmith" while still in high school, possibly inspired by Harry Nilsson's album Aerial Ballet. When two guys he knew in Boston invited him to be in a band with his old friend Steven, Kramer accepted, contributing both his simple yet powerful drumming style and the name Aerosmith.

### Alisha

One of the many mono-monikered pop stars of the eighties, Alisha was only fifteen when her self-titled album became a hit in 1985\. "All Night Passion," the first single, quickly became a dance club favorite. It was followed soon after by "Baby Talk," the bassline of which sounds an awful lot like "Into The Groove." When "Baby Talk" rose up the Billboard charts, the Brooklyn-born Alisha gained the dubious distinction of being the first dance diva ever to be dismissed as a wannabe Madonna.

### Herb Alpert

Herb Alpert was a musical mensch on both sides of the business, founding the wildly successful A&M records and playing trumpet as one of its acts. Born in LA in 1935, Alpert began his music career writing songs with Lou Adler, including the Sam Cooke hit "Only Sixteen." He founded A&M records with Jerry Moss in 1962; the label’s artists would ultimately range from the Carpenters to Cat Stevens to Janet Jackson and would include Alpert’s own group, the Tijuana Brass. Playing a south-of-the-border style known as "Ameriachi," Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass released ten Top 20 albums during the sixties.

### All Saints

Three out of the four members of the now-defunct British teen pop ensemble All Saints were Jewish: England-born Melanie Blatt and Canadian sisters Natalie and Nicole Appleton. Their single "I Know Where It’s At" reached number four in the British charts in 1996, entered the top 40 in the United States in 1997, and was a hit in Europe and Asia. By 1998, their self-titled album had gone platinum; their second effort, \*Saints and Sinners, \*was released in 2000 and also entered the charts. All three Jewish members of All Saints have gained media attention for their romances with fellow British rock stars: Melanie Blatt is married to Jamiroquai bassist Stuart Zander, Natalie Appleton’s husband is Liam Howlett of the Prodigy, and Nicole Appleton has a baby, Gene, with Liam Gallagher of Oasis.

### Anthrax

Scott Ian of Anthrax has managed to thrash his way into hard rock history despite being short and Semitic. Starting with 1984’s Fistful of Metal and continuing through the eighties, Anthrax set the standard for speed metal with lighting-fast guitar work and heavy vocals. Even as a metal god, Ian never forgot his heritage, referring to himself in conversation regularly as "the Jew." But depending on your definition of Judaism, Ian isn’t the only Yid in Anthrax. Born Jewish, guitarist Dan Spitz has been a Jew for Jesus since 2001.

### The Archies

Jews were making bands long before *Making the Band*. Just look at the Archies, a pre-fab ensemble concocted around the blueprint of the popular cartoon and best known for the infectious 1969 hit "Sugar, Sugar." Archie, Jughead, and Betty surely weren’t Jewish (though the jury is still out on Veronica), but the band’s mastermind Don Kirschner and producer Jeff Barry were indeed members of the tribe. And while none of the actual musicians in the Archies identified themselves as Jews, backing vocalist Andy Kim looks Jewish – he’s the spitting image of Neil Diamond, but he’s actually Lebanese.

### Army of Lovers

Swedish pop groups tend to be about as Jewish as Creed, but two of the Scandinavian pranksters in Army of Lovers were of Yiddish persuasion. Ex-hairdresser Jean-Pierre Barda is French-Algerian and Jewish, while former phone-sex operator Dominika Peczynski is a Polish-Russian Jew. In the late eighties, these Euro Jews and their colleagues delighted the continent with their high camp disco. By 1993, however, they had crossed the line from fame to infamy when their single "Israelism" was accused of mocking Jewish culture. The Army swore that the track, which added a much-needed backbeat and rap section to "Havenu Shalom Aleichem," celebrated Judiasm; naturally, while the controversy raged in Europe, the song went to the top of the charts in Israel.

### Asleep at the Wheel

Despite their incredibly emo band name, Asleep at the Wheel is not made up of four sad nineteen-year-olds from New Jersey; instead, the band is composed of an ever-shifting number of Western swing musicians. At 6’7", lead singer Ray Benson is somewhat of a Jewish giant. Also Jewish is the band’s steel guitarist, Lucky Oceans (who was born with the far more plausible name Reuben Gosfield). Asleep at the Wheel has been playing songs in the style of Merle Haggard and Bob Wills since 1970\. Their discography, which includes the 1975 hit record Texas Gold, 1978’s Collision Course, and their 1987 comeback album, Asleep at the Wheel 10, has earned them a whopping nine Grammy awards over the course of their career.

### Elan Atias

Elan Atias may not be the most famous person to front the Wailers, but he’s definitely more Jewish than Bob Marley. In 1997, when the Orthodox Atias was 22, he was picked as one of many in a succession of post-Marley lead singers for the Wailers. Atias has also toured with Santana and played with members of No Doubt. His recent cover of Roxy Music’s "Slave to Love" featured Gwen Stefani on backing vocals, and he is currently working with Tony Kanal on new tracks due out this year.

## B

### The Bad Livers

The Bad Livers may have been the most experimental neo-country band ever to come out of Austin. Alongside banjo-players and guitarists Danny Barnes and Bob Grant, Jewish bassist and tubist Mark Rubin helped create a sound that brought both punk influences and sampling techniques to bluegrass. Rubin was raised in rural Oklahoma and grew up listening to klezmer – yet another of the diverse musical traditions the Livers added to their eclectic Austin country.

### Bad Religion

Brett Gurewitz fits the model of other Jewish musicians with record labels, but with one notable exception: his label, Epitaph, is one of the most influential in punk rock. Gurewitz was raised Jewish but had become disillusioned enough by the time he was fifteen to name his band Bad Religion. Founded in 1980, the band has a lifespan unrivaled in the fast-moving world of hardcore: Despite several lineup changes and a long hiatus on Gurewitz’s part, Bad Religion is still around today. Gurewitz’s other project, Epitaph Records, has exhibited equal stamina. Epitaph was founded in 1983 as a way for Bad Religion to release its records. By the early nineties, the label had a number of hit bands; today, its roster ranges from the indie hip-hop of Sage Francis to the Swedish neo-garage group the Hives.

### The Band

In addition to backing Robert Zimmerman on what would eventually become the Basement Tapes, the Band had their own Jewish star. Robbie Robertson, who played rhythm guitar and wrote most of the Band’s songs, was born in Canada in 1944 to a Mohawk mother and a Jewish father. He was recruited to be a member of Ronnie Hawkins’ rockabilly band the Hawks; as the Hawks morphed into the Band, Robertson morphed into its most recognized member. The band gained popularity as Dylan’s backing group, but proved their chops with their own\* Music from Big Pink\* in 1968\. After permanently making his mark on American music with four more albums, Robertson went on to score several Martin Scorsese films, including Raging Bull.

### The Bangles

Who knew that the voice behind "Walk Like an Egyptian" grew up singing at Passover seders? Lead Bangle Susanna Hoffs is an L.A. Jewish girl who formed the band in 1981 by placing a want ad. Originally called "Colors" and then "the Supersonic Bangs," the group settled on their name when they learned that "the Bangs" was already taken. Their *Different Light* garnered national attention with the Prince-written "Manic Monday," and subsequent hits included their cover of fellow-Semites Simon and Garfunkel’s "Hazy Shade of Winter," the perennial karaoke favorite "Eternal Flame," and of course, the aforementioned track about the land of Mizrayim, which was number one on the charts in 1985.

### The Barenaked Ladies

These Toronto boys played for years before their breakthrough hit, "One Week," climbed the charts in 1998\. The band formed in 1988, taking their name from an old joke the vocalists had shared at a Bob Dylan concert as teens (they were inventing fictional bands with goofy names due to sheer boredom – Dylan wasn’t at his best back then). For most of the nineties, the Barenaked Ladies were a cult act, charming college kids with silly pop songs like "Be My Yoko Ono," but 1998’s \*Stunt \*brought them into the mainstream. Jewish frontman Steven Page recently included three Chanukah songs on the band’s holiday album *Barenaked for the Holidays*, and all five Ladies refrain from touring during the Jewish holidays.

### MC Paul Barman

"My dandy voice makes the most anti-choice granny’s panties moist," boasts MC Paul Barman on one track. That’s one way to put it. Barman raps flowlessly through his nose, dropping filthy but clever lyrics with so little rhythm that he generally sounds like a parody of a white rapper. But his debut, \*It’sVery Stimulating, \*was produced by Prince Paul, and he’s collaborated with such hip-hop luminaries as Deltron 3030.

### Steve Barri

Brooklyn-born producer Steve Barri got his start when legendary manager and label-head Lou Adler took him under his wing. Barri produced tracks for artists such as Jan and Dean and Johnny Rivers, for whom he wrote "Secret Agent Man" with his writing partner P.F. Sloan. As the head of A&R for Dunhill Records, he was responsible for signing Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night, Steely Dan, Jimmy Buffett, the Four Tops, and Dusty Springfield. In the early eighties, he began doing A&R for Motown Records, bringing in Rick James, the Commodores, and Lionel Richie. Barri was known for producing records with a rich, full sound; some of his greatest hits include albums by the Four Tops, Mama Cass Elliot, and Smokey Robinson.

### Jeff and Mark Bass

The Bass Brothers – yes, it’s their real name – are the two Jewish guys responsible for Eminem’s sound. Growing up in Detroit years before Eminem made Eight Mile Road famous, the Basses got their start young, when the 12-year-old Jeff and 8-year-old Mark auditioned for a Greyhound commercial. Three years later, the brothers set off to make their musical fortune with Jeff’s band Dreamboy. By the early nineties they were producing hip-hop acts; they joined up with Eminem in 1992 after hearing him on the radio performing at an open mic. Years later, the Bass Brothers would produce most of the tracks on both *Slim Shady* and *The Marshall Mathers LP*. They also co-write many of Em’s songs, and when *Eight Mile* came out, Jeff and Mark Bass shared an Oscar with Eminem for their work on "Lose Yourself."

### The Beastie Boys

Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D. began playing together as a hardcore punk act in the early eighties, when they were still known as the New York high school kids Adam Horowitz, Adam Yauch, and Michael Diamond. They were discovered by legendary rap producer Rick Rubin in 1984, signed to Rubin’s new label Def Jam in 1985, and catapulted into fame with the release of the frat-party classic *License to Ill* in 1986\. It would be hard for the band that wrote "Girls" not to mature on their subsequent albums, but nobody expected them to become post-modern heroes (their sample-crazy, Dust-Brothers-produced *Paul’s Boutique* prefigured Beck's \*Odelay \*by several years) or pious activists (their Tibetan Freedom concerts brought together huge names in alternative rock throughout the late nineties). Bonus ancestral note: Adam Horowitz’s father is playwright Israel Horowitz.

### The Beat Farmers

The Beat Farmers were formed in San Diego in 1983 as a country band with an L.A. punk rock influence. Leader Country Dick Montana recruited a host of musicians, including Buddy Blue, a Jewish fellow born Buddy Seigel, who played with the band until 1985, leaving shortly after their debut album was signed to Curb Records. The Farmers went on to play for the next ten years, collaborating with such musicians as John Doe of X and the Jewish singer (and former stripper) Candye Kane, until Montana’s death in 1995.

### Beck

Beck’s mother, Bibbe Hansen, was not only Andy Warhol’s youngest Factory actress but also the daughter of a Jewish mother whose own mother was also Jewish. As a result, by Halachic rules, Beck Hansen is a Jew, despite a non-religious background and a recent interest in Scientology. Like his fellow Jewish pranksters the Beastie Boys, Beck is a master of collage, mixing up folk, blues, country and funk and layering the whole stew with a hefty dollop of samples. His first album, *Mellow Gold*, became a success after 1994’s "Loser" taught a generation of kids how to explain how incredibly not cool they were in Spanish. His next big hit was 1996’s\* Odelay\*, which spawned six singles, followed by *Mutations* in 1998 and the ridiculously funked-out *Midnite Vultures* in 1999\. In recent years, Beck seems to have finally shed his perpetual adolescence, releasing the melancholy *Sea Change* in 2002 and marrying the actress Marissa Ribisi.

### Dan Bern

Dan Bern’s angry, literate folksongs have earned him the "new Dylan" label, and his tongue-in-cheek riffs on Dylan’s talking blues haven’t exactly helped shake that comparison. Unlike the former Mr. Zimmerman, though, Bern has never come close to hiding his Jewish background. He often performs under his family’s original surname, Bernstein, and his backing band is called the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy. Bern’s songs have titles like "Jew from Kentucky" and "My Name is Bernstein" (in which Bern claims that Jesus was born with the name Jesus Lipshitz), but his most Jewish lyrical moment might be in "Jewish Guys." When a woman informs him of Jesus’s many miracles, Bern’s narrator replies, "You don't know a lot about Jewish guys/ That's just the way we are/ All that stuff they say about Jesus/ I can do sittin’ in my car."

### Biohazard

This Brooklyn metal band is known for being one of the first to incorporate elements of hip-hop into their sound. Their 1992 album *Urban Discipline* gave the band a reputation for beat-heavy songs about the ravages of city life. Drummer Danny Shuler and bassist/vocalist Evan Seinfeld are both Jewish; Seinfeld even proclaims his heritage with a somewhat paradoxical Star of David tattoo.\*

### Roy Bittan

See Max Weinberg.

### Jack Black

Jack Black (that’s his real name) grew up in Los Angeles, where he discovered his acting skills during a game of Freeze after a Passover seder one year. Black’s career took off after he became a member of Tim Robbins’ acting troupe at U.C.L.A. As an actor, he has often played musically-inclined roles, including Barry in *High Fidelity* and the hero Dewey in *School of Rock*. But Black is also a rockstar of sorts as one half of Tenacious D. The joke-rock duo gots its start with just one song: a tribute to the greatest song in the world, although not that song itself (because the band had forgotten how that one went). The D had an HBO series in 1999; it didn’t last long, but Black and bandmate Kyle Gass have toured the nation twice now and are at work on an upcoming Tenacious D movie.

### Chris Blackwell

Chris Blackwell founded Island Records, the label that introduced ska and reggae to Europe and the US. Blackwell was born in London, but his family had long-standing ties to Jamaica; they had founded the first synagogue there, and when Blackwell was young, they moved back to the island. Blackwell’s career would reverse that trip across the Atlantic. He started Island Records in Kingston in 1959, but moved it to London in the early sixties. There, he quickly became the number-one provider of Caribbean music to the city’s growing West Indian population. He found his biggest reggae success with Bob Marley but eventually branched out to produce rock and pop, including such artists as U2, Robert Palmer, and Tom Waits. When the observant boy band Evan and Jaron went looking for a record label that would honor their "Shabbat clause," they turned to Island, and Blackwell was happy to accommodate them.

### Blondie

Shiksa goddess Debbie Harry may be the face of Blondie, but the band wouldn’t be the same without founder and guitarist Chris Stein, a Jewish fellow from Brooklyn (at least according to Guy Oseary's 2001 book *Jews Who Rock*, although Stein has been known toclaim otherwise). Stein met Harry in 1973 while she was waitressing at Max’s Kansas City. They had some success with their first two albums, but their real breakthrough into the nation’s consciousness came in 1978 with their third album *Parallel Lines*, featuring the classic new-wave tracks "Hanging on the Telephone," "Sunday Girl," and "One Way or Another." Both "Heart of Glass" from *Parallel Lines* and "Call Me," their theme to the movie *American Gigolo*, simultaneously topped the charts in the US and the UK.

### Blood, Sweat and Tears

One particularly intense night at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, Al Kooper bled all over his organ keyboard. He’d just formed a new band after leaving the Blues Project, and this incident inspired their name. Blood, Sweat and Tears was comprised of Kooper, Blues Project guitarist Steve Katz, and four other Jewish musicians: Bobby Colomby on drums, Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss on trumpet, and Fred Lipsuis on sax and piano. The bassist and trombonist weren’t MOT, but the band did hire a string ensemble for their first album that was three-quarters Jewish. This album, *Child Is Father to the Man*, has been called one of the best of the sixties. With horns, Kooper was able to add soul elements to the blues-rock of his previous band, while pushing it in the direction of jazz. Only about a month after the album was released, however, Kooper took a job at Columbia Records. He was replaced by a Canadian singer named David Clayton-Thomas, whose creamy voice can be heard on Blood, Sweat and Tears’ most famous singles: "You Made Me So Very Happy" and "Spinning Wheel." Without Kooper, the band lost some of their credibility, a problem that was greatly compounded by subsequent choices to tour on behalf of Nixon’s State Department, play Vegas, and compose music for Barba Streisand. They lasted for quite a while despite demonstrably poor judgment, but *Child Is Father to the Man* remains their greatest creative endeavor.

### Michael Bloomfield

Raised in a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago, Michael Bloomfield received his first guitar for his Bar Mitzvah. He also received a career-making favor from the rabbi who officiated, Edgar Siskin, when Siskin introduced young Michael to Columbia Records executive John Hammond, Sr. Hammond had signed Bob Dylan, and in 1964, he added Bloomfield to his roster of successful musicians. After an adolescence spent sneaking out of the house to hear music in Chicago’s clubs, Bloomfield was as knowledgeable about the blues as any young Jewish kid possibly could be—he’d even played with the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King. This made him a natural session musician, and he went on to a series of studio gigs, most notably as guitarist on Dylan’s *Highway 61 Revisited*. (He also backed Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.) Bloomfield’s own bands were all acclaimed for their innovation and energy, starting with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. He played guitar on their 1965 self-titled debut and their 1966 raga-influenced East-West, then quit in 1967 to found Electric Flag. In ’68, he teamed up with Al Kooper to make *Super Sessions* and *The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper*. 1969 saw the release of *2 Jews Blue*s with Barry Goldberg, an album Columbia didn’t want Bloomfield to cut. Bloomfield never hid his Jewish identity, though, occasionally even playing under the goofy name "Fast Fingers Finkelstein." In 1981, when he died (allegedly of a drug overdose), Barry Goldberg called him a "true hero not just to the Jewish people, not just to musicians, but to the world."

### Blue Öyster Cult

Of course it was Jews who discovered the hard-rock potential of the umlaut. Having gone through several even-worse band names (Soft White Underbelly, Oaxaca), founders Sandy Pearlman and Richard Melzter settled on "Blue Oyster Cult" just before signing to Columbia in 1971\. Known for playing "thinking man’s heavy metal," BÖC had their biggest success with "(Don’t Fear) the Reaper," which was featured in the horror movie \*Halloween \*and hit the top 40 charts. Read more about Blue Öyster Cult in Don't Fear the Rockdots.

### The Blues Project

Al Kooper, keyboards. Danny Kalb, guitar. Steve Katz, guitar and vocals. Andy Kulberg,bass. Roy Blumenfeld, drums. How’s that for a Jewish line-up? Sure, there have been other all-Jewish bands in the history of rock. There have even been other bands with five Jewish members; see J. Geils. But no other band—certainly no band this influential—has consisted entirely of what the rock writer Scott Bernarde points out is half a minyan. (They had a non-Jewish singer for a short while, but he left after the first album). The Blues Project formed in 1965 out of a group of musicians who had little in common other than their Jewishness. Somehow, they were able to create a sound that included Kooper’s rock leanings, Kalb’s love of the blues, Katz’s pop sensibility, Kulberg’s jazz and classical training, and Blumenfeld’s interest in African and Caribbean music. *Projections*, released in 1966, is widely considered the band’s finest achievement. Not long thereafter, though, the Blues Project split over the subject of horns. The pro-brass Kooper left to form Blood, Sweat and Tears; the rest of the band recorded one more album and then drifted apart. (See also Al Kooper, Blood, Sweat and Tears.)

### Marc Bolan

See T. Rex.

### Michael Bolton

Love him or hate him (is there anyone left who actually loves him?), Michael Bolton is undeniably Jewish. Born Michael Bolotin in 1954, Michael changed his name in 1983 after finding middling success as a singer-songwriter. Amazingly, his career as Michael Bolotin involved a stint as lead singer for a metal band, Blackjack, which released two albums with Polydor. Bolton found his real niche singing honky-fied versions of soul classics when his cover of Otis Redding’s "(Sitting on) the Dock of the Bay" became a Top 40 hit in 1987\. His next album, *Soul Provider*, contained five Top 40 singles, and the follow-up, *Time, Love, and Tenderness*, had four more. By the nineties, his audience had come to their senses; 1997’s \*All That Matters \*was a flop, and Bolton turned his hand to singing opera instead of the blue-eyed soul that made him famous.

### Bon Jovi

It’s hard for a band of Jersey guys not to have a Jewish member, but the boys of Bon Jovi have found themselves a real mensch in keyboardist David Bryan. Bryan was born David Rashbaum in Edison, NJ. He and the young Jon Bongiovi played in bands together as teenagers. When they hit the big time with a Polygram/Mercury deal in 1983, both David and Jon changed their names. Bon Jovi had three Top 10 hits with \*Slippery When Wet \*and five more with *New Jersey*. Five of their singles, including the classic "Living on a Prayer," reached number one on the charts. They are still beloved around the world – and David Bryan is still very active in his local shul.

### Karla Bonoff

The LA-based singer-songwriter Karla Bonoff wrote three songs for Linda Ronstadt’s 1976 album *Hasten Down the Wind*. Her success with Ronstadt won her a recording contract with Columbia, and the third of her albums for them contained "Personally," which was a Top 40 hit. Bonoff worked on several soundtracks in the eighties, most notably *Footloose*.

### Bush

British grunge heartthrob Gavin Rossdale is half-Jewish; his father is descended from Russian Jews. In 2000, Rossdale recited the Motzi at a Friday-night concert in Austria as a statement against the nation’s newly elected radical right-wing government (and also as a blessing over its bread). Bush gained fame in the early nineties on the strength of their post-Nirvana hooks, reaching the Top Ten with the singles "Little Things," "Comedown," and "Glycerine." Their albums *Sixteen Stone* and *Razorblade Suitcase* were grunge staples, but the Seattle sound had fallen out of favor by the 1999 release of *The Science of Things*.

\*In Leviticus 19:28, the Torah forbids tattooing: "You shall not scrape your flesh for a (dead) soul, and tattoos do not put upon you, I am the Lord."

## C

### Randy California

See Riffed Off by Dave McKenna.

### The Calling

Thanks to their name and the religious overtones of some of their songs, the Calling are sometimes mistaken for a Christian rock band. However, both singer Alex Band and guitarist Aaron Kamin are Jewish. Band and Kamin met when the twenty-year-old Kamin began dating fifteen-year-old Band’s sister. Despite the age difference, the two began playing together, actually doing a stint in a group called Generation Gap. The Calling had a chart-topping single with "Wherever You Go" from the album *Camino Palermo*.

### Vanessa Carlton

Born in a small town in Pennsylvania, Vanessa Carlton was something of a musical prodigy. She began her studies at the School of American Ballet in New York at age fourteen, but the rigidity of ballet frustrated her, leading her to take up the more individualistic craft of songwriting. *Be Not Nobody* debuted in 2002\. Its single "A Thousand Miles" reached the charts, and Carlton’s follow-up album, *Harmonium*, came out last year.

### Rick Chertoff

Rick Chertoff produced hit albums for Cyndi Lauper, the Hooters, Joan Osborne, and Sophie B. Hawkins, among others. While attending the University of Pennsylvania, he met fellow Jews Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian. The two went on to form the Hooters; Chertoff went on to produce them. In 1996 Chertoff was nominated for a Grammy for the Joan Osborne song "One of Us," which was written by Bazilian, but he’s probably best known for his work on Cyndi Lauper’s *She’s So Unusual.*

### Leonard and Phil Chess

The Chess brothers, who immigrated from Poland as young boys, ran the most influential blues label of the fifties. Signing such legends as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon, Chess Records set the standards for Chicago blues. The label also had a hand in kick-starting rock and roll when Leonard signed Chuck Berry in 1995.

### The Clash

Lest you think there was a single band in the heyday of punk that was entirely Jew-free, we present for your consideration Mick Jones of the Clash. Jones grew up in a working-class household in Brixton, the son of a Jewish mother whose own mother was a Russian refugee. True, he played in a hard rock band called the London SS – ah youth – but the named changed with the addition of a few new members, including a belligerent young fellow named Joe Strummer. After a stint supporting the Sex Pistols on the famous Anarchy Tour, the band released a self-titled album (cover photo taken by friend and great Jewish rock photographer Kate Simon). It hit number 12 on the British charts and was declared unfit for radio play in the US – a double punk coup. By 1979’s *Give 'Em Enough Rope,* the band members had simultaneously developed social consciousnesses and impressive arrest records. It wasn’t a huge hit, but the band released *London Calling* that same year, debuting at number one on the British charts, hitting 27 in the US, and forever earning themselves a place in the rock pantheon. 1983’s *Combat Rock* was even more successful, but that fall, Mick Jones was fired from the band. He went on to form Big Audio Dynamite; the Clash went on to release one more, very mediocre LP and then disbanded.

### Johnny Clegg

Johnny Clegg founded South Africa’s first multi-racial band, Juluka. Their first album got grassroots attention but never made it to the radio due to racial prejudice. With their second album,\* African Litary\*, Juluka achieved a South African hit, and by their third album, *Scattering*, they had a host of international fans. When Juluka broke up, Clegg went on to form the immediately-successful Savuka, which sold two million copies of its first album. *Heat, Dust, and Dreams*, the band’s fourth album, was nominated for a Grammy in Best World Music.

### Clem Snide

Named after a character from William S. Burrough’s druggie classic *Naked Lunch*, Clem Snide play country-inflected indie rock. Lead singer and guitarist Eef Barzelay was raised Jewish in New Jersey. Drummer Ben Marcus is also fifty percent Jewish and one hundred percent rock star; as Barzalay tells us on a birthday song for his bandmate on 2003’s *The Soft Spot*, "half-Jewish boys make kick-ass drummers."

### Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen was a novelist and a poet before he became a singer, but before that, he was just a Jewish boy from Canada struggling to join his family’s dry goods business. Cohen’s first album, *The Songs of Leonard Cohen*, appeared in 1968 after Judy Collins spotlighted his songwriting talents with her version of "Suzanne." A perennial college favorite, Cohen has always been more popular as a songwriter than a singer, as well-known covers of his haunting "Hallelujah" by both Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright demonstrate.

### Nudie Cohn

See Nudie and the Technicolor Jacket by Eddie Dean.

### Counting Crows

The hedonistic world of rock and roll affords many temptations for the Jewish rocker: In March 2003, the Counting Crows’ Jewish lead singer Adam Duritz was photographed cooking pork ribs in *Blender.* Duritz explained that he’d been led down the road of traif by that notorious corrupter Gibby Haines of the Butthole Surfers, who taught him his secret Dr. Pepper marinade. The Counting Crows, who got their start playing coffeehouses in San Francisco, rose to fame with their 1993 album *August and Everything After* on the strength of the Van Morrison-esque single "Mr. Jones." Since then, the Crows have released three CDs and a double live album, honing their dark but laid-back sixties sound with each release.

### Country Joe and the Fish

Best known for their anti-Vietnam War anthem "I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag," Country Joe and the Fish were one of the many legendary groups to play at Woodstock. Their three albums, all released in the late sixties, combined folk music with psychedelic rock and jazz. In 2003, drummer Gary Hirsch told rock biographer Scott Benarde that he’d always thought of the group as a Jewish band. Actually, with a Jewish drummer, a Jewish keyboardist, two half-Jewish guitarists, and a bass player whose maternal grandmother was a Jew, the band is officially only 65% Jewish.

### Cream

Although the sixties proto-supergroup Cream was technically a trio of non-Jews, their "silent" fourth member was a member of the tribe. Pete Brown grew up Jewish in London. He was a published poet by the time he reached the age of 18; Cream drummer Ginger Baker used to attend his poetry readings, which is how he met the band. Brown collaborated with Cream on many of their songs, including "I Feel Free," "White Room," and "Sunshine of Your Love."

### Jim Croce

Like Sammy Davis Jr, Jim Croce is a famous convert. Raised in an Italian Catholic family, Croce horrified his parents when he fell in love with a very young folksinger named Ingrid Jacobson. He converted for her and married her in a traditional Jewish ceremony that was not attended by a single member of his family other than his brother. Croce released two well-received albums and had four hits, including "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," which went to number one in 1973\. Tragically, he died in a plane crash while finishing up a tour for his second record, *Life and Times*.

### Culture Club

Culture Club was hugely popular in its heyday, achieving seven straight Top Ten hits in the UK and six in the States, including "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" and "Karma Chameleon." The band’s gender-bending lead singer Boy George (who is not Jewish) has said that the Jewish T. Rex frontman Mark Bolan inspired his own rock star persona; he also played for a while in an early incarnation of Bow Wow Wow after being invited to join the band by the Jewish punk impresario Malcolm McLaren. Culture Club drummer Jon Moss is Jewish. He had previously played with Adam and the Ants and the Damned.

### The Cyrkle

The Cyrkle are remembered primarily for two hits: "Red Rubber Ball" and "Turn Down Day." The band formed as the Rhondells at Lafayette College in the early sixties but soon relocated to Greenwich Village and changed its name to Cyrkle on the advice of John Lennon. Cyrkle had two Jewish members, guitarist and pianist Don Danneman and drummer Marty Fried, but it also got by with some help from its Jewish friends, including Paul Simon (who co-wrote "Red Rubber Ball") and Beatles manager Brian Epstein. These connections helped the Cyrkle achieve brief but widespread popularity between 1966 and 1967.

## D

### Clive Davis

Arguably the greatest talent scout in the history of rock, Clive Davis went into the music business because he thought being a young lawyer didn’t confer enough status. He went on to become a major industry macher, signing such notables as Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Chicago, Patti Smith, the Grateful Dead, Whitney Houston, and Sarah MacLachlan. He founded Arista Records, which is named after the honor society he was a member of in high school. He later formed LaFace records with Babyface and cut a 50/50 deal to form Bad Boy with Sean "Puffy" Combs. Despite publicly claiming to have no ear for hip-hop, Davis was thus also indirectly responsible for the careers of Monica, Outkast, TLC, Faith Evans, and the Notorious B.I.G. Most recently, he started J Records – it’s his middle initial, which weirdly enough stands for nothing – and turned Alicia Keys into a megastar.

### Sammy Davis Jr

Read about Sammy Davis Jr in Funny, He Didn't Look Jewish by Wil Haygood.

### Taylor Dayne

Jewish girl Leslie Wonderman changed her first name to "Taylor" and her last name to "Dayne" to become one of the pop divas of the eighties. After two unsuccessful stints in rock bands, she cut a solo called "Tell It To My Heart" which entered the Top Ten in 1987\. Both her debut album, also called *Tell It To My Heart*, and the follow-up, *Can’t Fight Fate*, produced three top ten hits.

### Neil Diamond

Known as the Jewish Elvis, Neil Diamond is responsible for some of the catchiest not-quite-rock songs of the twentieth century. First hitting the charts with "Cherry, Cherry" in 1966, he went on to score five Top 20 hits in a row. Diamond wrote such classics as "I’m a Believer," "Sweet Caroline," and "Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon." His filmic career includes the soundtrack to the movie \*Jonathan Livingston Seagull \*and the lead role in the 1980 remake of *The Jazz Singer*, the plot of which he revamped to better reflect his own life in show business. Little-known Neil Diamond trivia: he attended NYU on a fencing scholarship.

### The Dictators

Before the Ramones, there were the Dictators. Founded in 1974 by Andy Shernoff and music critic Richard Meltzer, the band set a New York standard, playing balls-out garage rock in a town where almost no one actually has a garage. Their sound was dirty, their subject matter trashy (wrestling, fast food). They enlisted frontman Richard Blum, aka Handsome Dick Manitoba, after he proved himself totally incompetent as a roadie. In short, they were punk rock before punk rock actually existed. Despite being wildly influential – this is a band that featured both ACDC and Cheap Trick as opening acts – they were hated by the critics, and by the time their aesthetic caught on in the late seventies, they had broken up.

### Dire Straits

See Mark Knopfler.

### The Doors

Robby Krieger, the Doors’ guitarist, may be the only Jewish Door, but his contribution to the band came from a very different cultural tradition. Krieger studied Indian music at UCLA and met Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek at a meditation session. The Doors formed soon after, in 1965, and found instant success with their single "Light My Fire" in 1967\. Their first, self-titled album was enormously popular. While the band continued playing together for the next four years, they were never able to release an album that was quite so gorgeously dark and rich.

### Bob Dylan

Perhaps the single most famous Jew in rock, Bob Dylan is a self-made enigma. Born Robert Zimmerman in 1941, Dylan began fabricating an image for himself from his first performances at the University of Minnesota, taking his new last name from the poet Dylan Thomas. Upon his arrival in New York in 1961, he became a staple of the Greenwich Village folk scene with his signature twisty, evocative lyrics and developing political sensibilities, all set to a classically folky acoustic backing. 1962’s *The Freewheeling Bob Dylan* went to number twenty-three on the charts and introduced Dylan to the world outside of New York. In 1965, Dylan famously shocked his fans with an electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, after releasing the partly electric *Bringing It All Back Home*. As the title of the famous documentary about him suggests, he never looked back, releasing literally dozens of albums of both electric and acoustic folk-rock throughout the rest of his career. A mysterious period in the late seventies saw Dylan’s conversion to Christianity, but he was back to the Jewish faith by 1983\. For more about Bob Dylan, see Talkin' Hava Nagliah Blues, A Night in the Life and Subterranean Homeland Blues.

### Jakob Dylan

As the son of one of rock’s most influential musicians, Jakob Dylan has done an admirable job developing a rock and roll career of his own. Sure, the famous name didn’t hurt, and it must have helped that he came equipped with piercing blue eyes and unholy cheekbones, courtesy of his stunning mother Sara Lowndes. But Dylan’s band the Wallflowers had a respectable showing in the charts with their 1996 album *Bringing Down the Horse*, producing the pleasant-enough hits "One Headlight" and "6th Avenue Heartache."

## E

### Elastica

Elastica lead guitarist/vocalist and Jewess Justine Frischmann couldn’t have been more of a rock goddess in the nineties. A founding member of Suede with her then-boyfriend Brett Anderson, Frischmann left the band to start her own group in 1991, explaining in one interview that she’d "rather be Pete Best than Linda McCartney." She proceeded to become half of Brit-pop’s most celebrated couple when she began dating Blur’s Damon Alburn. Meanwhile, Elastica’s singles "Stutter" and "Connection" climbed the charts, although they were criticized by many who said that their riffs were both lifted directly from Wire songs. Frischmann was also ragged by the press for her posh upbringing, causing her to reveal in one interview that her father is a Holocaust survivor who was at Auschwitz when the war ended. Ultimately, feeling pressure from both her band and the media, Frischmann quit the music business, but not before making a major impression on the Cool Britannia scene.

### Mama Cass Elliot

Poor Mama Cass: eternally haunted by the rumor that she died choking on a ham sandwich, which is no way for a Jewish girl to go. Born Ellen Naomi Cohen, Cass Elliot started her performance career as an actor; she actually competed against Barbra Streisand for the part of Miss Marmelstein in an off-Broadway performance of "I Can Get It For You Wholesale" in 1961\. Elliot became part of the Mamas and the Papas in 1965 when she left her own folk group to sing with Denny Doherty and John and Michelle Phillips. After hits like "Monday, Monday," "California Dreaming," and "Dedicated to the One I Love," Cass Elliot was enough of a star to embark on her own solo career, but it was cut short with her death (of a heart attack, not a sandwich) in 1974\. See Who's Your Mama? in Words.

### Brian Epstein

The Beatles’ famous manager Brian Epstein knew all about the fifth commandment – the not-very-rock-and-roll exhortation to honor thy father and mother. Epstein worked at his parents’ music store (which, coincidentally, is where James McCartney Sr bought his family’s piano on an installment plan). When a catchy new pop group called the Beatles caught his eye, he immediately asked his mom and dad to come see the band in action. They were a little unsure – Epstein’s Yiddishe mama had no idea what to wear to a rock concert – but after the show, they gave their son permission to manage what would become the most famous band in rock. Epstein is the man who got the Beatles their first contract, fired Pete Best, and oversaw the band through their rise to fame. Sadly, his career was cut short with his death at age 32 from an overdose of sleeping pills. His body was discovered next to working script of "Yellow Submarine" and a copy of *The Rabbi*, a novel by Noah Gordon.

## F

### Marianne Faithfull

The daughter of a Jewish baroness and a British WWII spy, Marianne Faithfull went from being one of the less talented singers of the sixties to one of the more extraordinary ones of the late seventies. Faithfull was initially known mostly for being Mick Jagger’s girlfriend and partner in crime – literally, as famous accounts of the lovebirds’ drug busts attest. Her recordings, including Jagger’s "As Tears Go By," were not very well received, and she sunk into drug addiction. But in 1979, with her comeback album *Broken English*, Faithfull found herself suddenly widely appreciated, especially by the newfound punk scene. All the years of drinking and heroin had roughened up her voice, giving it both texture and gravitas. Since then, Faithfull has recorded several albums, working with critically acclaimed songwriters like P.J. Harvey and Beck.

### Perry Farrell

Perry Farrell is another loud, proud Jewish rock star. Born Peretz Bernstein in Queens in 1959, Farrell worked in his father’s diamond business for a while before moving out west to found Jane's Addiction 1985\. Two platinum albums, *Nothing’s Shocking* (1988) and \*Ritual de lo Habitual \*(1990) followed. Both were hugely seminal for the nineties alternative rock scene, but by the time Nirvana broke, Farrell had moved on to a new band, Porno for Pyros. Perhaps more importantly, he was also at the helm of a project that defined the sound of the era: Lolapalooza, the enormous traveling rock show. Farrell debuted his pierced, tattooed baby in 1991, headlining with Jane’s Addiction just before they broke up, and went on to steer the festival through the decade.

### The Flamingos

Several different bands in the history of Jewish rock got their start in the synagogue chorus, but the Flamingos may be the only ones who met in a church choir – a Jewish church, no less. Jake and Zeke Carey were cousins who joined the Church of God and Saints of Christ Congregation when they moved from Baltimore to Chicago in 1950\. The church, or synagogue, is the oldest black Jewish congregation in the US (yes, there are others). When the Carey cousins joined the choir, they became friends with Paul Wilson and Johnny Carter. Sollie McElroy rounded out the group, and as a doo-wop fivesome, they recorded their first track, "If I Can’t Have You," in 1953\. In 1956, they had a Top Ten song with "I’ll Be Home," but their biggest hit was 1959’s "I Only Have Eyes For You." Having spent the early part of their vocal training on sad Jewish melodies, the group were well prepared for the lovelorn ballads of fifties R&B.

### Fleetwood Mac

Born into a highly musical Jewish family, Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Greenbaum – later Peter Green -- started playing with his future bandmates in the Bluesbreakers, replacing Eric Clapton in 1966\. The band became Fleetwood Mac in 1967 when the rest of the members left behind founder John Mayall to form their own group. Green’s hard-edged, blues-influenced guitar gained acclaim for the new band. Two of his songs, "Man of the World" and "Oh Well," were number two hits in 1969\. But by the following year, Green’s heavy drug use had rendered him unstable, and in the spring of 1970, he left the band.

### Alan Freed

Rock and roll might have existed without Alan Freed, but "rock and roll" would never have been born. In 1951, Freed began two spin rhythm and blues records on a Cleveland radio station, WJW. Instead of calling the sound "r’n’b," though, Freed gave it a racier new name, one that cut loose the blues and focused on the rhythm. Three years later, he applied for a patent, making "rock and roll" a legal coinage. By then Freed was a genuine star, DJ'ing on WINS in New York. Ultimately, a scandal involving radio bribery brought him to ruin, but the phrase "rock and roll" remained his legacy.

### Kinky Friedman

Country singer, mystery author, independent gubernatorial candidate: Texas’s leading Jewish cowboy, Kinky Friedman, wears several different ten gallon hats. Born Richard Friedman, Kinky spent three years in the Peace Corps before founding Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. With songs like "They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore" and "Ride 'Em Jewboy," the band appealed to a small but growing cult following, ultimately touring with Bob Dylan on his Rolling Thunder Revue. The Jewboys disbanded in the late seventies, and by the early eighties, Kinky Friedman had become a writer, publishing mystery novels about a Jewish country singer named Kinky Friedman. He’s had a long career as an author, but he’s moving on once again; this spring, Kinky is running for Texas governor under the slogan "Kinky Friedman: Why the Hell Not?"

## G

### Art Garfunkel

True, Art Garfunkel may go down in rock history as the ultimate embodiment of "that other guy," but before his songwriting partner abandoned him, Garfunkel was half of one of the most important folk duos of the sixties – and don’t you forget it. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel got their start as Tom and Jerry, hitting the top fifty with their single "Hey Schoolgirl." Lack of success caused them to split up, but when they reformed as Simon & Garfunkel in the sixties, they scored a number-one hit with "Sounds of Silence" after their producer added electric guitars to their gentle folk-rock. "Homeward Bound," "I Am a Rock," and "Hazy Shade of Winter" all hit the charts in 1966 and 1967\. "Mrs. Robinson" became a hit on the strength of the movie *The Graduate*, and their 1970 album *Bridge Over Troubled Water* remained on top of the charts for ten weeks. After the group split up, Garfunkel pursued an acting career which included a role in *Catch-22*. He also released several albums, but never even approached the fame of his former partner.

### The J. Geils Band

The J. Geils Band couldn’t have been more Jewish, with the notable exception of J. himself: singer Peter Wolf, drummer Stephen Bladd, harmonica player Magic Dick (born Richard Salkovitz), keyboardist Seth Justman, and bassist Danny Klein were all Jews. And they didn’t hide it: the band was often called the Jewish Rolling Stones. During the seventies, the J. Geils band toured tirelessly, gaining a reputation based on their gritty r’n’b and wild live shows. Their second album, *The Morning After*, had a Top 40 hit with "Looking for a Love" in 1970, and 1972’s *Bloodshot* entered the top ten thanks to the single "Give It to Me." But they were mostly known as a concert band until 1981, when their single "Centerfold" became a favorite on the newborn cable channel MTV, driving the album *Freeze Frame* up the charts. As one of the great live bands of the era, the J. Geils Band did miss one major gig: obscure band trivia has it that they were asked to play the original Woodstock. Sadly, it seems the influence of one too many Jewish grandmothers came through; the band supposedly gave the supremely bubbe-esque response: "Three days in the mud – who needs it?"

### Barry Goldberg

See Mike Bloomfield.

### The Grateful Dead

From their early days in the San Francisco psychedelic scene to their one radio hit, 1987’s "Touch of Grey," the Grateful Dead have always had a large Jewish following. Deadheadism is a lot like Judiasm. Fans of the Grateful Dead, like observant Jews, glean spiritual meaning from the intensive study of their chosen texts: in this case, song lyrics. They view themselves as misfits in the greater world but draw incredible strength from their own communities. And, as the joke goes, much like the Jews, Deadheads tend to follow around the Grateful Dead. Of course, the high number of Jews in the Dead’s fanbase is echoed by the band’s own Jewishness. Drummer Mickey Hart was raised Jewish, and the band’s publicist and manager were both Jews.

### Peter Green

See Fleetwood Mac.

### Guster

What is it about Jewish musicians and college-based cult followings? Like Phish, Guster developed a major following in the nineties with almost no radio play, winning the hearts of thousands of college kids on their practically endless touring loops. The all-Jewish trio met at Tufts University in 1992 and released their debut album, *Parachute*, two years later. *Goldfly* came out in 1997 and *Lost and Gone Forever* the neat year. In 1998, the band signed to a major label, Sire, but it folded. Undeterred, they released *Keep It Together* with Reprise in 2003, still touring tirelessly all the while. These days, they might be the only band at any given school’s spring weekend playing a shofar - but that’s only because Phish no longer exists.

### Arlo Guthrie

Woody Guthrie wasn’t Jewish, but he married a Jewish girl and settled in Brooklyn near his mother-in-law, the Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt. Guthrie’s son Arlo grew up Jewish and was deeply influenced by his grandmother, who served the family Shabbat dinner every Friday night. Arlo Guthrie is best known for his eighteen-minute-plus "Alice’s Restaurant Massacree," which was released in 1967\. Inspiring a 1969 movie and causing the album it was on to go gold, "Alice’s Restaurant" was Guthrie’s biggest hit; however, his 1972 single "The City of New Orleans" was a commercial success, and he continued to release albums throughout the seventies. Read more about Arlo Guthrie in This Land is Your Land.

## H

### Mickey Hart

See the Grateful Dead.

### Richard Hell

Sure, the Brits had Malcolm McLaren, but here in the US, we had our own Jewish punk pioneer in the person of Richard Hell. Born Richard Myers, the half-Jewish Hell got his start playing in Television – the band that convinced a dive bar on the Bowery called CBGB’s to start having live shows. Hell was deeply inspired by the trashy aesthetic of the New York Dolls, so when that band broke up, he teamed up with Johnny Thunders to form the Heartbreakers (although he dropped out before they made music history touring England with the Sex Pistols). Finally, Hell found his niche as a frontman with the backing band the Voidoids, defining the ennui of an era with their 1977 song "Blank Generation."

### Peter Himmelman

Peter Himmelman’s Jewish rock credentials are unimpeachable, even aside from his role as son-in-law to one Robert Zimmerman. How Jewish is he? Well, he refuses to play on Shabbos. His most recent album, *Imperfect World* (released in March of 2005) was written after an inspiring Tisha B’av fast period. Even his Hebrew name—Pesach Mordechai—is more Jewish than most. Himmelman’s twin interests in Judaism and music have been with him since his childhood in Minnesota: he made his first trip to Israel at age eight and got his first guitar when he was 12\. In the early eighties, he began playing under the pseudonym Sussman Lawrence, which eventually became the name of his new wave band. Both of their albums were lauded by critics, but it wasn’t until Himmelman went solo with *This Father’s Day* (1986) that he really found his stride. Dedicated to the memory of his father, with whom Himmelman was extremely close, the album won him a contract with Chris Blackwell at Island Records. Today, many albums later, Himmelman also writes children's music and music for television. He is known for his imaginative approach to concerts—he once took an entire audience out to eat after a show. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty hugely Jewish thing to do.

Susanna Hoffs See the Bangles.

## I

### Janis Ian

Janis Ian was born Janis Eddy Fink in New York City in 1951\. Though she began using "Ian" as a surname when she started playing folk music in high school, Ian never quite left behind her given name: her 1968 album was titled *The Secret Life of J. Eddy Fink*. Ian’s first hit was the highly controversial "Society’s Child (Baby I’ve Been Thinking)," a song about interracial romance that Ian wrote when she was only 15\. The track gained attention after Leonard Bernstein featured it on a television special, launching Ian’s career. She released albums throughout the late sixties but really came into her own in the seventies. Roberta Flack’s performance of her song "Jesse" became a Top 30 hit; more famously, "At Seventeen" won a Grammy and reached the Top Three in 1975.

## J

### Jamiroquai

Neo-soul Brits Jamiroquai boast a frontman who sounds like Stevie Wonder but looks like the kid who always sat in the back of the class in Hebrew School. Jason Kay was born in 1969 in Manchester. He decided to start a band after a stint of homelessness; music seemed a safer occupation than petty crime, which was how he had been getting by. Jamiroquai’s first single "When You Gonna Learn?" came out in 1992, followed by the album *Emergency on Planet Earth* in 1993\. It hit number one in the UK, but Kay didn’t find success in the US until 1996’s *Traveling Without Moving*. The video for the track "Virtual Insanity" was one of the coolest of the nineties and helped the album go platinum. The band never achieved the same fame in the states, but overseas, Jamiroquai is still going strong.

### Jane's Addiction

See Perry Farrell.

### Jay and the Americans

This all-Jewish band had the distinction of opening for both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on each group’s first American tour. Founded in 1961, the band was named by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; “Jay” was John Traynor, one of vocal group’s seven members. In 1962, their song “She Cried” became their first Top Ten hit. Not long after, John Traynor left the band. David Blatt, a singer who had been raised Orthodox, came in to fill the “Jay” role. When Blatt’s last name was misheard on The Mike Douglas Show, he became “Jay Black.” Nearly all of the band members changed their Jewish last names, but in 1967, they recorded an adaptation of a Yiddish song, “Vi iz dus Gesele,” which Black translated himself. This was not a huge commercial success, but many of their other singles—“Come a Little Bit Closer,” “Cara, Mia,” “This Magic Moment” and others—hit the Top 40.

### Jefferson Airplane

Nearly everyone in Jefferson Airplane was Jewish in some way or another. Drummer Spencer Dryden: Jewish. Singer Marty Balin and guitarist Jorma Kaukonen: Jewish. Paul Kantner: technically not a Jew, but with that last name, who cares? The Airplane went through many line-up changes as the band developed out of the mid-sixties San Francisco rock scene, but it achieved the form known to history when Dryden, Balin, Kaukonen, Kantner, and bassist Jack Casady recruited singer Grace Slick in 1966\. Slick brought two sings with her when she joined the band: "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love." These tracks both reached the Top Ten and made 1967’s *Surrealistic Pillow* a gold record. Jefferson Airplane continued representing the drugged-out culture of their hometown on the charts until the seventies, when the band morphed into both Jefferson Starship and Hot Tuna.

### Billy Joel

Billy Joel once pretended to be Irish and Catholic - hence the many songs about things like crosses and communion - but both of his parents are Jewish. Joel was raised with little Jewish education and in fact grew up attending Catholic mass with his friends. He was a bit of a piano prodigy, taking up the instrument at age 3\. As a teen, he played recording sessions, including the Shangri-La’s "Leader of the Pack." Joel built his career slowly, releasing several classic singles including "Piano Man" and "New York State of Mind" throughout the seventies, but it wasn’t until 1977’s \*The Stranger \*that he achieved real fame with "Just The Way You Are," which won Grammy Awards for both Record and Song of the Year. Billy Joel’s popularity has always withstood cold reception from rock critics: despite being dismissed as soft and derivative by the press, the man who wrote "It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me," "Uptown Girl," and "Only The Good Die Young" has sold more than 100,000,000 records over the course of his career.

## K

### Ira Kaplan

See Yo La Tengo.

### Lenny Kaye

In 1986, Lenny Kaye taught a course at Rutgers University on the history of rock. He was uniquely qualified, having played a major role in that history himself. Kaye grew up surrounded by music, playing in garage bands, writing articles about rock, and eventually getting a job at a record store in Greenwich Village. In 1971, Patty Smith came across an essay by Kaye in Jazz & Pop magazine and was so impressed that she tracked him down. They soon formed the Patty Smith Group, a proto-punk experiment anchored between the poles of Smith’s raw lyrics and Kaye’s noisy guitar. Meanwhile, Lenny Kaye was also working on a compilation of garage rock songs, *Nuggets*, which came out in 1972\. With this carefully organized double album, Kaye made a successful case for the suburban basement as prime breeding grounds for good music, an idea that would be cherished by the punk movement he was helping to create. The Patty Smith Group’s debut album, *Horses*, came out in 1975; they were to release three more records before breaking up in 1979\. Kaye formed the Lenny Kaye Connection in 1980, worked as a record producer, and continued his journalism career, writing for Addicted to Noise, Cream and Rolling Stone. In 1996, he played on Patty Smith’s comeback album, *GoneAgain*.

### Carole King

Born Carole Klein, Carole King wrote some of the most memorable pop songs of the sixties. "Will You Love Me Tomorrow"? That’s hers. "The Locomotion"? Also hers. Campfire favorite "You’ve Got a Friend?" Yup, that’s her too. And while she didn’t write "R-E-S-P-E-C-T," King did give Aretha Franklin another signature cut, the soulful "(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman." King got her start at Queens College, where she met fellow songwriters Paul Simon, Neil Sedaka and Gerry Goffin, whom she later married. She and Goffin wrote over 100 charting singles over the first half of the sixties ("The Locomotion" was recorded by their babysitter) but split up towards the end of the decade, causing King to move out to LA, where she met James Taylor. In addition to popularizing "You’ve Got a Friend," Taylor encouraged King to perform as a solo artist, and in 1971, she released *Tapestry*. It remained on the charts for six years, finally granting King the recognition her songwriting deserved.

### Kiss

Born Chaim Witz, Gene Simmons grew up attending yeshiva in Brooklyn (his upbringing was so Jewish that when he first saw a picture of Santa Claus, he figured the bearded guy must be a rabbi). Simmons began playing with fellow Hebrew Paul Stanley (Stanley Harvey Eisen) in a band called Wicked Lester, but the two soon joined forces with Peter Criss and Ace Frehley to form a group positioned somewhere between the macho end of glam and the theatrical end of hard rock. \*Kiss \*came out in 1974 and went up to 87 on the US charts; with 1975’s single "Rock and Roll All Nite" off the live album *Alive*, the boys behind the make-up became bona fide rock stars. The single "Beth" went to the Top Ten in 1977 and the 1979 album *Dynasty* also went platinum, but after all of this success, Peter Criss decided he wanted out. KISS’s fortune went downhill from there, spiking briefly in 1983 when the remaining band members (Ace Frehley had left by the point too) appeared for the first time in public without the make-up. Several reunions and much controversy later, Chaim Witz is still going strong – last winter saw him as a guest judge beside fellow Yid Paula Abdul on this season’s American Idol. Read more about Kiss in A One For the Money, a Two for the Money.

### The Knack

All four members of the Knack were Jewish; naturally, so was Sharona. Coming out of LA in the late seventies, what made the band so unique was its choice of idols: while everyone else was emulating either Led Zeppelin or the Sex Pistols, the Knack looked back further, aiming to be 1979’s answer to the Beatles. They may have overshot, but the Knack were hugely popular for about a year. \*Get the Knack \*(1979) sold millions of copies, partly on the strength of "My Sharona." By the time \*…But the Little Girls Understand \*was released less than a year later, the band was suffering somewhat of a Knacklash. They released two more albums, but their next real chance to shine didn’t come until \*Reality Bites \*revived "My Sharona" in 1994\. Read more about the Knack in His Sharona.

### Mark Knopfler

Mark Knopler was always a Person of the Book. The son of a Hungarian refugee whose Jewish faith and communist sympathies led him to flee to Scotland, Knopfler majored in English in college and worked as a rock critic before founding Dire Straits. As the band’s songwriter, Knopfler remained wordy and clever, gaining attention for writing literate lyrics. Dire Straits had their first hint of success when the single "Sultans of Swing" was picked up from their demo by a London DJ. On the strength of the airplay, the band wrangled a recording contract and released their self-titled debut, which entered the Top Ten in both the US and the UK. Their second album sold three million copies worldwide, and their third, *Making Movies*, had a major hit with "Romeo and Juliet." It wasn’t until their sixth album, 1985’s *Brothers in Arms*, though, that Dire Straits really became megastars. With the video for "Money for Nothing," they became one of the bands to embody the feel of early MTV. Meanwhile, Knopfler began writing scores for movies, including *The Princess Bride* (1987).

### Al Kooper

What *didn’t* Al Kooper do in the 60s and 70s? Born Alan Peter Kuperschmidt, this Brooklyn-raised Jew began his career in the Royal Teens (of "Short Shorts" fame). He went on to become a well-respected session musician, a role that placed him in the studio with Bob Dylan for "Like a Rolling Stone." That famous organ riff? That’s all Al Kooper. In the meantime, Kooper also managed to become a founding member of the Blues Project when a producer invited him to play on their demo. Frustrated by his bandmates’ decision not to include a brass section, he quit the band and founded Blood, Sweat and Tears. After orchestrating what has been called one of the best albums of the sixties, Kooper moved on to a production job at Columbia Records. He brought the Zombies to the United States; he signed Lynyrd Skynyrd. He also kept playing his own music, releasing two blues-rock albums with Mike Bloomfield. Between his producing activities, his own bands, and the sessions he played with groups like the Who, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, Kooper played a part in many of the most important moments of rock and roll. (See also the Blues Project and Blood, Sweat and Tears.)

### Lenny Kravitz

Lenny Kravitz is one of rock’s most famous half-Jews. The son of a Jewish TV producer and actress Roxie Roker (Helen on *The Jeffersons*), Kravitz has made a career of playing his rock heroes almost better than they could play themselves. Unfortunately, he started his simulations with Prince, which didn’t get him much farther than the stage name Romeo Blue and a pair of ill-advised blue contact lenses. Once he turned to Hendrix, however, Kravitz was unstoppable. 1989’s \*Let Love Rule \*somehow came off as stripped-down and authentic compared with everything else out that year; it became a major hit, with the title track’s video logging in long hours on MTV. The same year, Kravitz proved his genuine talent by writing "Justify My Love" for Madonna. His next album, *Mama Said*, had a huge hit with "It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over," and by the time he released *Are You Gonna Go My Way* in 1993, he’d earned respect as an original performer. "Fly Away," from 1998’s *5*, was a megahit, as was Kravitz’s cover of "American Woman" in 1999\. Today, Lenny Kravitz can be seen backing another beloved fashion victim and Jewish icon, Sarah Jessica Parker, in Gap ads across America.

### Robby Krieger

See the Doors

## L

### Geddy Lee

See Rush.

### Leiber and Stoller

A lot of people hated Elvis Presley’s "Hound Dog" when they first heard it. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, though, had a good reason: that skinny hick was ruining their song. Leiber and Stoller had both been raised Jewish, but their musical influences were always African-American. Elvis, they figured, was impinging on their role as the only white guys in r’n’b – a role they backed up by writing over fifty pop hits, including "Yakety Yak" for the Coasters and "There Goes My Baby" for the Drifters. Ultimately, of course, Leiber and Stoller were hardly the only white songwriters to break the barriers of segregation in their music. But they did it first, and with classics like "Hound Dog," you could argue that they did it best.

### Lisa Loeb

Lisa Loeb proved a lot of things in the early nineties. With her number one single, "Stay," she proved that you don’t need a record deal to top the charts; with her unabashedly Jewish name, she demonstrated that there’s no need for pseudonyms in this day and age; and with those giant spectacles, she let a generation of nerds know that glasses can be sexy. Loeb got her start as part of a duo with her Brown University roommate, Elizabeth Mitchell (later of Ida). She moved on to a role as front-woman with her band Nine Stories in 1990 and attracted some major label interest, but it was not until after her buddy Ethan Hawke featured "Stay" in \*Reality Bites \*that she was signed by Geffen. "Stay" won a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Group. She released her debut album, *Tails*, in 1995 and scored a radio hit with "I Do" from 1997’s *Firecracker*. 2003’s *Cake and Pie* was re-released under the name *Hello Lisa as part of a promotional deal with Sanrio’s Hello Kitty character. Loeb has also found some fame in television, starring alongside former boyfriend Dweezil Zappa in the short-lived cooking show Dweezil & Lisa*.

### Courtney Love

Everything about Courtney Love is controversial, so it’s no surprise that even her Jewish identity has been called into question. Half-Jewish groups have claimed Love as one of their own, but the singer has also stated that only one of her grandparents was a Jew. Add this to the various bizarre rumors about Love’s background – could her mother actually be Marlon Brando’s lovechild? – and her tendency to, well, make stuff up, and it becomes nearly impossible to determine the truth. As with all rock stars, though, we’re probably best off accepting Courtney Love’s stage persona. Unhinged and usually also undressed, Love has been thrashing around in the headlines since she was just the rocker wife of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. As Cobain’s star rose, Love’s band Hole began to get attention, making Love a star when \*Live Through This \*was released not long after Cobain’s suicide in 1994\. Naysayers claimed that the album was written entirely by Love’s husband; surprisingly, 1998’s *Celebrity Skin* did very little to refute those rumors, possibly because so many of the songs sounded like the handiwork of Love’s ex Billy Corgan. Love’s band has since released *America’s Sweetheart*, but the singer has gained more attention recently for several public meltdowns, at least one indecent exposure outside a Manhattan Wendy’s, and a stint in rehab.

### The Lovin’ Spoonful

The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Zal Yanovsky was known as the Jewish Ringo Starr, which is surely confusing to the many misguided Yids who claim Ringo as a member of the tribe, but becomes doubly confusing when you recall that Yanovsky was a guitarist, not a drummer. One look at that punim, though, and you’ll know where the nickname came from. The Lovin’ Spoonful is responsible for a huge number of mid-sixties hit singles, including "Summer in the City" and "Do You Believe in Magic?" from the 1965 album of the same name. In 1967, the band began to fall apart when bassist Steve Boone and Yanovsky were busted for marijuana possession. Boone and Yanovsky ratted out their source, angering many of their fans. Yanovsky quit the band, and despite several subsequent releases, the Spoonful never fully gained back the love.

## M

### The Mamas and the Papas

See Mama Cass Elliot.

### Handsome Dick Manitoba

Born Richard Blum, Handsome Dick Manitoba has been a figure on the New York music scene since he fronted the Dictators in the 1970s. These days, he sings with the MC5, DJs on Steve Van Zandt's satellite radio channel, and still finds time to manage his eponymous Alphabet City bar. See the Dictators for more information.

### Matisyahu

Born Matthew Miller and raised in the California suburbs, Matisyahu had to undergo two transitions to become the musician he is today. First, he had to discover his passion for Orthodox Judaism, a religious interest sparked in the two most Jewish places on earth: Israel, which he visited as a teen, and New York City, where he attended college. As a student at the New School, Miller met a Lubavich rabbi in Washington Square Park (ironically, he had just written a play about a student who meets a Lubavich rabbi in that very location). The Lubavichers welcomed him, and he moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn. While the secular Matthew Miller was becoming Hasidic, the hippie Matthew Miller was discovering reggae. After a stint following Phish as a teen, Miller attended a wilderness school where his interest in music was encouraged. He began to turn his proclivity for beatboxing in the back of the classroom into a real musical career, performing at local open mics. By the time he became Matisyahu, he had become a skilled reggae artist, writing songs about his faith and performing in a black hat and peyas. JDub Records released his debut album, *Shake Off the Dust…Arise* in 2004.

### Malcolm McLaren

In 1958, Malcolm McLaren became a Bar Mitzvah. In 1975, he became manager of a bunch of skinny louts who called themselves the Sex Pistols. The latter event was probably more formative for McLaren, but the fact remains that punk’s most famous manager is a member of the tribe. Malcolm McLaren was raised by his grandmother and attended just about every art school in the UK before opening up a clothing store with fellow misfit Vivienne Westwood in 1972\. In 1974 he began managing – and dressing – the fading New York Dolls, but his career was made during his three years in charge of the Sex Pistols. With his wild aesthetic and Situationist ambitions, McLaren arguably invented punk rock. He went on to manage Bow Wow Wow, which had a hit with "I Want Candy" in 1983\. Along the way, McLaren discovered both Adam Ant and Boy George, but by that time he was mostly focusing on his own work. 1982’s "Buffalo Gals" has been credited with introducing hip-hop to Britain; it reached the Top Ten, and its 1998 revival also charted in the UK. Read more about Malcolm McLaren in The Situationist.

### Megadeth

Dave Mustaine formed Megadeth after he was booted out of Metallica two years after helping found the band. It seems Mustaine might not be the best team player: he’d already fired eight band members when he recruited the Jewish guitarist Marty Friedman in 1990\. Despite the high turnover, Megadeth had a successful eighties run: 1986’s *Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying?* and 1988’s *So Far, So Good…So What!* both went platinum. After Friedman joined the band, their popularity only increased (a fact that should be noted well by anyone who doubts the rock prowess of Jewish metalheads). All but one of their nineties albums debuted in the Top Ten, *Rust in Peace* (1992) and *Youthanasia* (1994) went platinum, and 1992’s \*Countdown to Extinction \*went double-platinum. Recently, Mustaine told Israeli radio that his mother was Jewish, but he considers himself Christian.

### Mountain

In 1958, young Leslie Weinstein received a guitar as a Bar Mitzvah present. Almost ten years later, Weinstein, now calling himself Leslie West, formed the hard-rock band Mountain. West had a strong rock resume, having spent years playing Long Island venues as part of the local heroes the Vagrants, but it wasn’t until he teamed up with former Cream producer Felix Pappalardi for 1969’s *Mountain* that he really achieved rock star status. After the release of his solo album, West assembled other musicians to make up the band Mountain; they had an auspicious beginning, playing their fourth gig ever at Woodstock. In 1970, their album *Mountain Climbing* went gold, and its hit single "Mississippi Queen" still graces classic rock radio stations today.

## N

### New Found Glory

Like the Calling, New Found Glory often gets mistaken for a Christian rock band despite being chock-full of Jews: three out of the five members grew up in Jewish homes in Coral Springs, Florida. Since the rest of the band is from Florida, they tend to get lumped in with Floridian emo boys like Dashboard Confessional, but New Found Glory were putting out albums before the latter-day emo explosion. They’re also a little bit tougher and goofier than the likes of Chris Carraba, although they do play suspiciously melodic pop punk. After 1999’s *Nothing Gold Can Stay* and 2000’s *A New Found Glory*, the band did a stint with the Warped Tour, which led to both their 2002 album \*Sticks and Stones \*and an invitation to tour with Warped a second time. "My Friends Over You," from *Sticks and Stones*, was a hit single, and in 2004 the band released another LP, *Catalyst*.

### The New York Dolls

The New York Dolls got their start in 1971 and found their Egyptian Jewish guitarist, Sylvain Sylvain, in 1972\. Originally named Sylvain Mizrahi, Sylvain Sylvain was born in Cairo but moved to New York with his family as a young boy to escape Gamel Abdel Nasser’s anti-Semitic policies. Like his famous designer cousin Isaac, Sylvain exhibited a flair for fashion; he and his bandmates became famous for dressing like Bowie while making noise like Iggy. Sadly, the New York Dolls were too ahead of their time to ever have much commercial success (record companies thought they were too vulgar, if you can believe such a thing) but their albums *New York Dolls* (1973) and *Too Much Too Soon* (1974) both went on to influence every kid who formed a punk band in the following decade.

### Randy Newman

Randy Newman is both a songwriter’s songwriter and a secular Jew’s secular Jew. Best known for his satirical songs "Short People" (1977) and "I Love LA" (1983), Newman has never been hugely commercial, but his work is always complex, well-crafted, and sly. It also has been covered dozens of times, by artists from Blood, Sweat and Tears to Joe Cocker to Dusty Springfield, and Three Dog Night’s version of his "Mama Told Me Not To Come" hit number one on the charts in 1970\. Newman writes film soundtracks as well as pop songs: his "If I Don’t Have You," from *Monsters Inc.*, won an Oscar in 1998\. Both of his parents are Jewish, but Newman was raised in a non-observant home, and his songs about religion – of which there are quite a few – take an ambivalent, questioning perspective.

### NOFX

In the liner notes of their 1992 album *White Trash, Two Heebs and a Bean*, NOFX provided handy visual aids for their fans. Drummer Eric Ghint was represented by a can of Shaefer malt liquor. Guitarist Aaron Aheyta (aka El Hefe) contributed a can of black beans. As for the band’s lead singer and other guitarist, Fat Mike Burkett and Eric Melvin, they provided both matzah and gefilte fish. In 1994, NOFX took the Jewish pride a step further with "The Brews," from *Punk in Drublic*. The chorus announced: "Hey hey, we’re the Brews/ sporting anti-Swastika tattoos/ Oi oi, we’re the boys/ Orthodox, Hasidic, OG ois." When not playing his own snotty but wildly accessible anti-corporate punk, Fat Mike releases albums by bands like Avail and No Use for a Name on his Fat Wreck Chords label.

## O

### Phil Ochs

One of the many Jewish luminaries of the early sixties Greenwich Village folk scene, Phil Ochs is best known for the protest songs that made many critics compare him to Bob Dylan. As a Jewish leftist, Ochs was committed to social action through folk music. Ochs called himself a "singing journalist," releasing his first album, *All the News That’s Fit to Sing*, in 1964\. Although he turned his focus to more personal matters as the sixties moved on, releasing the successful love song "Changes" in 1966, Ochs was present at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. After 1970, he left folk music altogether, performing as an Elvis-esque fifties-era rocker in a gold lame suit. His behavior became increasingly erratic, and in 1976 he committed suicide.

## P

### Peaches

Raunchy electro rapper Peaches used to be music teacher Merrill Nisker; her public persona may have changed, but she’s still a Canadian Jew. Read more about her in Sarah Wildman's profile, coming soon.

### Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Tom Petty’s backing band the Heartbreakers may seem awfully goyish, but the drummer takes a menorah with him on every concert tour. (Well, if it’s menorah season.) Stan Lynch began to play drums as an adolescent in Florida. On occasion, he would fill in behind the kit of a local band, Mudcrutch, led by a kid named Tom Petty. When Petty got signed in 1975, Lynch and some friends from Florida became his backing band, eventually playing on hits like "American Girl" (1976), "I Need to Know" (1978), and "Don’t Do Me Like That" (1979). In 1982, the band gained another Jewish member, Howie Epstein, who played bass for the Heartbreakers for twenty years before his untimely death, of a heroin overdose, in 2003.

### Phantom Planet

The guys of Phantom Planet are well-known multi-taskers: musicians, actors, models, relatives of famous people. Not surprisingly for a bunch of Hollywood kids, lead singer Alex Greenwald, former drummer Jason Schwartzman, and guitarist Jacques Brauthbar are also all Jews. You’ve probably seen two of these three fine young men on the big screen: Schwartzman starred in *Rushmore*, and Greenwald played the bully Seth Devlin in *Donnie Darko*. And it’s a safe bet that you’ve heard them on the small screen: their single "California" is the theme song for Fox’s ubiquitous teen soap *The O.C.* The band’s debut album, *Phantom Planet Is Missing*, came out in 1998; \*The Guest \*was released in 2001; 2004’s self-titled record was Schwartzman’s last with the band.

### Phish

Like the Grateful Dead, Phish play unstructured, jammy, jazz-inflected music, tour incessantly, and occupy a special place in the hearts of many a Jewish hippie. Phish have a leg up over their predecessors in the Jewish department, though: the band has not one but two Jewish members. Both drummer Jon Fishman and bassist Mike Gordon are Yids, making Phish officially one-half Jewish. The band embraces its roots, playing "Yerushalayim Shel Zhahav" and "Avenu Malkenu" in concert. Phish formed at University of Vermont in the mid-eighties and were signed by Elektra in 1992\. By the release of their fifth album, 1994’s *Hoist*, they had a major following among college kids. Tours with the H.O.R.D.E. festival, cameos on *The Simpsons*, and many, many side projects boosted the attention they received from the public, leading the band to tour until the summer of 2004, when they officially quit after twenty years.

### Porno for Pyros

See Perry Farrell.

### Princess Superstar

"Princess" is a loaded word for many Jewish girls, but Concetta Kirschner embraced it, taking Princess Superstar as the name of her hip-hop alter ego. That didn’t seem like enough bravado, though, so she went on to name her her record label A Big Rich Record Label and release the albums *Strictly Platinum* (1996), *CEO* (1997),\* Last of the Great Twentieth Century Composers\* (1999), and 2002’s *Princess Superstar Is*. Backed by major critical love from CMJ and support from everybody from Kool Keith to Beth Orton, Princess Superstar blends the braggadocio of hip-hop ladies like Lil Kim with the chutzpah of your stereotypical Jewish princess.

### Procol Harum

Procol Harum’s biggest hit, "A Whiter Shade of Pale," existed before the band did. Jewish lyricist Keith Reid and singer/pianist Gary Brooker began writing songs in 1967\. They found the rest of the band by placing an ad in \*Melody Maker \*and rehearsed as the Pinewoods before re-naming themselves Procol Harum, after the Latin phrase for "far from these things." "A Whiter Shade of Pale" was their first single and became one of the only debut tracks to hit number one on the British charts on its first release. With one song and no permanent band, Reid and Brooker rearranged their line-up and only then recorded a whole album, 1967’s *Procol Harum*. They released *Shine on Brightly* in 1968 and *A Salty Dog* in 1969, both of which charted in the US. The next few years saw even more line-up mutations as well as a shift in record labels, but despite all of the changes, Procol Harum remained a popular prog-rock band throughout the seventies.

## R

### Joey Ramone

Joey Ramone may not be the only Jew with a hip corner of downtown Manhattan in his name (just ask the Lower East Side’s Rabbi Yaakov Spiegel). As the sole Jewish Ramone, though, Joey definitely deserved the honor bestowed on him by the City of New York, which named the corner of 2nd St and the Bowery "Joey Ramone Place" after his death to cancer in 2001\. Joey Ramone was born Jeffrey Hymen in Forrest Hills, Queens, which was somewhat of a breeding ground for Jewish rock stars; both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel grew up there. Which is fitting, because the Ramones were to punk something like what Simon & Garfunkel were to sixties folk-rock: They weren’t necessarily the first, and they weren’t necessarily the best, but they stamped their name on their genre way few others ever could. None of their songs charted in the States when they were released (although 1977’s "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" did make the British Top 40) but their sped-up, dumbed-down rock songs defined punk as we know it.

### Red Hot Chili Peppers

The Chili Peppers formed out of a triumvirate of high school friends: Anthony Kiedis, Michael Balzary (later known as Flea), and a Jewish guitarist named Hillel Slovak. They got their start playing strip clubs as Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem, but changed their name in 1983, shortly before signing with EMI. Slovak and drummer Jack Irons briefly took off to form their own band, What Is This, but returned in time to play on 1985’s *Freaky Styley* and 1987’s *The Uplift Mofo Party Plan*. Keidis and Slovak both had heroin problems, though, and in 1988 Slovak died of an overdose. The Chili Peppers rotated through a series of guitarists before settling on John Frusciante, who has played with them on several chart-topping albums.

### Lou Reed

In the pantheon of Jewish rock visionaries, Lou Reed (his father changed the family name from Rabinowitz) ranks up there with Bob Dylan. As they say at seder, if he’d only founded the most influential band of all time, it would have been enough. But after his run with the Velvet Underground, once he’d made it OK to sing about heroin and S&M and to use feedback and soundscapes in rock songs, Lou Reed went on to release *Transformer* in 1972\. If he had only added New York grit to glam rock with an album produced by David Bowie and featuring the Top 20 hit "Walk on the Wild Side," dayenu. But then Reed put out 1973’s dark, elegant *Berlin*, somehow getting into the British Top 10 despite not coming anywhere near the US. charts. That might have been enough, but in 1975 he released *Metal Machine Music*, a two-CD album with a very apt title. Had he only invented noise rock while conning his fans into purchasing two discs of unlistenable screeching, dayenu – but Reed kept going. His career highlights since the seventies include 1989’s critically acclaimed *New York*, a tour with the re-formed Velvet Underground in 1993, and some theatrical endeavors. Which would have been enough, but Reed is still going. Read more about Lou Reed in Subterranean Homeland Blues.

### Jonathan Richman

If you want to be a cult rock star, it helps to begin your career from the Velvet Underground’s manager’s couch. That’s where Jonathan Richman tried to get his start in New York in 1969, and while he didn’t catch on in the NYC scene, he did wind up with John Cale as the producer for his 1973 album with his band the Modern Lovers. The self-titled disc didn’t come out until 1976, but with songs like "Roadrunner" and "Pablo Picasso," it went on to become a pre-punk classic. 1977’s \*Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers \*and *Rock and Roll with the Modern Lovers* also showcased Richman’s goofy, childlike pop songs. In the eighties. Richman performed as a solo artist, finally emerging in the national eye in 1998 as a troubadour in the film *There’s Something about Mary*.

### David Lee Roth

As Adam Sandler tells us on radio stations across the country every December, David Lee Roth lights the menorah. Sandler’s not just being poetic with that line: David Lee Roth is, and always has been, a proud Jewish rock star. Witness that last name, left unabashedly Jewish while his more reticent peers took on bland or silly monikers to hide their ethnic heritage. Roth was raised on the chutzpah and showmanship of vaudeville performers like Al Jolson – not a surprise, given his stage presence. He started playing with Eddie and Alex Van Halen as part of the opening band for their shows as Mammoth and teamed up with them to form Van Halen in the mid-seventies. Their self-titled first album came out in 1978 and was a major hit. *Van Halen II*, *Women and Children First*, *Fair Warning*, *Diver Down*, and *1984* came out in the next six years and were all hugely successful. In 1985, Roth put out a solo EP, *Crazy from the Heat*, presaging his departure from Van Halen by only a few months. After more than ten years and several well-received discs (including the single "California Girls"), Roth reunited with Van Halen for the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards. Since then, his relationship with his former band has been spotty, but Roth continues to tour like the unstoppable Jewish showman he is. Read more about him in And the Dreidel Will Rock.

### Rick Rubin

One of the two guys behind legendary hip-hop label Def Jam is Jewish. Hint: it’s not Russell Simmons. Like seemingly every white guy in hip-hop in the 80s, Rick Rubin was a Jewish New Yorker. He and Simmons met at NYU and founded Def Jam out of a dorm room in 1984\. By 1986 their label was part of Columbia and they were the proud parents of two huge hits, the Beastie Boys’ \*License to Ill \*and Run-DMC’s *Raising Hell*. Rubin produced both of those albums as well as the follow year’s *Yo! Bum Rush the Show*, Public Enemy’s debut LP. By then, though, the Def Jam partnership was breaking up, and Rubin left Simmons to found his own label, Def American. Rubin always liked hard rock as much as hip-hop, so it makes sense that he went on to sign Slayer and produce the rock-inflected Public Enemy album *It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.* 1991 saw a double coup for both of Rubin’s favorite genres: the Red Hot Chili Peppers' *Blood Sugar Sex Magik* and Sir Mix-A-Lot’s hit single and Bar Mitzvah dance party fave "Baby Got Back." Rubin is still producing records today, though he’s long since dropped the "Def" from his label name.

### Rush

Everything about Rush, from the sci-fi-influenced lyrics to the virtuosic musicianship to the very lengths of their songs, is grandiose and epic – which is why, in the late seventies and early eighties, they were reviled by critics and adored by teenaged boys. Geddy Lee, who is best known for his unnaturally high-pitched singing voice (yes, he does speak like an ordinary guy), was born Gary Lee Weinrib in 1953\. His unusual nickname comes from his grandmother’s Yiddish accented English, in which "Gary" became "Geddy." Lee’s parents were Holocaust survivors who got married at Bergen-Belsen a few months after the concentration camp was liberated. Like many survivors, they were overprotective of their children, and young Geddy rebelled by turning to music, not knowing that his father had been a musician before the war. Along with guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart, Lee has sold over 35 million albums in the course of his career. 1976’s *2112* went platinum, 1977’s *A Farewell to Kings* reached the top 40, and 1980’s *Permanent Waves,* and 1981’s *Moving Pictures* spawned the radio hits "The Spirit of Radio" and "Tom Sawyer."

## S

### Neil Sedaka

The list of performers who have covered Neil Sedaka songs could take up his entire bio. In the course of his career, Sedaka’s songs have been performed by ABBA, the Carpenters, Sheryl Crow, Bobby Darin, Gloria Estefan, Carole King, Peggy Lee, and not one but two TV bands (the Monkees and the Partridge Family). Sedaka grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a Sephardic father and an Ashkenazi mother. He got his start with the Tokens as a high school student, auditioning at the Brill Building and signing to a small label. A few years later, he took time off from Juilliard to work for another Brill Building publisher, Al Nevins and Don Kirschner’s Aldon Music. With his songwriting partner Howard Greenfield, Sedaka wrote dozens of songs, many of which hit the top ten. Meanwhile, his self-titled debut album came out in 1959 and was nominated for a Grammy. His next Grammy nomination came four years later for his famous "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," which would be nominated again after its revival in the mid-seventies. Sedaka’s career was briefly unmade when Carole King, his old girlfriend and the subject of his early single "Oh! Carol," released \*Tapestry \*and ushered in an era of more contemplative, serious singer-songwriter pop. His mid-seventies comeback on Elton John’s label re-established him as a force in music, and he’s been around in some form ever since – most recently with *2003’s Brighton Beach Memories: Neil Sedaka Sings Yiddish*.

### The Silver Jews

The Silver Jews have always played Rhoda to Pavement’s Mary, but David Berman’s deadpan vocals and the band’s country slant makes them markedly different from their more famous cohorts. Berman, who is also a published poet, started playing with Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich while the three were undergrads at the University of Virginia. At the same time, Malkmus founded Pavement with a childhood friend and recruited Nastanovich as the drummer and general noisemaker. Berman, Malkmus, and Nastanovich moved to New York after graduating and continued playing together as the Silver Jews, but for years Pavement’s success as the indie rock band of the early nineties eclipsed the quieter, more lyrics-based Jews. After recording several EPs on a walkman, the Silver Jews released *Starlite Walker* in 1994, followed by *The Natural Bridge* in 1996\. By 1998’s *American Water*, critics were hailing the Silver Jews as better than Pavement. The genesis of their name, by the way, remains a mystery: It might be a reference to either the Silver Apples or the Silver Beatles, it might have something to do with blonds who are also Yids, and it might just be more wordplay on the part of the band’s poetic frontman.

### Carly Simon

The daughter of one of the founders of Simon & Schuster, Carly Simon played in a band with her sister before releasing her solo debut in the early seventies, just as the listening public developed an interest in confessional singer-songwriters. "That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be" hit the top ten; the title single from her next album, "Anticipation," reached the top forty. Both records were released in 1971, earning her that year’s Grammy for Best New Artist. Simon will always be best known for the number-one single off her third album: "You’re So Vain." It might have been about Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty, or Simon’s then-husband James Taylor, but the singer wouldn’t say (and hasn’t, to this day). Simon continued to sell phenomenally throughout the seventies, ultimately releasing nine albums in that decade.

### Paul Simon

Does it get more Jewish than a cameo in *Annie Hall*? Since his start as a sixteen-year-old charting with "Hey Schoolgirl" in 1957, Paul Simon has always been a Jewish musical hero. This is, after all, a guy who played under the name "Jerry Landis" for a bit in 1963, making him perhaps the only Jew in rock to ever try changing his name to something more Jewish. Of course, he found real success recording under his real name with Art Garfunkel, but Simon was never fully wedded to the duo. As early in 1965, he was recording as a solo artist in Britain. From *Wednesday Morning, 3 AM* in 1964 to *Bridge Over Troubled Water* in 1970, Simon and Garfunkel could be found in every college dorm in America. *Paul Simon*, Simon’s first solo outing after the group split, sold a million copies in 1972, as did the next year’s *There Goes Rhymin’ Simon*. *Still Crazy After All These Years* (1975) and \*Graceland \*(1986) both won Grammy awards for Album of the Year. In the nineties, Simon’s foray into Broadway, 1997’s *Songs from the Capema*n, was a flop, but his live concert in Central Park at the start of the decade was a huge success, cementing his role as the quintessential Jewish New Yorker.

### Gene Simmons

See Kiss.

### Slash

Opinion is divided as to the Hebraic roots of this guitar hero. Maverick executive Guy Oseary includes the former Saul Hudson in his book *Jews Who Rock*, but Slash’s fansite makes a point of stating that "an Old Testament name is not always indicative of a particular faith." Calls to Slash's management weren’t returned, but we think it’s safe to trust the many sources who say that his dad was Jewish, even if the man himself doesn’t spend much time in shul. Slash got his start in rock in high school, when he befriended a drummer named Steve Adler. After an unsuccessful stint playing as Road Crew, the two formed Guns N’ Roses in 1985\. 1987’s *Appetite for Destruction* made them famous, but rumors of wild behavior, including Slash’s own heroin addiction, kept them in the news. In the early nineties, Slash overcame his drug problems and founded Slash’s Snakepit, which released *It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere* in 1995\. The following year he moved on to Slash’s Blues Ball, a cover project, but the Snakepit reformed in 1999\. Nowadays, of course, Slash is involved in yet another band, the Scott Weiland-fronted supergroup Velvet Revolver, which had a hit with 2004’s *Contraband*.

### Sleater-Kinney

Fittingly, Sleater-Kinney’s best-known song off their best-known album is an ode to a fellow Jewish punk icon. "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone," from 1996’s *Call the Doctor*, showcases the band’s signature ingredients: Corin Tucker’s mad banshee yelp and Carrie Brownstein’s angular guitar. Both Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss, also of Quasi, are Jewish. Developing out of the riot-grrl scene in the Northwest, Sleater-Kinney followed \*Call the Doctor \*with a move to the veteran indie label Kill Rock Stars. *Dig Me Out* was released in 1997, followed by *The Hot Rock* in 1999\. *All Hands on the Bad One* came out in 2000; by 2002’s *One Beat,* the trio had more than earned their place as one of the stalwarts of the Kill Rock Stars roster.

### Dee Snider

See Twisted Sister.

### Phil Spector

Phil Spector was born with perfect pitch in the Bronx in 1940\. His family moved to LA after his father’s suicide, and he had his first hit as one of the Teddy Bears in 1958 with "To Know Him is to Love Him," based on his father’s epitaph. As a songwriter and producer, Spector worked with the Beatles, the Righteous Brothers, Gene Pitney, and a number of girl groups, most famously the Ronettes. His "wall of sound" style made him famous, but his bizarre behavior also garnered attention: while recording *Death of a Ladies’ Man*, Spector chased Leonard Cohen around his studio with a loaded crossbow. Tragically, after a lifetime of hits like *Let It Be* and Ike and Tina Turner’s "River Deep, Mountain High," Spector was indicted for the murder of his neighbor, Lana Clarkson.

### Spirit

Read about Randy California and his band Spirit in Riffed Off.

### Paul Stanley

See Kiss.

### Steely Dan

Jewish rock star dirty joke coincidence number two: while the Lovin Spoonful’ and 10CC are Jewish bands whose winking names that need no explanation, few know that both indie rockers Clem Snide and soft-rock intellectuals Steely Dan are Jewish bands named after two of the cruder characters in William S. Burroughs' *Naked Lunch*. Clem Snide might have taken their name from a certain talking orifice, but Yiddish-fluent non-Jew Walter Becker and authentic Hebraic rocker Donald Fagen went with the moniker of a giant dildo. It’s the edgiest thing they’ve ever done, but the Dan has an enormous cult following. *Can’t Buy a Thrill* came out in 1972 and contained "Do It Again" and "Reeling in the Years," which both went to the top ten. Their next hit single came in 1974, when "Rikki Don’t Lose that Number" from their third album also entered the top ten. *Katy Lied*, *The Royal Scam*, \*Aja, \*and *Gaucho* all did well during the end of the seventies, but then Steely Dan went into hibernation, emerging in 2000 with the acclaimed *Two Against Nature.* More than thirty years after the band first broke, thousands of fans still come out to see the duo play their jazzy, sophisticated pop live.

### Chris Stein

See Blondie.

### The Strokes

Depending on who is counting, there are either one or two Jewish Strokes. Guitarist Nick Valensi is the son of a Tunisian Jew. And guitarist and keyboardest Albert Hammond Jr told *Rolling Stone* in 2003 that he’d informally converted to keep Valensi company. Whether or not informal hipster conversations count for much in our 3000-year-old religion, the Strokes do make a nice addition to the Jewish rock pantheon. Valensi met fellow Strokes Fabrizio Moretti and Julian Casablancas at private school in Manhattan in 1998; Hammond joined the band the following year. By 2000, the boys had developed a reputation as the saviors of garage rock, and when *Is This It* came out in 2001, they were greeted with a firestorm of hype. The media loved them and hated them in equal measure; so too did their audience. But the band managed to survive the frenzy at least long enough to release *Room on Fire* in 2003\. Sure, it sounded exactly like their previous album – but if it ain’t broke, as they say…

## T

### T-Rex

Jewish Londoner and ex-model Marc Bolan got his start in a duo called Tyrannosaurus Rex, playing folk songs with vaguely dippy titles (his best-selling book of poetry, published in 1969, was called "The Warlock of Love"). The band’s name hinted at something slightly more off-kilter than folk music, though, and in 1970 they streamlined it to T.Rex and released the fuzzed-out "Ride a White Swan." The single hit number two in the UK and was followed by a string of successes, including "Get It On," which reached number one in the UK and number ten in the US. By 1973, T. Rex’s hard-rock singles like "20th Century Boy" were defining glam rock for the decade. Indeed, Bolan (né Feld) may not have kept his father’s name, but as a fashion icon, he certainly did his Yiddishe papa proud: Like so many Jews before him, Mr. Feld was a tailor.

### 10CC

Raunchy band names seem to be popular with Jewish rock stars; like the Lovin’ Spoonful, the British art-pop band 10CC – named after the amount of semen supposedly ejaculated by the average man – boasts several Jewish members. Initially called Hotlegs, the band got its name from producer Jonathan King after he dreamed that a group called 10CC would someday be hugely successful. Indeed, 10CC scored several hits in the 1970s, including "I’m Not In Love," which reached number-two in the US charts in 1975\. Three out of the four members of the band were Jewish: Lol Crème, Kevin Godley, and vocalist/songwriter Gouldman, who has said that he prefers writing in a minor key because he was raised hearing Jewish liturgical chants in synagogue. Gouldman also wrote hits for the Yardbirds and Herman’s Hermits, among others. Crème and Godley later gained minor fame as a video-producing team in the eighties, when they made pioneering use of the same morphing technology later seen in Michael Jackson’s video for "Black or White."

### Tiny Tim

Between the nose, the falsetto, and the bizarre behavior, Tiny Tim didn’t do much for the reputation of the Jews worldwide. His own mother told *Parade* magazine in 1968 that people tended to think he was meshuggenah. But Tiny Tim, born Herbert Khaury, was simply a sweet, strange guy who wanted to make people happy with his ukelele. In 1968, he appeared on Rowan and Martin’s *Laugh-In* singing the old standard "Tip-Toe Through the Tulips" in an absurdly high voice. This was the sixties, and people loved it. Tiny Tim’s first album, *God Bless Tiny Tim*, sold 200,000 copies. He furthered his fame in 1969 by marrying his teenaged girlfriend on the "Tonight" show. Despite his novelty status, Tiny Tim toured for many years, only stopping in 1996 due to a fatal heart attack that struck while he was playing "Tip-Toe Through the Tulips" to a Minneapolis audience. Among the performers he influenced: Paul McCartney, whose falsetto on "Honey Pie" on the "White Album" is a Tiny Tim tribute.

### The Tokens

The Tokens might be the most Jewish group of early rock and roll. Every member was raised in a Jewish home, and their frontman, Jay Siegel, considered becoming a cantor. Perhaps most Jewish of all, the Tokens developed out of the Linc-Tones, a vocal group founded by master Jewish songwriter Neil Sedaka. Sedaka left the group long before their first hit, 1961’s "Tonight I Fell in Love." Their real claim to posterity came a year later, when they re-worked the Weaver’s version of the South African folk song "Mbube," or "Wimoweh." You probably know it by another name, and you might picture it being sung by a cartoon warthog, but in 1962, "Mbube/Wimoweh," otherwise known as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," was a massive hit attached to a bunch of Jewish boys from New York City. It hit number one in 36 countries – including Israel.

### Twisted Sister

Rumor has it that Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, and a third Jewish New Yorker named John Segal played together in a band called Rainbow, back in 1970\. This wasn’t the same Rainbow fronted by Ronnie James Dio—that would have been too much rawk for any one band to sustain—but it was the same John Segal who founded Twisted Sister in 1972\. Calling himself J.J. French, Segal recruited a number of musicians to help him with his mission, which was to sound like the New York Dolls. When a half-Jewish guy named Dee Snider joined the band in 1976, though, Twisted Sister lost some of their glam schtick and developed a harder sound. Playing with the Dictators' former bassist, the band became local legends, releasing singles on their own label TSR. They finally signed to Atlantic nearly a decade after French had founded the band, and in 1984 released the multi-platinum-selling *Stay Hungry*. The singles “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock” took full advantage of the new medium of MTV. Within a year, the band had gone from underground metal darlings to monsters of rock, so the backlash may have been inevitable. The band released a few more albums but never quite returned to their all-too-brief *Stay-Hungry*\-era glory. These days, Snider can be seen on VH1, where he’s often a talking head alongside fellow Challah Famer Scott Ian. In April of this year, Snider, Ian, and J.J. French hosted VH1’s Passover special “Matzo and Metal.”

## V

### Van Halen

See David Lee Roth.

### Veruca Salt

You might not expect a band named after a character by the famously anti-Semitic Roald Dahl to contain members of the tribe, but both Nina Gordon and Louise Post of Veruca Salt are Jewesses. So was the band’s drummer, James Shapiro, Gordon’s big brother – unlike his sister, he uses their father's last name instead of their mother's. In the nineties, Veruca Salt had a major alterna-hit with their Pixies-influenced single "Seether." Despite the fact that their first album, *American Thighs*, was produced by Liz Phair knob-twiddler Brad Wood and released on the Chicago indie Minty Fresh, Veruca Salt never had much cred. But "Seether" stormed the charts, even on finicky college radio stations, and the record went gold. After the band signed with Geffen, their follow-ups *Blow It Out Your Ass It’s Veruca Salt* (1996) and \*Eight Arms to Hold You \*(1997) couldn’t redeem their tarnished image, even though the former was produced by another Midwestern indie hero, Steve Albini. In 1998, the band split up and Gordon went solo.

## W

### WAR

It’s somewhat ironic that horn player Lee Oskar ended up in a band called WAR, since he left his native Denmark in 1966 to get away from the aftermath of World War II. Oskar’s father had worked for the Danish resistance; his mother was a concentration camp survivor. Oskar grew up feeling hemmed in by his parents’ caution and fled to the US as soon as he could. In Los Angeles, he met Eric Burdon and the rest of the members of WAR; at the time, they were all playing in a band backing up the failing singing career of former LA Rams linebacker Deacon Jones. The new group released their first album as Eric Burdon and War in 1970, scoring a number-three hit with "Spill the Wine." Their real breakthrough came a few years later, after Burdon left the group, when WAR released the best-selling album of 1973\. Poignantly for a band consisting of six black men from LA and one European Jew, the record was titled *The World is a Ghetto*. Both the title track and "The Cisco Kid" became top ten hits; later, singles like "Low Rider" and "Why Can’t We Be Friends" (both 1975) cemented their fame for the ages.

### Max Weinberg

Bruce Springsteen isn’t Jewish, but his drummer is. Max Weinberg, the man Springsteen called "the best thing" on *Born in the USA*, has been proving that Jews do have rhythm since 1974, when he auditioned for the E Street Band. "Mighty Max," as Bruce calls him, has played on *Born to Run*, *Darkness on the Edge of Town*, *The River*, and *Born in the USA*. He also lent his straight-ahead, no-frills style to Meat Loaf’s *Bat Out of Hell* in 1977, and for one week in 1983, he could be heard on both the number-one and number-two tracks on the charts: "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler and "Making Love Out of Nothing at All" by Air Supply. After the E Street Band went on hiatus, Weinberg spent some time as a record producer and tried going back to school, although he kept drumming in bar mitzvah bands. In 1993, a chance meeting with Conan O’Brien led to a gig leading the band on O’Brien’s new late-night show\*\*. Weinberg has since gone back to Springsteen’s reunited E Street Band, but he still leads the Max Weinberg Seven on Conan every night. Meanwhile, E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan is also a Jew, as well as the first person ever to write an original song for Bruce: "Roll of the Dice," from 1992’s *Human Touch*.

### Leslie West

See Mountain.

### Peter Wolf

See the J. Geils Band.

## Y

### Peter Yarrow

Despite their New Testament name, Peter, Paul and Mary were one-third Israelite. Peter Yarrow wasn’t raised in a particularly religious household, but like many of the Jewish folksingers of the sixties, he based his career on the very Jewish concept of healing the world – tikun olam. Inspired by Pete Seeger, Yarrow took up the guitar in high school. After graduating from Cornell, he met Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers in Greenwich Village, and the three formed a folk trio. Their self-titled album had hits in 1962 with "Lemon Tree" and the Pete Seeger song "If I Had a Hammer." In 1963, they released\* Moving\*, which contained Yarrow’s classic children’s song "Puff the Magic Dragon," and *In the Wind*, which contained their hit covers of Bob Dylan’s "Blowing in the Wind" and "Don’t Think Twice." They backed up their musical convictions with social action, marching against segregation and apartheid. Yarrow never talked much about his Jewish background, but when his bandmates asked him to write a Hanukkah song in 1983, he came up with "Light One Candle," still a staple of Hebrew school singalongs today.

### The Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Of the neo-garage bands to come out of New York in the past few years, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs might be the most notoriously over-hyped. Which is not to say they don’t deserve the praise – it’s just that their live shows had critics raving before they’d ever released a full LP, creating a very imbalanced ratio of praise to recordings. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' self-titled EP came out in 2001\. After several years of touring with hipster behemoths like the Strokes and the White Stripes, the band finally released an album, *Fever to Tell*, which contained the single "Maps." The jury is still out on lead singer Karen O (does that stand for "Oy"?) and guitarist Nick Zinner, but drummer Brian Chase definitely qualifies as a Jewish rocker.

### Yes

In 1981, Yes broke up, and bassist Chris Squire set about forming a new group called Cinema. He recruited Yes drummer Alan White, Yes keyboardist Tony Kaye, and a South African Jewish guitarist named Trevor Rabin. Then Yes vocalist Jon Anderson asked if he could get involved, and Squire realized that he had virtually re-formed his old band. This proved to be the most commercially successful of the many incarnations Yes took during their thirty-year career. After over a decade of recording songs four times as long as anything on the radio and inspired by Stravinsky, Yes released a dance-pop album, *90125*. Rabin’s contributions included the single “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” which became Yes’s only number-one hit. In his native country, Rabin had been similarly successful, fronting the pop band Rabbitt, which has been called South Africa’s answer to the Beatles. Rabin, who changed his name from Rabinowitz, was raised in a Reform household. He grew up observing Shabbat and singing in his synogogue choir, and despite the name change, he has never really left Judaism. In 2004, he told the San Diego Jewish journal that it helps to be a Jew in the world of rock and roll, because so many other musicians are also MOT. Indeed, Rabin wasn’t the only Jew affiliated with Yes—their manager, Brian Lane, was born Harvey Freed.

### Yo La Tengo

Every Hanukkah, Yo La Tengo puts on an eight-day show at Maxwell’s, the veteran rock club in Hoboken. Frontman Ira Kaplan, who has been called "the Jewish Jimi Hendrix," brings his Jersey hometown covers by Jews ranging from Neil Diamond to the Ramones. Yes, they’ve put out Christmas EPs – but for their December devotion, Yo La Tengo might win the title of the most Jewish band in indie rock. With their marriage of soaring noise tapestries and sixties pop confections, they’re also one of the most influential. Debuting in 1986 with *Ride the Tiger*, the band gained steam throughout the end of the decade. In 1993 the band signed with Matador and released *Painful*, beginning their journey towards elder-statesmanship with a series of albums that managed to be hugely innovative while taking a major cue from the Velvet Underground. *Electr-O-Pura* (1995), *I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One* (1997), and \*…And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out \*(2000) all feature songs made out of layers of sound as bright, dense, and strange as the clouds above North Jersey. Most recently, they’ve covered Sun Ra’s "Nuclear War" and released *Summer Sun* (2003).

## Z

### Warren Zevon

Warren Zevon lived a life straight out of a Tom Waits song. The young Zevon’s Jewish father was a professional gambler and prizefighter; along with his Mormon mother, Warren grew accustomed to moving every time Mr. Zevon’s fortunes changed for the worse. In LA, young Warren picked up piano, studying under Igor Stravinsky. When his parents divorced, the sixteen-year-old Zevon took off to New York in his father’s Corvette, where he began writing sharp, satirical songs about lives as tough as his own. 1969’s Wanted Dead or Alive gained little attention, but critics fell in love when they discovered his self-titled 1976 album, which was produced by Jackson Browne. The single "Werewolves of London," from 1978’s *Excitable Boy*, was his first big hit. But Zevon’s alcoholism got the better of him in the eighties, despite the critical praise won by *The Envoy* in 1982\. He resurfaced in 1987 with *Sentimental Hygiene,* backed by members of REM, and followed it with several well-received albums in the late eighties and nineties. Not longer after the 2002 release of *My Ride’s Here*, Zevon was diagnosed with a rare form lung cancer usually associated with asbestos poisoning. He died the following year after putting out one final album, *The Wind*.

### John Zorn

John Zorn is downtown New York’s emissary of radical Jewish culture – a phrase which, not coincidentally, is the rallying cry of his record label, Tzadik. As a composer and saxophonist, Zorn has always been equally influenced by Jewish culture and the lure of the experimental. He gained a cult following in the nineties with his rock band Naked City, which brought free jazz to post-rock as a sort of downtown experimentalist supergroup. After Naked City dissolved, Zorn formed Masada, for which he has written over two hundred pieces exploring Judaism through avant-garde composition. Meanwhile, since 1995, Tzadik has been promoting experimental Jewish music through its Radical Jewish Culture project.
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### Words
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/words/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:09:12.000Z
Everything worth reading on JewsRock, gathered in one place. Dig in.

### [Essays](https://www.jewsrock.org/tag/essays/)

The long reads — the tailor behind rock's flashiest suits, Bob Dylan and the Talmud, Kiss as a metaphor for Jewish survival. Our flagship.

### [The 4 Questions](https://www.jewsrock.org/tag/the-4-questions/)

Quick Q&As with the tribe and its fellow travelers — Jon Stewart, Al Franken, Adam Levine, David Brooks, Jeff Garlin, and a young Beck.

### [The Blog](https://www.jewsrock.org/tag/blog/)

Short, sharp dispatches from the mid-2000s — the daily churn of Jewish rock news, gossip, and obsession.

### [Recipes](https://www.jewsrock.org/tag/recipes/)

Randy California's kugel and Handsome Dick Manitoba's chopped liver. So rich you could plotz.

### [Lyrics](https://www.jewsrock.org/tag/lyrics/)

Dropping the bomb scripture at your bar mitzvah — Jewish lyrics from Dylan to Sandler.

### [Bad for the Jews](https://www.jewsrock.org/tag/bad-for-the-jews/)

When our own do us wrong. A gentle roast.

### [Other Stuff](https://www.jewsrock.org/tag/other-stuff/)

Odds, ends, and essential miscellany — including the real names behind the stage names.
## Posts
### Dropping the Baum: The Real Names of Jewish Rockers
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/dropping-the-baum-the-real-names-of-jewish-rockers/
Last updated: 2026-08-16T01:41:25.000Z
*By Franklin Foer*

The history of punk could be told (counterfactually) as a Zionist parable. In the mid-70s, a band out of Forest Hills called the Hymans cut a stripped-down eponymous album, The Hymans. Crooning about Nazis, the Hymans' Jewish singer comes close to fulfilling the ideal of Muskeljudentum promoted by Theodore Herzl's circle: raw, virile, unbookish Jewish masculinity. While the Hymans may have turned the course of history, they were, in fact, part of a chain of Jewish musicians. Although the Hymans had many influences, none were greater than the proto-punkers Richard Blum and Ross Friedman. Simultaneous to the Hymans' rise, Chaim Witz and Stanley Eisen flung themselves across stadium stages with golden chais splayed across their manicured gardens of chest hair.  
  
You know this version is fantasy. But to tell this history as it really happened only requires changing a few names—or, rather, changing back a few names. Hyman went by the gentile moniker Joey Ramone. (To be sure, the Ramones were populated by more gentiles than Jews.) Blum and Friedman, stalwarts of The Dictators, remade themselves as Handsome Dick Manitoba and Ross the Boss. And, of course, Witz and Eisen made asses of themselves for Kiss under the noms de goy Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. Fortunately for the reputation of the Jewish people, the visible eye detected no chai on their chests.  
  
Why have so many Jewish rockers, from Peretz "Perry Farrell" Bernstein to Bob "Dylan" Zimmerman felt compelled to obscure their Jewishness by goy-ifying their names? It's hard not to feel a bit hurt by their abandonment of the Jewish people. By changing their names, they have unwittingly sent a message to their old comrades from chader: To be cool, to be a rebel, you have got to split from the tribe. As Dorothy Parker remarked of Fanny Brice after the comedienne's nose job: "She cut off her nose to spite her race."  
  
To take the edge off the feelings of hurt, I have conducted an analysis of the Jewish rockers who have dropped the Baum, jettisoning their ancestral names. The list is heartening. For every Joey Ramone and Bob Dylan, there's a dozen Gene Simmons. In other words, most of the name changers are, like Simmons, a shande for the goyim.  
  
There's a long history of Jewish artists dropping the Baum that predates Dylan. On the old vaudeville circuit, performers felt obliged to purge most of their obviously Jewish markings. You could understand why. If audiences in Kansas and Ohio knew that Jack Benny was really Benjamin Kubelsky and George Burns was Nathan Birnbaum, they might not have flocked in such droves to their shows. And they largely succeeded at deceiving the gentiles. ("The Simpsons" once mocked this credulousness. At a dinner, Krusty the Clown recites a brucha. "He's talking funny talk," Homer responds. When Lisa notes Krusty's Judaism, Homer replies, "A Jewish entertainer? Get out of here.")  
  
But there's a difference between Baum-dropping in Hollywood and rock. Hollywood makes little pretense about presenting an idealized, fabricated version of life. Rock, on the other hand, has made a fetish of its own authenticity. And it's not surprising, therefore, that it is Baum-droppers who have produced some of the most inauthentic dreck in the history of American pop.  
  
A hefty number of Jews have reinvented themselves for success in the genre now known as Adult Contemporary: Barry "Manilow" Pincus, Kenny "G" Gorelick, and Michael "Bolton" Bolotin. Their careers seem to invariably follow the same dialectical path. After recording Christmas albums, albums only possible thanks to their new goyische names, these artists invariably have mid-life reversions to their childhood faith—a spiritual rebirth that allows for foundering careers to instantly generate large audiences at Jewish music festivals. Tellingly, these Baum-droppers produce music that is even cheesy by the low standards of the genre.  
  
In the end, there's an undeniable commercial impulse driving Baum-dropping. And it isn't limited to Jews found on the smooth jazz stations. Even hippies—or perhaps especially hippies—found themselves unable to resist assimilationist pressures. Mama Cass Elliot came out of the womb as Ellen Cohen; Tiny Tim was Herbert Khaury.  
  
Of course, examples abound of Baum-droppers who aren't such embarrassments. Indeed, their Baum-dropping is integral to their art. Name-changing, for instance, was a punk staple, even for rockers of gentile extraction (see Gary Glitter and Sid Vicious). Besides, the early punks were part of a long tradition of rebel Jewish artists, like their comic counterpart Lenny Bruce (aka Leonard Alfred Schneider), reenacting an old script that requires them to shame their mothers, reject tradition, and emerge with a new, more modern aesthetic. That theme dominates much of Yiddish literature, the novels of Philip Roth, and the memoirs of the City College crowd of New York intellectuals. That is, if they hadn't run away from their parents and their religion, they would have lacked sufficient anger and angst to produce punk.  
  
Similarly, anyone involved in hip-hop, even laterally, gets a pass. No rappers, of course, perform under their own name. That excuses the Baum-dropping of the Beastie Boys, Princess Superstar, and Beck.  
  
Or there's the rare case of Bob Dylan, who reinvented himself so often and convincingly that it's hard to imagine that a figure called Robert Zimmerman ever existed. Besides, he didn't just ditch his name, he temporarily ditched his religion and produced the evangelical album Slow Train Coming. And, as soon as he hopped on the Jesus train, it's just as well that he didn't have an obviously hamische name that could have exacerbated the Jews for Jesus propaganda potential.  
  
Does it hurt to drop the Baum? It must be a painful psychic process, because it is a phenomenon so little acknowledged in either song or rock memoir. So far as I know, only one band has written about the obscuring of its Jewish roots as part of its persona. The Dictators have blared one of the truest lines in rock:  
  
They loved us down in Dallas / We didn't pay our dues / They loved us down in Dallas / They didn't know we were Jews.  
  
*Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Last Politician.*
### The Spirit of Rand
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-spirit-of-rand/
Last updated: 2006-03-16T00:00:00.000Z
*By Bob Cook*

If you were to ask anyone, "Family Feud"-style, what they associate with the Canadian power trio Rush, somewhere near the top of the list would be Geddy Lee's wailing siren of a voice. Also near the top would the band's most notable lyrical inspiration: novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand.

The blend of Lee’s voice and Rand’s ideas has led Rush to great commercial heights in its 30-plus years, although to many the Lee-Rand combination is the musical equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard, scratching out long-winded, dangerously self-absorbed Objectivist treatises. "What about the voice of Geddy Lee/How did it get so high/ I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy?" Pavement asked in its 1997 song "Stereo."

Photo courtesy SRO Management/Anthem

Certainly, there are many other reasons Rush is still filling arenas after all these years: The incredible musicianship and interplay of Lee on bass, Alex Lifeson on guitar and Neil Peart on drums. The band's status as Canadian national heroes, particularly Lee, with his hockey hair and devotion to the Toronto Blue Jays. That kick-ass synth line in their signature song, 1981's "Tom Sawyer."

Still, the Lee-Rand connection intrigues, in part because their backgrounds have so much in common. Rand's philosophy grew from watching the Bolsheviks persecute her Jewish family and take their business, a chemistry shop, during the 1917 Russian revolution. Lee grew up the son of two Holocaust survivors from Poland who opened a variety shop in Toronto after World War II. Rand's distrust of any theological or governmental power led her to declare herself an atheist as well as an Objectivist. In Rush's signature song, "Tom Sawyer," Lee espoused the band's philosophy that its "mind is not for rent/to any god or government."

Of course, as any self-respecting Rush fan knows, it is drummer Neil Peart, not Lee, who writes the band's lyrics and for a long time was the band's card-carrying Rand acolyte. But Peart tapped into something in Lee's subconscious that made him a more compelling deliverer of Rand's philosophy than Rand herself. The Fountainhead might be heavy reading, but Rush is heavy rock.

Gary Lee Weinrib was born in 1953, six years after his parents, Morris Weinrib and Manya "Mary" Rubenstein, arrived in the Toronto neighborhood of Willowdale, then as now a center for Canadian Jewish life. Lee's parents met as teens when they were interred in a labor camp in their hometown of Starachowice, Poland. Later, they were shipped to Auschwitz, and then split, with Morris taken to Dachau and Mary to Bergen-Belsen, until they were liberated by Allied soldiers and reunited after the war.

After their liberation "they didn't know what to do," Lee told Circus magazine in 1977\. "They still lived in the concentration camp, as most people did, trying to collect themselves. When they liberated them, they thought they were the only people left in the world. Can you imagine that? They thought they were the few survivors. They were slowly informed that the world was still going on. Then they couldn't understand why they were saved. How could it happen? How could God let it happen? They gathered up what they could and came to Canada. They were going to go to New York, but someone said it was nice in Canada."

Lee's parents did not hide their Holocaust experiences from their three children. Lee told the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles that he remembers hearing the horror stories starting at about age eight. He also could see the after-effects in the dicey health of his father, who died the year before Lee's bar mitzvah. Lee's mother kept "Geddy" (her Yiddish-inflected pronunciation of "Gary") busy working the family variety store; she was not thrilled when her fifteen-year-old son started playing in bands around Toronto, including a precursor to Rush that included guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer John Rutsey.

Unlike Rand, who developed her politics while watching the Soviets nationalize her father's chemistry shop, Lee did not radicalize politically upon the knowledge that the state had attacked his family and heritage. Instead, he went into rock 'n' roll for the usual reasons: rebellion against a protective family, and girls.

"When I first started playing my mother was very against it. She had come out of the war, out of a concentration camp—and she wanted me to be what her people could never be—to grow up and have the security of being a doctor and this and that... The first years I was doing this she couldn't understand it at all. It was a very intense situation," Lee told Circus.

But what Lee got from his parents was the notion that you need to work particularly hard if you wanted to go into business for yourself. From the start, Lee and his bands played anywhere they could in Toronto. Lee, who identifies himself as a cultural Jew, also came back to temple for meaningful occasions, such as when he got married to Nancy Young in 1976\. (As an aside, Nancy Young is the sister of Lindy Young, who kicked Lee out of an early version of Rush. One wonders if Lindy Young thinks about that at family reunions.)

When Rutsey either left or was kicked out (depending on the source) in 1974 over his diabetes-related health problems or his desire to make Rush a Bad Company clone (again, depending on the source), Lee and Lifeson found Peart, a St. Catharine, Ontario, high school dropout who had come back to Canada after trying to make a career in England. Lee and Lifeson loved Peart for his drumming, and even more for his willingness to take on writing the lyrics.

In the 1988 book Rush Visions: the Official Biography, author Bill Banasiewicz notes that Peart and Lee bonded over Objectivist theory, turning the band from a fist-pumping precursor to Loverboy into the prog eggheads we know today. For its 1976 album 2112, dedicated to "the genius of Ayn Rand," the band found an unlikely commercial breakthrough thanks to the 20-minute title track, a meandering, rocking, Lee-screeching novel about a man who gets smacked down by high priests after his discovery of a guitar threatens to undo a (presumably falsely) utopian society.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand wrote that man has his "own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Speaking of productive, Rush spent about the first 20 years of its career in a constant album-tour-album cycle. And speaking of reason, its songs were more likely likely to be about trees as an allegory for political and personal interaction ("The Trees," from 1978's Hemispheres) or about two-lanes wide airguns blasting at someone driving a sports car after vehicles have been banned ("Red Barchetta," from 1981's Moving Pictures) than about finding some hot tail after the gig.

Rush has the distinction of being the only rock group cited in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies—its Fall 2002 publication of "Rand, Rush and Rock" was then followed with a Rush-dedicated symposium, detailed in its Fall 2003 issue, on such topics as "Rand, Rush, and De-Totalizing the Utopianism of Progressive Rock."

While some detractors may find the use of Rand to be merely addle-brained, others found it far more dangerous. In Visions, Lee is said to have been stunned, given his heritage, that a New Musical Express reviewer in 1977, citing Rush's lyrics, had the nerve to call the band "fascists."

In fact, over the years, Rush has begun to downplay Rand's influence on its work. Peart now refers to himself as a "left-learning libertarian," distrusting mass movements and concentrated power, an odd thing, it might seem, for the drummer of a band which released a live CD and DVD set, Rock in Rio (2003), documenting a show in front of 40,000 people.

Lee himself has said the connection with Rand was less about politics and more about something very rock 'n' roll—individualism and defiance. The band, Lee has said in various interviews, found in Rand someone who eloquently espoused its own belief that government and mass movements were usually detrimental to artistic expression.

That view is stated most directly in what the band once called its "Fear Trilogy," three songs played in order on tour. With sequencing inspired by George Lucas, part one is "The Enemy Within," from 1984's Grace Under Pressure, part two is "The Weapon," from 1982's Signals, and part three is "Witch Hunt," from 1981's Moving Pictures. (It was no longer a trilogy after part four, "Freeze," appeared on 2002's Vapor Trails.) The songs describe how demagogues use outside influences as a means to kill individual expression. A line in "Witch Hunt" seems particularly appropriate to Lee's family background: the strangers "who threaten us" are "immigrants and infidels."

Not to say Rush is completely humorless. Lee has taken vocal turns with such Canadian comedy duos as Bob and Doug McKenzie and South Park’s Terrance and Phillip. Many Rush shows begin with the theme song to "The Three Stooges." (The Stooges have three Jews instead of just one, but Rush is very much like the old comedy group in that generally women hate them both.) Lee generally comes across as a happy-go-lucky guy, which perhaps is why it took Peart to crystallize his feelings about growing up Jewish, a child of immigrants and survivors. Certainly, Lee could see in his own parents’ story, as Rand did in hers, that a concentrated governmental and social movement could have tragic consequences for those deemed "other."

The only Rush song that directly deals with the Holocaust is 1984's "Red Sector A," which, in typical Rush style, is more portrait that personal rant. Peart has said he wrote it with Lee's parents in mind, which is most clear in the couplet that frames the song, evoking the confusion they felt at upon their liberation: "Are we the last ones left alive? Are we the only human beings to survive?"

In the 1977 Circus interview, Lee and interviewer Debra Frost discussed how perseverance had been key to the band's success—the perseverance to play 300 dates a year, throw back critics' slings and arrows and stay true to their musical vision.

Frost asked Lee about his parents, "Was 'perseverance' a key word to their survival?"

Lee responded: "I would say so. "

---

*Bob Cook is a sports and culture writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, NBC News, and the Chicago Reader.*
### The Godfather of Everything That Moves
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-godfather-of-everything-that-moves/
Last updated: 2006-03-07T00:00:00.000Z
*By Ethan Brown*

James Brown is the Godfather of Soul, George Clinton the Godfather of Funk, but Mel Cheren is the Godfather of Everything That Moves. Hip-hop, punk-funk, techno, house—anything with a beat—shares its DNA with the music played at the Paradise Garage. Cheren ran the downtown New York club with his lover, Michael Brody, from 1977 to 1987.

Photo courtesy Mel Cheren

And it was there, in a sprawling former parking garage at 84 King Street, that Madonna tried—and failed (she was booed off the stage)—to convince a crowd that a white girl could be a disco diva; that a Bronx DJ named Larry Levan played records like the Peech Boys’ "Don’t Make Me Wait" and Taana Gardner’s "Heartbeat," whose grooves would provide the backbone for hundreds of hip-hop and R&B samples; and that a Spanish DJ who went by one name—Alfredo—sensed the future in Levan’s across-the-board style and imported it back to his home in Ibiza, schooling young DJs like Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling in this eclectic ethos. They then shipped it back to home in London and gave birth to something called rave.

The Paradise Garage is the Eden of BPM culture, Cheren its Adam. It would be too easy to say that Cheren, a gay Jewish kid who came of age in the 1950s, is an unlikely icon of post-modern groove. But popular music history proves that agents of profound cultural change are just as likely to be behind the boards as in front of them (think Sam Phillips creating the spectral sound of Sun Studios or Phil Spector laying down the primal, kick drum beats of "Be My Baby.")

Like Phillips and Spector, Cheren both reacted against something and saw an opening for something new. As an employee of ABC/Paramount Records in the 1950s, he recoiled at the saccharine sounds of Pat Boone. Later, working at Scepter Records in the 1960s, after falling in love with the orchestral soul sound coming out of Philadelphia, Cheren imagined a moment when DJs (and dancers, too) would want those lush grooves extended over the length of an entire song.

So, in 1976, Cheren created a label of his own to fulfill that vision, West End Records. It didn’t take long for the label to open up the greatest beat-minded minds; one of West End’s first releases, Sessa Mato’s "Sessamato," was the first record that Grandmaster Flash set raps to. Meanwhile, Cheren’s lover, Brody, who shared his partner’s passion for the percussive sound emerging from discotheques, canvassed friends for financial help in opening a disco.

By the spring of 1977, Brody had cobbled together just enough cash to open the Paradise Garage on King Street in the West Village. The space wasn’t much more than an industrial shell (its most notable feature was a ramp leading up to the dance floor), but Cheren and Brody were savvy—visionary, even—about the talent they employed behind the decks. The pair hired Larry Levan, an up-and-coming DJ who had cultivated a small yet devoted following at the Continental Baths on St. Marks Place (also home to some of Bette Midler’s first performances) as the Paradise Garage’s resident spinner.

Even before the Paradise Garage opened, Cheren and Brody knew that they had made the right choice: Levan abandoned his apartment in the Bronx and actually moved into the club, helping to fashion its decor and sound system. Levan enthused to Cheren and Brody about the vision he’d bring to the club and even talked about creating his very own speakers for the Garage, which he dubbed "Levans."

From the beginning, it seemed that everything about the Paradise Garage would be different from its competition in clubland, right down to the opening night. Instead of an official premiere, the Paradise Garage opened its doors with a series of "Construction Parties," in which proceeds from the door went to defray the costs of the club’s launch.

But the atmosphere at the "Construction Parties" was hardly low-key: Levan thrilled revelers with his charismatic DJ’ing style, which emphasized song selection over mixing.

Rock, salsa, soul and, of course, disco blared from Levan’s booth with a sense of improvisation that no one (not even Cheren himself) could have predicted. Yet Levan wasn’t simply being eclectic or showoff-y about his vast record collection; he played a diverse set because he felt that the dancers’ emotions were much more fluid than the songs with a steady, 4/4 beat allowed. When the dance floor grew exhausted in the early morning hours, Levan would employ sound effects like rain and wind; when dancers needed a boost of energy, he would play anthems like Chaka Khan’s "I Know You, I Live You" complete with the high-pitched squeal of a siren.Under Levan’s hypnotic spell, dancers would stay at the Garage for 48 hours at a time.

Outside the Garage, disco was booming, most notoriously at Studio 54\. But Cheren and Brody refused to kow-tow to disco’s increasingly glitzy, classist sensibility. "Standing on a pedestal outside the door, picking and choosing, Mark the doorman resembled some elitist Nazi youth," Cheren wrote of Studio 54 in his autobiography Keep On Dancin: My Life and the Paradise Garage. Though the Garage had a membership policy, complete with photo ID cards, Cheren and Brody strove to maintain democracy on the dance floor. At the Garage, drag queens, outer-borough gays, and even celebs like Mick Jagger, Eddie Murphy, Diana Ross, and Keith Haring mixed.

Nostalgia for the Paradise Garage remains a powerful force in dance music culture, from British cultural critic Tim Lawrence’s recently published proto-disco history Loves Saves the Day to the Garage reunion tours (complete with the club’s warm-up DJ David DePino) that crisscross nightspots all over Europe. But it was really Cheren’s notion of dance floor as utopia that ensured the survival of the Paradise Garage long after disco’s late 1970s demise, the onset of AIDS in the early 1980s, the club’s closing in 1987, and Levan’s death from heart failure in 1992\. "Everybody was freaking," house music producer Cevin Fisher intoned on his tribute to the Garage, "The Way We Used To." Almost twenty years after the Paradise Garage’s demise, the club’s egalitarian spirit still fuels dance floors all over the world.

Ethan Brown writes for New York Magazine.

---

*Ethan Brown is an investigative journalist and author (Murder in the Bayou) and a senior editor at Deep South Today.*
### Rocking the Catskills
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/rocking-the-catskills/
Last updated: 2006-02-26T00:00:00.000Z
*By Anya Kamenetz*

Baruch Atah Adonei Elohenu Melech Ha Olom Ah yeah, that's the holiday . . . that's the Hanukkah robot funk! Barumpa bump bump, barumpa bump bump . . . beeyach! Baruch Atah Adonei Elohenu Melech Ha Olom Right about now gonna drop some Hanukkah science Yeah, this is it

Although the above lyrics are unrecognizable to all but the completist, they did indeed drip from the lips of a young Beck Hansen, in a 1996 rarity titled "Just Say Noel." And there, revealed in a single spin of the dreidel, is one of the most transcendent and versatile music talents of the past decade. Beck might be bizarre, but he’s also quintessentially Jewish: hyperverbal, ironic, and always full of soul.

"If I have children I'll raise them as Jews, because it's a great religion," Beck told the LA Weekly in 2000\. Beck became a father last year, to a son named Cosimo Henri. Don't bother sending a gift for the bris, however; Beck's bride, Marissa Ribisi, an actress and the twin sister of actor Giovanni Ribisi, also happens to be a long-standing Scientologist.

Rumors of Beck’s ties with Scientology, the celebrity-embracing church (calling it a cult brings swift and certain legal action, so I won't) have dogged him all his life. His father, David Campbell, follows the church, which claims to give its members supernatural psychic powers and the ability to ward off disease. After years of denying the rumors, Beck himself told The New York Times Magazine in March 2005 that yes, he is a Scientologist, "It's been useful," he said. "My dad's been doing it since before I was born."

With Tom Cruise or John Travolta it's not so bad, but somehow it's a shame to see an intelligent and talented member of the tribe mixed up in such mishegos. So does this mean goodbye to our favorite folk-rock boychik? Has he been masquerading all this time? A look into his family and influences will reveal at least one facet of the truth.

High Five, more dead than alive! Rockin' the plastic like a man from the Catskills! "Rock the Catskills," Odelay, 1997

Beck has deep roots not in the Borscht Belt but on the Lower East Side, where his mother, Bibbe Hansen, was raised by a half-Jewish mother and, briefly, a Jewish stepfather. The blonde, blue-eyed Beck is halachically Jewish by the most diluted of paths: his mother's mother's mother. In fact, Beck's great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side is Abraham Rosenberg, first president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.

Bibbe was best known as a performance artist and a onetime Warhol star, appearing alongside Edie Sedgwick in the film Prison at the tender age of 13\. When she was a young self-described "juvenile delinquent," her mother married Jimmy Shapiro, scion of a prominent New York Jewish family. "It was the Fifties and we weren't allowed to join the country club because we were Jews," she said in an Index magazine interview. "My mother got into a bar brawl in a little upstate town. It was a catfight with some woman who started yelling that the 'lousy kikes are messing up our town’. So my mother hauled off and decked her. I remember getting turned away from hotels back then--they were "restricted" which meant "no Jews". So we were Jewish enough to be discriminated against."

Bek Campbell (teachers changed his first name, and he took on his mother's last name after his parents' divorce) was born on July 8, 1970\. He grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Los Angeles, raised in bohemia by his mother, who incorporated Jewish traditions including a few years of Hebrew school.

"Passover was the first time I got drunk," he told the zine Plotz in 1997\. "We had pretty rowdy Passovers because my mom would invite all her non-Jewish friends over and they brought a party atmosphere with them."

Beck’s father is a noted session musician who has recorded with Aerosmith among others; but he was out of his life early. Beck started making tapes at the age of 10, using found-sound collages as well as his own playing, a magpie style that still marks his music. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade. "I wanted a bar mitzvah," he told the LA Weekly in 2000, but his family couldn't afford it. "When I was a teenager I used to go to synagogue and study Torah with a friend who lived in Tujunga."

At the age of 18, the budding music star boarded a bus back to the East Village. He was a skinny kid with torn jeans, a guitar, and a fierce love of Woody Guthrie, just like the greatest Jewish rock star of all time, Bob Dylan. And like Dylan, he hung around the fringes of a New York scene, the acoustic-punk-confessional-freak show called "anti-folk", before forging a sound all his own. Upon his return to Los Angeles in 1990, Beck was ready to start his own performance career.

Miracles amaze me She looks so Israeli Love the way she plays me I think I'm going crazy "Nicotine and Gravy," Midnite Vultures 1999

By 1994 "Loser," with its slide guitar, hip-hop beats, and unstoppable chorus, was all over MTV. Beck quickly signed to Jewish media mogul David Geffen's record label DGC, which released Mellow Gold, his major label debut. Critics and teenage girls alike fell for the album's collage of folk, country, Delta blues, and hip-hop, all accented by Beck’s laid-back, fluent and witty lyrics. And that flowing blond hair. And those blue eyes, as big as satellite dishes. He was the best of both worlds – a male shiksa with a hint of Yid, which escaped in interviews and in rare lyrical turns like "Just Say Noel."

"Yeah, when Jewish girls find out Beck is Jewish they just go crazy," his stepfather, Sean Carrillo, has said, "cause they feel that they can now bring him home to meet the folks. It's really important to his Jewish girl fans."

Like Dylan, another shy Jewish kid trying on personas, Beck has never been afraid to change it up. In his most exhilarating transformation, Midnite Vultures, Beck morphed into a Smoove-B style sex god. Onstage in 2000 performing the single "Debra," he writhed on a bed that lowered down from the ceiling, doing a dead-on impersonation of Prince's heated-up falsetto, with a little bit of R.Kelly thrown in. Although the song is equal parts come-on and put-on, it's little recognized as a tribute to glossy-lipped Jewish American Princesses everywhere.

How do we know Debra is Jewish? Well, we don't, but as a libidinal Jewish fan, I'd like to believe it. Let's start with her name, Debra. There is no more common Jewish girl's name. The song offers a few more clues: Beck offers to take his lady out for "a real good meal," a Jewish pick-up line if there ever was one. And where does he plan to dine? Zankou Chicken, a legendary Middle Eastern restaurant in LA that serves lip-smacking, garlicky roasted chicken--perfect for a takeout Shabbat dinner.

Milk and honey, flowing down like money Bring a poor boy to his knees "Milk and Honey," Midnite Vultures, 1999

Beck's latest album, Guero, was released in March 2005\. Titled after Spanish slang for "white boy," it’s another return to the LA streets of Beck’s childhood, playing with notions of race and identity. As has happened for his last few albums, Guero formed the basis for independent remixes and spin-offs. Beck has sanctioned many of these homages; with his Jewish background, he recognizes the value of reinterpretation.

"I like to look at things from as many different angles as possible," Beck told the LA Weekly in that same interview. "And one of the things I love about Judaism is that it gives 100 different interpretations of a single line of Torah." Just so, in the Talmudic tradition of rock criticism, it is possible to give 100 different readings of a single line of Beck's music and 100 different reinterpretations of the man's life itself. Hallelujah.

Anya Kamenetz is a freelance writer living in New York City. She blogs at Anyakamenetz.blogspot.com, and her book, Generation Debt, will be published by Riverhead in February 2006.

Full text of Beck's 1997 interview with Plotz.

---

*Anya Kamenetz is an author and journalist, a former NPR education correspondent, and a senior advisor at the Aspen Institute.*
### Naked City
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/naked-city/
Last updated: 2006-02-17T00:00:00.000Z
*By Ari Abramowitz*

Photo courtesy Michael Dorf

New York was a dump. Hell, that’s why I wanted to go there. Mind you, it wasn’t the rotten apple Taxi Driver dump of the late 1970s. But to a nice Jewish boy from Scarsdale, pre-broken-windows-policy New York circa 1990 was crappy enough to evoke that enticing post-Bohemian fractional-truth: in filth, sublimity.

Just over a decade earlier had brought the Talking Heads and the Ramones, followed by the Contortions, and Liquid Liquid, concurrent with Larry Levan spinning at the Paradise Garage and Kool Herc spinning in the South Bronx, followed soon by the Misfits, Agnostic Front and hardcore matinees at CBGB’s. This was sublime filth, and it came together in the later '80s as the "downtown scene."

This being New York City, Jewishness has a life of its own. There were two million Jews in this town but, other than the occasional chassid sighting, you wouldn’t necessarily know it. "Jews in New York" is simply a given. They’re everywhere and nowhere. Except that they could be very specific in the images I had in my mind at that time: Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Neil Diamond, infinite doctors and lawyers. All worthy and noble people, people who carved their own way in the world, people who contributed deeply to society, people worthy of emulation. But they weren’t me. There had to be something else to Jewishness. This 17-year-old needed it, needed something to relate to: a Bar Kokhba, a Judah Macabee. The best my folks could come up with was Sandy Koufax.

Fortunately, New York is so massive and in such perpetual flux that you can leave any piece of your pre-existing identity at home, or ditch it around the block (and, as with an acrimonious ex, hope to not run into it again). As certain Columbia professors at the time might have put it: you can transcend the oppression of the signified. Or as a generation earlier might have put it: You can just be. You could just be by downing acid and walking over the Brooklyn Bridge or by throwing on a tight, fetching leather outfit and heading to an S&M ball or by going out to dance clubs until 1—in the afternoon. Or you could just be by going out several nights a week to check out live music.

It might have been "just being," or it might have been a search for transcendence, or it might have been running away, or all of them together. There had to be way to write an addendum to the Talmud or maybe the Zohar incorporating my 17 years of experience and only-just-emerging identity. Something that drew from the tradition but headed towards futures that were still unknown and unseen. Until that amendment was written, I needed freedom. From where I stood, freedom looked to be at the margins, at the fringes. The Knitting Factory seemed to me to have some claim to the margins, so the Knit was often my destination.

One of the heavyweight regulars at the Knit was Elliot Sharp and his band, Carbon. Sharp looked the part (shaved bald, dressed all in black, soul patch, long, vampiric, albino-spider fingers creeping up, down and across his custom-made double-neck guitar) and Carbon was the bridge from what I knew about music to where I was looking to go. It worked because Carbon was, really, a prog-rock metal band not far from my beloved mid-70s King Crimson, but alloyed by the noise and skronk of the avant garde—the asymmetrical, guitar lines, undulating bass, thumping drums, freaky electric harp and industrial sampling—and played by weirder looking people.

John Lurie & the Lounge Lizards had been around for aeons, and even then their reputation preceded them. The band always looked great, especially Lurie—every bit the "thin, white duke" that Bowie was, but more hip, more with it, less aristocratic, and with a little less hair. They laid down their "fake jazz" with so much style and authority that they owned the space. But it wasn’t quite jazz, fake or not. It was funk, it was bossa nova, it was African, it was New Wave, it was noise, it was the swingingest thing around.

But no one topped Naked City. This was the band of John Zorn, the man around whom the "downtown scene" really coalesced, the man who would compose jazz, metal, modern classical, klezmer, and much more in thousands of permutations. This was the band that could play 37 styles of music in 53 seconds. This was the band who could also cover classical musicians such as Debussy and Messaien. This was the band that could play a piece that sounded like Black Sabbath’s tour bus getting run over by a pack of a dozen elephants—for 45 minutes. This was the band who listed as its inspirations artists from avant-garde jazz (Anthony Braxton, Eric Dolphy) to death metal (Carcass) to classic rock (Little Feat, Led Zeppelin) to all kinds of pop (Carole King, Liberace (unironically)), to movie soundtrack composers (Bernard Herrmann) to cartoon soundtrack composers (Carl Stalling) to classical (Stravinsky) to funk (Meters)…and that’s only one-third of it. This would all be pretentious (and still might be, anyway) if these inspirations didn’t manifest themselves in the music. But they’re all in there, making Naked City the first ethno-thrash-surf-jazz band in history. They were simply the best band I had ever seen up to that point in my life.

I spent a year just being a new kid in New York, worshipping these guys: Sharp, Lurie, Zorn, and others. This was why I had come to the City. No signifiers, no signifieds. Freedom to just be. Except for one thing: these three guys, and many more in this scene, were all Jewish. Heck, even the guy who created the Knit, Michael Dorf, is Jewish. And I had no idea. Not until near the end of freshman year, when the Knit held their "Radical Jewish Culture Festival" and all of them were there. At this festival, "Jewish" could mean noisy, evil, prog-metal or jazz-funk hipsterism or ethno-thrash-surf-jazz or simply the most fresh, vibrant, and vital music that I had ever heard.

And they weren't just being Jewish, but standing up and being counted as Jewish—affirmatively, proudly, and awesomely Jewish. Is that why Zorn played a show wearing tzitzit and a t-shirt that spelled "abracadabra" in Hebrew? This all opened the way for me to discover the spectacular volume of essential Jews in music, and not just the Geffen/Azoff types: Lou Reed, Laura Nyro, Donald Fagen, Geddy Lee, Perry Farrell, Marc Bolan, David Lee Roth, even Gene and Paul and on and on. Jewishness had always been there and was always opening spaces for influential creativity, style, substance, virtuosity and soul. I may have had the ears to hear, only I didn’t yet have the eyes to see. They were only just starting to open.

---

*Ari Abramowitz is a music writer and the author of The Pockit Rockit Music Finder.*
### Have Yourself a Jewish Little Christmas
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/have-yourself-a-jewish-little-christmas/
Last updated: 2006-02-08T00:00:00.000Z
*By Sean Daly*

Jewish and "Jingle Bells" don’t mix. Every time a pop star with Judeo-Christian claims has dared go "dashing through the snow," the results have been disastrous. Take Barbra Streisand, for instance, whose frantic 1967 version, "Jingle Bells?" sounds like it was recorded in a meth lab. What’s the rush, Babs? And what’s with that question mark? Are those rhetorical bells? Barry Manilow decided "Jingle Bells" would make a great duet—unfortunately, in 1990, he chose milquetoast R&B group Expose to ride along on his ho-hum open sleigh. Sheesh: The Donner party had a better time in the snow. Should he ever decide to get his bobtail bells in order, David Lee Roth might be the lone Chosen One twisted enough to nail that sleighing song.

That said, "Jingle Bells" is about the only fa-la-la fave in the Christmas canon that Jewish artists have yet to do better than anyone else. Let’s face it: Christmas music—from the religious to the reindeer—would be flat-out feh without a whole lot of help from Hebrew nation. After all, the very best Christmas tunes were written by members of the tribe. Irving Berlin whipped up "White Christmas," Mel Tormé concocted "The Christmas Song," and Jerry Herman decided "We Need a Little Christmas." Want more? Sammy Cahn decided to "Let It Snow," Joan Javits sexed it up with "Santa Baby," and Al Stillman got all schmaltzy for "There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays." What’s left? The Heat Miser song?

Talk about kicking Bing Crosby when he’s dead: Waltz your roasted chestnuts into any music store at the Yule end of the year, and you’ll be bombarded with Jewish artists dominating the bins. Some stars have even issued multiple holiday discs: Streisand has two (1967’s A Christmas Album and 2001’s Christmas Memories), Manilow has two (1990’s Because It’s Christmas and 2002’s A Christmas Gift of Love), and Kenny G has three (1994’s Miracles, 1999’s Faith, and 2002’s Wishes). Such Jewish pop icons as Carole King ("Love for Christmas"), Beck ("Little Drum Machine Boy"), and Simon & Garfunkel ("Star Carol") have all recorded Christmas singles. Oh, and don’t forget the Ramones’ "Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight)." That one rocks.

Why Jewish musicians have such a thing for Santa-appropriate songs is open for debate—and maybe a bit of eye-rolling from the more cynical. The artists usually strive for one of two PC approaches—the silly Christmas party or the warm-n-fuzzy Christmas spirit—managing to avoid stirring up religious brouhahas at all costs. But who cares: The more the merrier the Christmas, right? Right. So, to experience a full and festive Very Jewish Christmas, check out eight of the most popular Christmas albums on the market—recorded by people who should do the world a favor and whip up a decent Chanukah hit. Jewish or not, Adam Sandler must be stopped.

(Albums rated by a strict system of best-out-of-five nondenominational wreaths.)

A Christmas Gift for You Phil Spector Phil Spector Records

Jewish? Who cares! Gun-wielding psychopath? Bah humbug! Phil Spector decks the Wall of Sound with boughs of holly on arguably the greatest holiday album of all time. (Consumer alert: Charles Brown’s "Cool Christmas Blues" is an absolute must, as well—but he’s a bluesman, not a Jewish man.) Staying away from the real Baby Jesus-y stuff, the eccentric producer with the disturbing hair enlists such groovy talents as Darlene Love ("White Christmas"), Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans ("Here Comes Santa Claus"), and the Crystals ("Santa Claus Is Coming to Town") on this 1967 gem that manages to makes the mad month of December less hellish. It’s really that good. The girl-group harmonizing is instantly uplifting, and the signature layers of rumbling rat-a-tat drums will make you grin like a fool, with or without the benefit of spiked eggnog. The best track is the Ronettes’ "Frosty the Snowman," which has a supersexy "Be Me Baby" vibe. Merry XXX-mas, indeed. FIVE WREATHS

Miracles: The Holiday Album Kenny G Arista

Real name: Ken Gorelick. Real sales of this 1994 album: More than eight million, making it the largest-selling seasonal disc of all time. That’s right: Whether there’s a menorah or a blue spruce lighting up your big bay window, chances are you probably have a copy of Mr. G’s Miracles hidden somewhere in your home. And yes, you should be ashamed. Whether blowing on Hallmark-lame versions of "Silent Night," "Little Drummer Boy," or "Away in a Manger," the unstoppable G-force’s saxophone induces chills—and not the good kind. More like the frostbite kind. Should he get points for including the self-penned "The Chanukah Song"? No. This wheezy cut sounds like a lazy outtake from Fiddler on the Roof. Miracles is the kind of sugar-plum-dipped elevator music that makes more people take the stairs. ONE WREATH

The Christmas Album Neil Diamond Columbia

Neil Diamond is the William Shatner of soft rock. And that’s a compliment. Whether it’s a hot August night or a snowy Christmas Eve, Diamond remains a delightfully cheesy force to be reckoned with, over-emoting like only he can, no matter what the tune. In fact, with the exception of that creepy E.T. song, he’s rarely made an unfailingly earnest misstep, and this 1992 disc is no exception. He gives the religious cuts and the sillier stuff equal over-the-top reverence. The opener, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel/We Three Kings of Orient Are" has a sweet, well-meaning, can’t-we-all-just-get-along vibe. The L.A. Mass Choir joins the Jazz Singer for a rousing "Silent Night" that’s powerful enough to knock the tinsel from the tree. And his "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" is given the same hands-to-heaven tent-revival gusto as his hippier hits from his dirty-denim days—heck, there’s even a bluesy harmonica solo! Kitschy and flat-out fun, this is a must for the collection and should be spun liberally when that holiday party is losing steam. Diamond is the man. FOUR WREATHS

Christmas Is Almost Here Carly Simon Rhino

After reading the epic liner notes about how much she loves Christmas songs—"I want to hear them while I cook, sew, decorate trees, and laugh or cry. While I dance and drink and eat warm apple torte..."—one has to wonder: Carly Simon sews? Backed by some all-star support (Burt Bacharach, Willie Nelson, Heartbreaker Benmont Tench, drummer Jim Keltner), Simon is all about the "Christmas message" on this 2002 effort, overlooking the religious complications in lieu of universal togetherness. Or something like that. Despite being produced by pop-schlockmeister Don Was, this is a predominantly stripped-down, rootsy affair and a rather likable one at that. Simon can still sing like a slightly stoned mockingbird, and her "White Christmas" is a keeper. Sister Lucy’s treacly "Heaven" probably should have been kept within the cozy confines of Simon family gatherings, but as hirsute rocker Billy Squier—hey, is he Jewish?—once put it so eloquently, "Christmas is the time to say I love you." THREE WREATHS

Christmas Memories Barbra Streisand Columbia

Much better than her first Christmas album—if only because that oddly punctuated "Jingle Bells?" is nowhere to be found—this 2001 Babs-sized effort is draped in a diva-appropriate gauze worthy of that one-of-a-kind Voice. "Let’s come together and listen to the music," proclaims the liner notes. Indeed: After listening to golden-throated renditions of "I’ll Be Home for Christmas" and "Ave Maria," you gotta believe a whole lotta yuppie kids have been conceived to this one. Lavishly produced with a grand cinematic sheen, the vocalist and her approximately 1,000-piece orchestra are in lush harmony, torching up every one of the millions of dollars spent on making sure this one glows like an open fire. You know what you’re getting with a Streisand album—and she almost always delivers. And far be it from Babs to only sing the love songs to hubby Big Jim Brolin: The closing track, "One God," aims to bring all of us that much closer: "Many the ways all of us pray to one God / Many the paths winding their way to One God / Brothers and sisters...there were no strangers / After his work was done." Great, now I feel guilty for slamming Kenny G. FOUR WREATHS

Because It’s Christmas Barry Manilow Arista

Although he writes the songs that make whole world sing, Barry Manilow has remained a bit of mystery over the years. Mr. Mandy’s an intensely private guy, and his religious affiliation has remained just as vague as who he dates, where he lives, and why "Copacabana" still makes my fat butt get up and dance. He’s simply Barry the balladeer, the modest king of cornball make-out music. And we love him for it. Not surprisingly, 1990’s "Because It’s Christmas," with the exception of that stinky version of "Jingle Bells," is intended to do nothing more than score you a little First Noel nookie. It’s certainly not his best work, but it’s not a disaster, either. Check out "Baby, It’s Cold Outside," a duet with K.T. Oslin; their sexually awkward flirting at the beginning is worth the price of the album. And there’s a very good chance his closing "It’s Just Another New Year’s Eve" just might make a few young girls cry. TWO WREATHS

This Is the Time: The Christmas Album Michael Bolton Columbia

Although it’s possible that no house of worship would ever want to claim him as their own, Michael Bolton is, in fact, Jewish. And yes, taking shots at Mr. Big Blond Mullet is way too easy—so let’s do it! Bolton is so overtly breathy on this 1996 dud, whether sucking wind on "Silent Night" or exhaling hard on "Joy to the World," he sounds like he needs a respirator. Never one for subtlety, the oh-so-serious singer fires up the vocal histrionics on all 10 mind-numbing cuts, sounding at time likes marble-mouthed Sly Stallone in full-grunt Rocky mode. With so many of your obnoxious, bad-tempered relatives visiting for the holidays, do you really need one more loudmouth in your home? The best song is "Ave Maria," but only because Bolton allows guest vocalist Placido Domingo to go first. The towering tenor brings the house down, of course—and leaves Bolton looking silly in the rubble. ONE WREATH

Christmas With the Rat Pack Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. Capitol

It figures the Catholics would get all the good stuff on this 2002 compilation. Frank nails "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," Dino charms with "Winter Wonderland," and what does proud member of the tribe Sammy Davis Jr. get stuck with? "Jingle Bells." Oh well. Not the the lil’ Nixon-hugger’s best showing—in fact, the Candy Man’s bells seem to be dipped in the same pick-me-up juice that inspired Streisand’s spastic take. You might as well put a question mark at the end of this one, too. But hey: You gotta love Sammy anyway, and he redeems himself with a thoroughly Vegas-style "Christmas Song." These three wiseacres sound like they’re having a blast, and you just know there was an open bar present at every session. Underneath all the cigarette smoke and generously applied cologne, there’s a message lurking, too: Christmas is such a swinging shindig, everyone should join the bash. Whether you’re Jewish, Catholic—or heck, even Kenny G. TWO WREATHS

---

*Sean Daly is a broadcast journalist at ABC Action News in Tampa and a former pop-music critic for the Tampa Bay Times.*
### Parents purchase pop stars for daughter's sweet 13
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/parents-purchase-pop-stars-for-daughters-sweet-13/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:30.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

The New York Times Style section continues its Bar Mitzvah coverage with a long [story](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/fashion/sundaystyles/20ACTS.html?pagewanted=1&ref=jewsrock.org) about superstars who shamefacedly play private parties. Example number one: Ja Rule and Ashanti, who recently performed at wee Amber Ridinger's entrance into the Jewish community. Things that are wrong with this picture:

1.) The obvious: thanks for confirming every single anti-Semitic stereotype out there, guys. And for the record, this does not make things better:

"It can be seen as over the top when really the reason you hire a top entertainer is to give your guests a once-in-a-lifetime experience," Mr. Tutera said.

Mr. Tutera, a New York party planner, makes an interesting point: this stuff isn't showy! Like donating tzadakah -- say a range of $25,000 to over $1 million -- to the poor, it actually counts as a mitzvah because it makes people happy. See? Not over the top at all.

2.) The other obvious: wasn't there supposed to be some sort of focus here on joining the Jewish community and becoming an adult? Now, if Ja Rule had helped Amber with her Torah portion, that would seem a lot more Jewishly appropriate.

2.) In ten years, that $27,000 Dolce & Gabbana dress still won't be kitch. Which means poor Amber will never have hilariously geeky pictures to send to the Bar Mitzvah Disco folks. And that may be the biggest shanda of all.
### The Jewish godfather of outsider art
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-jewish-godfather-of-outsider-art/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:31.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

“Outsider art” is a strange expression; ever since the idea of bohemianism came into being, artists have been outsiders by definition. “Outsider musician” is an even weirder idea, given how many rock stars have made their names by proclaiming their outsider status. But rock has a long history of outsider artists—people like Wesley Willis and Daniel Johnston, whose mental illnesses didn’t prevent them from recording bizarre, haunting albums.

Jews are no strangers to outsider status, as Eli Attie points out in his Jewsrock [article](http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=words.view&wordid=FBA78B3B-C4B2-4222-B0BCB522BA79DEE0) on Richard Hell. So should it surprise us that the first outsider musician was a Jewish guy? Larry “Wild Man” Fischer was living on the streets and charging 10 cents a song when Frank Zappa discovered him. Captivated by his effortless weirdness, Zappa tried to make Fischer into a star. It didn’t work, as Josh Rubin documents in his new film [Derailroaded](http://www.derailroaded.com/derailroaded.htm?ref=jewsrock.org). But it did result in what could be the theme song for Jewish rock alienation, [“The Wild Man Fischer Story,”](http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/btb/our%5Fman%5Fin%5Fnirvana.html?ref=jewsrock.org) in which Fischer repeats a parental lament that half of the musicians on this site probably heard at one point or another in their lives: “Why can't you be like every other Jewish boy in the neighborhood, a nice decent boy?"
### Tell your friend Veronica
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/tell-your-friend-veronica/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:31.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

There's a good reason Hannukah music isn't nearly as good as Chrismas music: it's just not that important a holiday, religiously. Christmas requires songs of solemn majesty -- "Silent Night" and "We Three Kings" and "The Little Drummer Boy" are all so stirring because "Happy Birthday" doesn't cut it when the birthday boy happens to be God. It's sort of like how the Kol Nidre service contains some of the most beautiful music of the Jewish liturgy: religions tend to save the really serious stuff for the really serious holidays. And Hannukah's not that serious. It's a miliary victory, a celebration. It's for the kids. It makes sense that the most famous Hannukah song, at least in the US, is a repetitive child's ditty about a beloved toy.

But just because it makes sense doesn't mean it's fair. How many Jewish kids have experienced the humiliation of the high school Christmas pageant, in which half an hour of beautiful old carols is followed by two minutes of a song written for toddlers? Why can't Hannukah have fun, celebratory music that doesn't suck?

Fun, celebratory music that doesn't suck -- that's "for the kids" but aimed at those on their way out of childhood? Could it be that what the world needs is some Hannukah-based indie pop? That's [JDub](http://www.jdubrecords.org/?ref=jewsrock.org)'s solution. This month, along with Reprise, they release the first album by [the LeeVees](http://www.theleevees.com/player/?ref=jewsrock.org), "Hannukah Rocks." Dreamed up by Guster's Adam Gardner and the Zambonis' Dave Schneider, the LeeVees is a band dedicated to writing cute jangly songs exclusively about Hannukah. Here's hoping they make it to a high school holiday concert near you.
### Bad for the Jews: Update
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/bad-for-the-jews-update/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:32.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

After years of legal [battles](http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=words.view&wordid=3E1D65A6-9651-4082-95B0122A7D808BA0), John Fogerty has [returned](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/01/arts/music/01foge.html?ref=jewsrock.org) to the label that once sued him for plagiarizing himself. Fantasy Records, now owned by the Concord Music Group, will release a best-of CD; a DVD is also in the works. Fogerty's old nemesis Saul Zaentz is no longer associated with the label. Asked about their current relationship, Fogerty said, "The way I view Saul Zaentz and his henchmen, shall I say - well, that probably gives it away."
### World's Greatest Jewish EMT returns to the airwaves
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/worlds-greatest-jewish-emt-returns-to-the-airwaves/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:32.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

In less than two months, David Lee Roth will replace Howard Stern on radios along the East Coast. The [New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/arts/26infi.html?ref=jewsrock.org) has the story; Village Voice blog [Riff Raff](http://villagevoice.com/blogs/riffraff/archives/2005/10/exclusive%5Fdavid.php?ref=jewsrock.org) has an "exclusive" letter "from" DLR. The latter is more entertaining, plus it contains a joke about Sammy Hagar making a joke about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers being Jewish (which they aren't, exactly, but they aren't [not](http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=challah.view&page=P)).
### Shame! Embarrassment! Big Hair! Headgear!
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/shame-embarrassment-big-hair-headgear/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:33.000Z
*by Kara Baskin*

Behold: [My Big Fat 80's Bar Mitzvah](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/fashion/sundaystyles/23BAR.html?pagewanted=1&incamp=article%5Fpopular&ref=jewsrock.org), coming soon to a bookstore near you.

Teen angst as picture book. Their mothers always knew they'd be published.  
<br
### Post-holiday rock
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/post-holiday-rock/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:33.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

Jewsrock is proud to announce its first article by an ordained rabbi: [Any Major Dude](http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=words.view&wordid=4A6E9853-4004-42DC-B6EC92996844DB58), an exegesis of the Steely Dan song as it relates to loss, sin, and the High Holy Days. The new year will see more of this sort of thing, plus of course more essays, histories, and profiles of the Jews of rock. Shana tovah!
### Who's Your Mama?
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/whos-your-mama/
Last updated: 2005-11-05T00:00:00.000Z
*By Emily Yoffe*

CBS Photo Archive/ Getty Images Entertainment/ Getty Images

She’d probably appreciate the joke. Cass Elliot, who had an exquisite understanding of life’s absurdities, would acknowledge it would be hard to find a greater cosmic irony than a fat Jewish girl choking to death on a ham sandwich. But, after she laughed that colossal laugh of hers, she might have said, "Come on, guys! Read the autopsy report." She certainly wouldn’t have been squeamish about it. After all, before she decided show business looked like more fun, the plan was she would go to Goucher (the biographical song "Creeque Alley" changed it to Swarthmore for the rhyme with "sophomore"), then become a doctor.

Yes, there was a ham sandwich in the London bedroom in which her body was found, she’d concede. She had just spent the evening performing to a sold-out house at the London Palladium, so she was entitled to a snack. She could have added, "So, I didn’t keep kosher. At least I never recorded a Christmas album!" But read the report, she would have insisted. No trace of pork was found in her trachea. She would have pointed to the line on the autopsy that gave her cause of death as "fatty myocardial degeneration." In other words, heart failure caused by the lifetime strain of carrying usually more than 100 extra pounds on her 5’5 frame. (Her weight at death was 238 lbs.)

Since she’s been dead almost as long as she lived (September 19, 1941 to July 29, 1974), she might be growing sick of the fact that her accomplishments have been shadowed by the urban legend about the manner of her death. Mike Myers, as Austin Powers, the cryogenically frozen secret agent who returns from the 60s, even makes use of it when he lists the cause of the departures of his rocker friends: "Janis Joplin—alcohol; Jimi Hendrix—drugs; Mama Cass—ham sandwich." Even someone with as self-mocking a sense of humor as Cass would by now understandably scream, "Enough already!"

She was born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore. Somehow it occurred to this bright, obese girl with little formal musical training to eschew college and become a performer. She convinced her parents that if she didn’t make it in five years, she would return and finish her education. In 1966, five years after she left home, The Mamas & The Papas released their first album, If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears. It was explosively successful, featuring the group’s tight harmonies on such songs as "Monday, Monday" and "California Dreamin.’" It stayed on the charts for more than two years.

Her importance to the history of rock wasn’t just the music she made—although the songs are forever inscribed in the neurons of anyone alive at the time: "Got a Feelin’," "Words of Love," "Dream a Little Dream of Me," "Dedicated to the One I Love." She’s also important because of the music that wouldn’t have been made without her. She was one of those people who knew everybody, and brought them all together. In 1964 she was briefly in a group called The Mugwumps, with singers James Hendricks and Denny Doherty, and guitarist Zal Yanovsky. Cass introduced Yanovsky to her friend John Sebastian, a meeting that resulted in The Lovin’ Spoonful. She later introduced her friend David Crosby to her friend Graham Nash and thus, Crosby, Stills and Nash. Cass even has an uncredited moment as a backup singer on their first album.

She was known, according to a Rolling Stone interview, as "The Queen of Los Angeles Pop Society." She would order great platters of deli food and in the afternoon her house would fill with friends: Eric Clapton, David Crosby, Buddy Miles, Joni Mitchell, Jack Nicholson. Artist Gary Burden, on the A&E "Biography" of Cass, described her home as the L.A. rock equivalent of Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon. The late movie producer Julia Phillips, in her memoir, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, remembered that Cass left a blank wall in her home on which her celebrated friends wrote graffiti. Cass’ contribution was "Who is Chuck Barris?" the 1970s equivalent of "Rose is a rose is a rose."

But, as the cliché would have it, the fat woman with a million friends was often terribly lonely. In response to an interviewer she once mused on why she was fat. "I’m a very gullible person … An attractive young girl in this world who is gullible can get herself into a lot of trouble and I find that … it keeps the lechers away." But it kept almost all the men away. To save her one-time singing partner, the slender and handsome James Hendricks, from being drafted and sent to Vietnam, she married him. However soft the lights, or big the peignoir, or great the favor she had done, Hendricks preferred to leave the marriage unconsummated. Then she fell in love with Denny Doherty; he rebuffed her marriage proposal. He said on A&E that he wasn’t "man enough to say she’s 300 pounds and you’ve got to get past that, stupid." She had a crush on Tommy Smothers, and in the same documentary he said how uncomfortable it was to try not to hurt her feelings.

Cass had a tortured relationship with her body. She damaged her health by alternating between eating binges and crash diets. But, while she hated being fat, she refused to hide herself in a black caftan of shame; she even posed nude for what turned out to be a popular pin-up photo. Michelle Phillips, her gorgeous fellow Mama, recalled on A&E that just before she met Cass for the first time she had dropped acid. She was disappointed it was having no effect until she answered the doorbell and there was the enormous Cass in a pink angora sweater, white miniskirt, and white boots. Phillips recalled of her reaction to the sight, "I thought: This drug is very powerful."

By then Doherty had joined folk singers John and Michelle Phillips to become The Journeymen. In 1965, powered by her unrequited crush on Doherty, Cass took off for St. Thomas, where Doherty and the Phillipses were camping on the beach and getting stoned. She desperately wanted them to become a quartet, but John Phillips, Michelle’s husband, found her physically unacceptable; he thought the perfect Michelle was the female ideal. Finally, Cass’ voice won him over. As she told Rolling Stone in 1968: "When I heard us sing together the first time…We knew. We KNEW … this is it."

The foursome eventually got to L.A. where, using Cass’ great connections, she called her friend Barry ("Eve of Destruction") McGuire. He introduced her to his producer, Lou Adler. Adler listened to the quartet and immediately decided to record them, even before they had performed in public as a group. Their album couldn’t be released until they came up with a name for themselves. Joseph F. Laredo writes in the liner notes to their Greatest Hits album that Cass had heard a biker on a radio refer to the women in his gang as "mamas," and Cass said she and Michelle were "the mamas."

The group instantly became international stars. They immediately invested all their money in savings bonds. Oh, sorry, time for another cliché: they actually poured it into houses and cars and snorted it up their noses (or, in John Phillips case, stuck it into his arm). Cass loved lavishness and spent the rest of her life paying off debts and back taxes. The group’s endless drug use and messy personal lives— while Cass was pining for Doherty, he was having an affair with Michelle, John’s wife—doomed them.

Cass came to loathe the name "Mama"; a posthumously released album was titled Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore. But she longed to be a real mother. Unable to find a stable relationship, she got pregnant by a man whose identity she never revealed. Her daughter Owen was born in 1967\. (When John Phillips first heard about the pregnancy, he asked when the abortion was scheduled.)

She adored having a daughter, although her precarious financial situation forced her to constantly go on the road. Owen was seven when her mother died. "She was warm and funny and very loving," says Owen Elliott-Kugell. "She had a very enveloping, great laugh." Owen was raised by Cass's sister, singer (and lawyer) Leah Kunkel. Owen is married to songwriter Jack Kugell and is the mother of two young children whom they are raising as observant Jews. She knows the identity of her father, but has kept her mother’s secret. She told A&E that when she’s driving with her children and Cass comes on the radio, she loves to tell them that’s their grandmother.

When Cass launched her solo career in 1968, it was a time of bitter social polarization. But Cass had an uncanny ability to transcend categories. "She was acceptable to a rock and roll audience and to Nixon-era older folks," said her friend John Sebastian on A&E. She recorded an album with rocker Dave Mason and appeared at the Flamingo in Las Vegas with Catskills veteran comedian Marty Allen. She talked about her many acid trips, hung out with Timothy Leary, and was a welcome guest on the wholesome TV shows of Andy Williams and Dinah Shore.

She was a rocker only for a short while. She gravitated to what she herself described, with perfect equanimity, as "middle-of-the-road" music—the kind of show tunes that first fired her show business ambitions. The schlocky self-esteem anthem "Make Your Own Kind of Music" became her theme song.

Ellen Cohen was the oldest of three children from a "groovy lower-middle-class" family, as she said in a 1969 Esquire interview. The family was proudly Jewish, although not particularly religious. The children went to Jewish summer camps, and Cass’ mother, Bess, was the president of the local Hadassah. Unusual for those days, Cass was bat mitzvahed.

For much of her childhood, her family moved around the Washington, D.C. area as her father, Philip Cohen, pursued mostly losing restaurant ventures. He eventually found success when he put kitchens in buses and drove to construction sites to serve breakfast. In Esquire, Cass recalled going off with her father at 4:30 a.m. to do the cooking. "Meals on wheels for schlemiels," she called it.

There was always music in the house. Philip Cohen had wanted to be an opera singer; Bess was a skilled piano player. The family often gathered around the piano and sang together. "Cass and I had a thing about harmony," recalls Kunkel.

Because of all her family moves, Cass had to make up some high school credits in order to graduate. After summer school one day she went to pick up a friend who was appearing in a local production of the musical "The Boy Friend." The director was losing a member of the chorus, and when Cass arrived, her friend pointed to her and said, "Well, she sings." She sang and got the part. As she said in a radio interview three months before her death, "Then I went back to school and somehow, school didn’t seem the same to me." People in show business, she said, "looked like they were havin’ a good time."

She went off to Broadway, leaving behind her identity as Ellen Cohen. There are two accounts for how she chose both first and last names, says Richard Barton Campbell, who with Cass’ daughter maintains the invaluable Cass website, www.casselliot.com. One was that Cass named herself after Cass Daley, a B-movie actress, comedienne, and singer with buck teeth and a large tush. The other was that her father used to call her Cassandra, after the Trojan princess and seer. Elliot was either an homage to T.S. Eliot (Cass, he was an anti-Semite!) or a childhood friend who was killed in a car accident.

Shortly after arriving in New York, she almost landed the role of Miss Marmelstein in the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale. That part launched the career of another unconventional-looking Jewish girl: Barbra Streisand. Cass made it to a road company of "The Music Man," then came home to Washington. Leah recalls her oft-stated remark: "There weren’t a lot of parts for 300 pound ingenues." Unwilling to go pre-med, Cass entered the folk scene. By 1963, at the age of 22, she had her first taste of fame, appearing on "The Tonight Show" with her trio, The Big Three.

The night of her death she had just completed a successful two-week engagement in London. Michelle Phillips recalled on A&E that Cass called her after the show crying about how she’d gotten a standing ovation; she felt she had finally established her solo career. Cass died happy. A ham sandwich had nothing to do with it.

---

*Emily Yoffe is a senior editor at The Free Press and the former “Dear Prudence” columnist at Slate.*
### What Grammy Hall would call "a real Jew"
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/what-grammy-hall-would-call-a-real-jew/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:33.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

Annie Hall presents a serious conflict for the Jewish girl. On the one hand, it’s nearly impossible to identify with Annie, not just because she’s so non-Jewish but because of the way she’s written. Annie is a cipher, the classic unknowable Other, both in terms of her ethnicity and in her role as the object of Alvy’s desire. So you watch the movie, and you become totally convinced that you’re Alvy, or Woody, or whoever—neurotic, trapped in your own brain, doomed to sneeze the coke off the table. It’s a nice, warm feeling: you and Alvy/Woody are comrades in charming Jewish awkwardness. He understands you! You guys could be friends! But of course you couldn’t be friends, because in the male/female, Jewish/Christian dialectic, you’re not really in the same box as Alvy. You’re actually Allison, Alvy’s first wife, the one he reduces to a liberal Jewess stereotype the moment he meets her. So does that mean that you need to find an Andrew Hall, some inscrutable guy whose family eats ham on Sundays while discussing the swap meet? But isn’t that Christopher Walken’s character? And isn’t he, like all Christopher Walken characters, creepy and unhinged?   
  
Of course, Annie Hall presents absolutely none of these problems for the Jewish boy. Which is why, while I’m sitting in my bedroom trying to figure out if I’m supposed to be attracted to Christopher Walken, [Hartley Goldstein](http://www.hartleygoldstein.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) is out on the town, playing songs from his new album (titled, tragically, “Songs in the Key of Zoloft”) on the Lower East Side every Sunday for the next month. Gothamist likes his “A Love Song for Annie Hall,” and not just because it was produced by the guy who did the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah EP. In yesterday’s [interview](http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2005/09/28/the%5Fgothamist%5Fband%5Finterview%5Fhartley%5Fgoldstein.php?ref=jewsrock.org#more), they quizzed him about his Jewish name, his favorite parts of New York, and his sense of humor. Here’s what he has to say about the uses of the latter in NYC:  
  
“When you are surrounded by demanding people, and you are under 6 feet tall, you learn how to use humor to your advantage pretty quickly.”  
 So true! If by “humor” you mean “elbows.” In any case, Hartley has a very promising beard—hipster meets Hasid, like a Devandra Bernstein—and so he’ll surely go on to do great things.
### How many Kol Nidres must one man hear before you can call him a Jewish folksinger?
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/how-many-kol-nidres-must-one-man-hear-before-you-can-call-hi/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:34.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

Those who caught last night’s installment of [No Direction Home](http://www.pbs.org/previews/american%5Fmasters%5Fdylan/?ref=jewsrock.org), PBS’s documentary about Bob Dylan, will note that it’s not a very Jewish film. Young Zimmerman definitely looks Jewish in his newboy cap—actually, he looks a lot like Fievel Mousekewitz, the plucky rodent hero of [An American Tail](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090633/?ref=jewsrock.org)—but his early years weren’t terribly Hebraic. Or maybe that’s the wrong choice of words, since songs like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” certainly evoke Biblical emotions. As the Scorsese-directed film emphasizes, Dylan’s primary influences were American folk music and American blues, neither of which are Jewish in origin. But you have to wonder whether the solemnity and minor-key darkness of Jewish liturgical music, as well as the “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”-like repetition in the chanted prayers, had any effect on Dylan’s ear. In our article “[Talkin’ Hava Nagilah Blues,](http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=words.view&wordid=E0736A45-3930-4C77-AC40547568A63145)” Seth Rogovoy argues that Dylan’s lyrics betray a Jewish influence. I want to know if his music does as well.
### Max, replaced?
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/max-replaced/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:34.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

Around here, we tend to be more excited about Max Weinberg than Paul Shaffer. This has nothing to do with Shaffer's role as musical director of the induction ceremonies of a certain litigious [institution](http://www.rockhall.com.html/?ref=jewsrock.org):, I swear. It's just the pull of the almighty Springsteen.

As of yesterday, though, we have a new favorite late-nighter. Because yesterday, Paul Shaffer presided over the [Great Shofar Blast Off](http://www.njop.org/html/shofar.html?ref=jewsrock.org): in Midtown Manhattan. The winner, Kalman Feinberg of Teaneck, N.J, came away with a trip for two to Israel. And we came away wondering if anyone has pictures of Shaffer's Bar Mitzvah. (via [Gawker](http://www.gawker.com/news/religion/its-beginning-to-feel-a-lot-like-yom-kippur-127196.php?ref=jewsrock.org))
### Wendy Wasserstein on the Imaginary Piano
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/wendy-wasserstein-on-the-imaginary-piano/
Last updated: 2005-10-27T00:00:00.000Z
What's the first album you ever bought?

The Mamas and The Papas - I lived in New York so "California Dreamin'" was appealing to me.

What's the best concert you've ever been to?

The first time I saw the Beatles, at Carnegie Hall.

If you could join any band, past or present, which would you choose?

The Rolling Stones. I could sing "Brown Sugar" at 66!

What's the most embarrassing album in your collection?

I own a Herman's Hermits album.

Name the song you loved so much, you played it to death.

"Norweigian Wood" by the Beatles, and "The Weight" by the Band.

Which song do your parents wish you'd never heard?

"Like A Rolling Stone."

What slow dance number do you most remember from your bat mitzvah?

"You Send Me."

What are the most Jewish albums in your collection?

Deborah Drattel's Operas. I also own lots of Chanukah songs.

We never would have guessed it, but you play the \_\_\_\_\_

Imaginary piano!
### Politics and prose
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/politics-and-prose/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:34.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

There was a mysterious e-mail in my inbox today: Chopped Herring Records promising an exclusive track featuring a “very special guest MC” (the emphasis is theirs). Called “Happy September 11” and available [here](http://www.choppedherringrecords.com/?ref=jewsrock.org), the song is a fairly predictable diatribe about the sorry state of the world since the events of 2001\. It’s got a Jewish angle – “the lunar calendar is more accurate anyway” – and a sad, almost klezmer-esque backing track, but it’s mostly exactly what you would expect from a bunch of lefty hip-hop guys.

But wait. Who is this very special guest MC? Why is he so nasal, and so familiar? Why do I keep expecting him to say something hilarious about, like, Jane Pratt, even as he’s raging against our current political mess? Could it be?

Yes, it could. [MC Paul Barman](http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=challah.view&page=B), every Brown University student’s favorite white rapper, has gone topical. It’s weird, a little creepy. I’m not sure what to make of it. But in the meantime, while I’m pondering, you should check out [this](http://www.mvremix.com/urban/interviews/mcpb052.shtml?ref=jewsrock.org) fairly recent interview with Barman in the Canadian (and also New Jerseyite) webzine MVRemix. It includes the following exchange:

MVRemix: I don’t know how you’re going to take this question. But I was debating whether or not I should ask this, and I’ve decided to just ask you straight out. Do you see yourself as the Jesus Christ of white suburban Jewish kids in New Jersey who aspire to be MC’s?

MC Paul Barman: Only in the sense that I’ve occasionally had long curly hair and a beard.
### Pop-kabbalah roundup
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/pop-kabbalah-roundup/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:35.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

From [Michael Musto](http://www.villagevoice.com/nyclife/0535,musto,67296,15.html?ref=jewsrock.org): "Insiders say Madonna's horse is anti-Semitic." Finally! We'd been waiting days for somebody to make this quip.

Meanwhile, [Star](http://www.starmagazine.com/news/61757?ref=jewsrock.org) reports trouble in trucker-hat paradise: Kevin Federline doesn't want to raise his baby Jewish, and Britney doesn't want to give birth to a kid named Vegas. However, Brit is considering naming the baby Jamie after her father and sister, totally ignoring the Jewish superstition about using the names of living relatives and thereby proving that Kevin has absolutely nothing to worry about.
### Don't mess with a Jewish girl
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/dont-mess-with-a-jewish-girl/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:35.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

Sharon Osbourne, we love you, and we wouldn’t want you to be anyone other than your feisty self. Weirdly enough, we also totally trust your judgment. On MTV’s reality competition “Battle for Ozzfest,”you conducted yourself with a dignity hitherto unknown in that medium, doling out wise decisions like some sort of Jewish British Greek goddess. So if you want to take on Iron Maiden, we’ll support you. (Well, I’ll support you—I haven’t really asked Kara. But writing in the second person makes me feel both safe and important, so I’m sticking with it.)

According to [Sharon](http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050827/music%5Fnm/osbourne%5Fdc&ref=jewsrock.org), the flap started when Iron Maiden’s singer, Bruce Dickinson, began making anti-Osbourne comments during his band’s sets on the Ozzfest tour. "Was Dickinson so naive to think that I was going to let him get away with talking s\*\*t about my family night after night? I don't think he realizes who he's dealing with,” she said in a recent statement. So after a Maiden show last week, Sharon appeared on stage to chew Dickinson out, calling him a “prick.” She also took responsibility for several power outages during previous shows.

The Iron Maiden [website](http://www.ironmaiden.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) reports that the band is keeping “a dignified silence”—two words not often heard in heavy metal. As of August 27, they’re off the tour. Meanwhile, over at [petitiononline.com](http://www.petitiononline.com/madd17ya/petition.html?ref=jewsrock.org), some 4000 metal fans have signed a petition against Sharon. The petition itself doesn’t advise any course of action, although plenty of nasty suggestions show up among the signers.

Curiously, the [Orange County Register](http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/08/22/sections/life/lf%5Fnews%5Freviews/article%5F643721.php?ref=jewsrock.org) review of the fateful show—which is listed on the Maiden website—had this to say: “During Mudvayne's set at Ozzfest on Saturday, lead singer Chad Grey exclaimed that Ozzfest was Christmas for his band and metal heads everywhere. Unfortunately, in the case of Iron Maiden, Scrooge was manning this ship.” So Sharon stole Christmas? Interesting choice of words, bro.

In other Osbourne news, Sharon’s helpmate and daughter were both on the Howard Stern show this morning, prompting a phone call from Jewish rock star Leslie West. The Mountain guitarist made fun of Ozzy’s incoherence and then told a fairly disgusting story about poop-flinging.
### Unfortunate Son
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/unfortunate-son/
Last updated: 2005-10-18T00:00:00.000Z
*By Kara Baskin*

Tucker Ranson/ Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but not when it comes to rock and roll. (Case in point: "Ice Ice Baby.") But few vocalists would dare attempt John Fogerty’s signature growl. Which was precisely Fogerty’s problem when he was sued for sounding too much like ... himself.

Saul Zaentz, a businessman whose credits include movie producer, chicken-coop farmer, and chairman of Fantasy Records, accused the Creedence Clearwater Revival singer of pulling off the ultimate rock and roll hat trick: defamation of character, copyright infringement, and self-plagiarism. Zaentz charged that Fogerty’s 1985 solo hit "The Old Man Down the Road" sounded strangely similar—illegally similar—to a previous CCR hit, "Run Through the Jungle." It was a song to which Zaentz, not Fogerty, held the rights.

Bad blood between the singer and the impresario had simmered since the sixties. Fantasy was then a small Berkeley, California, operation specializing in blues and jazz; John Fogerty toiled in the company mailroom as a shipping clerk. Zaentz, a Russian-Polish Jew from California by way of Passaic, managed jazz acts like Duke Ellington and had recently acquired the Fantasy mantle. Though the label specialized in blues and jazz, savvy Zaentz knew a good thing when he heard it. He signed CCR—who thankfully changed their name from the Golliwogs—and the group became famous for a new brand of rock known as "swamp pop." A little "Bad Moon Risin’," some "Fortunate Son," and the El Cerrito garage band was on the map. Zaentz was also sitting pretty, thanks in large part to Fogerty’s distinctive rasp.

But Zaentz allegedly failed to pay the band their rightful songwriting dues. Fogerty and his bandmates sued him for nonpayment of royalties; Zaentz countered that the musicians had signed away most of their rights to him, and contractual battles hemorrhaged in litigation for years. Bitter and excluded from his rightful tax bracket, the front man refused to play any CCR hits for a decade. But he slammed back in 1985 with Centerfield, which was released on the Warner Brothers label.

The album contained the FM-friendly title track and another hit, "Rock and Roll Girls." It also took a swipe at Zaentz: "Zanz Kant Danz" (sounds mysteriously like Zaentz, doesn’t it?). The song about a pet pig trained to steal was widely whispered to be a dig at the businessman: "Zanz Kant Danz/But he’ll steal your money/Watch him or he’ll rob you blind." Though Fogerty insisted it was nothing more than an innocent tune about a boy and his pet pig named Zanz, the pig was renamed Vanz and the song changed to "Vanz Kant Danz" in later pressings. Centerfield also featured a fiery "Mister Greed," ("You’re a devil of consumption! I hope you choke, Mister Greed!"), which Fogerty snarled with the same ire he displayed on "Fortunate Son" years earlier. (The older song railed against the draft, the new one decried corporate greed: The eighties had arrived.)

Perhaps feeling insecure about his dancing skills, Zaentz also got hung up on "The Old Man Down the Road," the album’s smash hit. The chord progression was identical to the 1970 CCR hit "Run Through the Jungle," he decreed. Fogerty had plagiarized a song that he—not the erstwhile CCR singer—rightfully owned.

And so Behind the Music met Court TV. Fogerty gamely spent two days on the witness stand during the two-week U.S. District Court trial, guitar in hand, playing many of his compositions to demonstrate his songwriting style, contending that any similarities between the songs were simply part of his distinctive "swamp rock" style. He strummed his guitar during breaks and regaled star-struck jurors with rock folklore.

Fantasy fired back with testimony by musicologists equipped with charts, a piano, and a computer sound system that superimposed one pattern of notes on another. A rival musicologist for Warner Bros. served as DJ, spinning a series of Creedence records ("Green River," "Keep on Chooglin’," "Tombstone Shadow," and "Bootleg") while jurors nodded in time to the beat.

In the end, Fogerty’s star power was no match for Zaentz’s musicologists: Jurors took only three hours to vote in favor of Fogerty 5-1\. But, although he emerged victorious from Fogerty v. Fantasy Records, the win was bittersweet. The musician later insisted that it cost him more than $400,000 to defend himself against the plagiarism allegations—more, in fact, than he would have earned from the song. "He sues me for breathing," Fogerty was quoted as saying of Zaentz at the time.

Unbowed, Zaentz went on to greater success, earning an Oscar for producing The English Patient. (It was not his first: he also produced the Oscar-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus.) Still on the pop culture pulse as an octogenarian, one of Zaentz’s latest endeavors was securing rights to The Lord of the Rings, though he has since sued New Line Cinema for $20 million in Rings royalties. The Fantasy label was recently sold to Concord Records, Inc.

And John Fogerty has gone on to make more music. His latest album, Déjà Vu All Over Again, actually sounds nothing like anything he’s recorded before.

---

*Kara Baskin is a journalist for The Boston Globe and Boston magazine and the author of Generation Yes.*
### Miri Ben-Ari conquers the world, piece by piece
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/miri-ben-ari-conquers-the-world-piece-by-piece/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:36.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

This year’s MTV Video Music Awards will probably be remembered for disasters both natural and man-made: Hurricane Katrina, the shooting of Suge Knight, that scraggly [stuff](http://www.mtv.com/onair/vma/2005/index.jhtml?ref=jewsrock.org#/onair/vma/2005/photos%5Fhub/index.jhtml?fid=1507638&trueFid=1507638&photoID=1779416&) on Omarion’s chin. But for Jews in rock, the 2005 VMAs might go down in history as proof that not every hip-hop Hebrew is either a producer or a Beastie Boy.

When Kanye West won a VMA for “Jesus Walks,” it wasn’t the first award that song has won—it received a Grammy back in February. But the VMA is the icing on the cake, the schmaltz on the matza ball, the raisins in the kugel. You only get a VMA if you’ve very much arrived; even newer nominees like the Bravery reached maximum media saturation months ago. “Jesus Walks” has been huge for a long time now—Kanye’s follow-up album actually comes out [today](http://netmusiccountdown.com/inc/news%5Farticle.php?id=8757&ref=jewsrock.org)—but the VMA just seals the deal.

Why does this matter for Jews? Because “Jesus Walks” was co-written by a 26-year-old Israeli named [Miri Ben-Ari](http://www.miriben-ari.com/?ref=jewsrock.org). Sure, the subject matter isn’t terribly Jewish (unless you’re Norman Greenbaum). But Ben-Ari is a musician, not a lyricist. It would be hard to mistake Kanye West’s lyrics as anything but personal. What Ben-Ari has added is the powerful background, which, as much as the words, is what makes the song so distinctive. A classically trained violinist, Miri Ben-Ari arranged every song on “The College Dropout.” She’s also played on songs like Janet Jackson’s “I Want You” and Twista’s “Overnight Celebrity.”

The VMA was nice (as was the Grammy), but for Ben-Ari, this appears to be just the beginning. She recently signed on to do a [music video](http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Entertainment&article=UPI-1-20050825-10525300-bc-us-reebok.xml.%20&ref=jewsrock.org) with Reebok, who will also feature her in their “I am what I am” ad campaign. And on September 20, she’s releasing a new [album](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000A7Q1QK/qid=1125420384/sr=8-1/ref=pd%5Fbbs%5F1/002-9282971-9424837?v=glance&s=music&n=507846&ref=jewsrock.org). Called “The Hip Hop Violinist,” its guest list includes John Legend, Fabolous, Scarface, Anthony Hamilton, and both Lil’ Wayne and Lil’ Mo.
### Art Garfunkel continues to define the word "schlemazel"
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/art-garfunkel-continues-to-define-the-word-schlemazel/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:36.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

[Yahoo](http://entertainment.tv.yahoo.com/entnews/eo/20050830/112543656000.html?ref=jewsrock.org) reports that Art Garfunkel smokes pot. Poor guy can't catch a break -- this is the second time in two years that a cop has found a joint in his car. Weird how this kind of thing never happens to Paul Simon.
### OyTunes
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/oytunes/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:37.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

A old anti-Semitic [stereotype](http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/27394.htm?ref=jewsrock.org) suggests that Jews maintain their [stranglehold](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/08/18/magazine/21phen.1.html?ref=jewsrock.org) on the world by only helping out fellow Hebrews. This is totally unfair, as it’s never so much Jewish favoritism as the simple fact that nobody else is qualified. I mean, seriously, you want we should turn the international economy over to the Episcopalians?

Joking—joking. But let’s think about this stereotype for a minute. The music industry is full of Jews, as you might have noticed while exploring this site. Are Jewish rock stars using their fame to unfairly promote other Jews?

There’s only one way to find out: the iTunes celebrity playlists. The iTunes people ask movie stars, rock stars, and generic star stars to contribute their top ten to fifteen songs. Over the past year, they’ve gotten playlists from several notably Jewish groups. Are these tribesfolk biased towards fellow Yids? Our examination reveals the truth.

Carol King  
Second song on her list: the Wallflower’s “6th Avenue Heartache.” That’s pretty Jewish.

Al Franken  
Not one but two Grateful Dead songs: “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider,” both live in Paris in 1972\. Mickey Hart was, of course, a Yid—but it seems like Al just really, really, [really](http://jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=words.view&wordid=79BC9B11-3E9E-410A-A86A2C73675F7028&ref=jewsrock.org) likes the Dead. He also lists one by Bob Dylan: “Forever Young.”

Maroon 5  
Another Dylan: “Simple Twist of Fate.” Hmm.

Joel Schumacher  
Speaking of Jewish stereotypes: the mega-producer lists “Money for Nothing,” by Dire Straits, and explains that it’s his favorite song (“I want it played at my funeral”). Oy. Also has the Leiber and Stoller-penned “Hound Dog”—not the Elvis version, but the earlier one by Big Mama Thornton.

Phantom Planet  
This was around Christmas/Hannukah 2004, which poses a real challenge to a mostly Jewish band: how to deal with the celebration of our secular country’s biggest national holiday? For Phantom Planet, the only solution was the bridge-building, all-pleasing genre of indie rock, which “should put you in the mood for Christmas, or whatever you celebrate,” as Alex Greenwald generously offers. Any Jews on the list? Beck with “The Little Drum Machine Boy” off of something called “Sleighed – the Other Side of Christmas,” which was released before he became a Scientologist.

Scissor Sisters  
Nothing notably Jewish. Nothing at all.

Mix Master Mike  
Michael Schwartz likes the Clash (“This is Radio Clash”). Then again, nobody associates the Clash with Judaism, anyway.

Conclusion? Out of the seven Jews on iTunes in the past year, nobody’s too jazzed about other Jewish artists. (It does seem that Jews like Bob Dylan—but so does everyone on iTunes, since listing Bob Dylan makes you look smart without being remotely controversial.) But hold on—why are there only seven Jews interviewed on iTunes in the past year? Isn’t there anyone Jewish working at iTunes? Can’t they give their fellow Yids a hand?
### The Yeshiva of Indie Rock
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-yeshiva-of-indie-rock/
Last updated: 2005-10-09T00:00:00.000Z
*By Doree Shafrir*

Adam Brody as Seth Cohen, the quintessential Jewish indie rocker

At an indie rock show I was at a few weeks ago, the lead singer of one of the bands got on stage and said to the crowd, “Sorry for making you guys miss The O.C. But Seth Cohen would be proud.”

I relate this anecdote for two reasons: one, to express that I was, indeed, annoyed that I’d had to miss The O.C. to see what turned out to be a pretty mediocre band; and two, because Seth Cohen has so permeated the indie-rock zeitgeist that he’s now even being referenced by indie-rock bands themselves. It’s a perfect example of art influencing art influencing life...influencing art. Or something.

Seth Cohen—with his skinny frame, dark curly hair, endless pop culture and musical references, and of course, his perfectly Jewish name (though as any O.C. devotee knows, he’s actually only half-Jewish—and on the side that doesn’t count)—has become the contemporary poster child for a certain type of guy: the indie dude. And it should come as no surprise that the quintessential indie dude is, at least in name and part-parentage, Jewish.

As a teenager, I careened from obsession to obsession: the Smiths, the Lemonheads, the Beastie Boys. In retrospect, my angst-ridden adolescent musical taste was only preparing me for an eventual obsession with the Converse-wearing, skinner-than-I-was frontmen of indie rock. And in retrospect, my first real boyfriend was basically a Seth Cohen doppelganger: half-Jewish (on the wrong side!), skinny, mop of black wavy hair—and an intense, brooding commitment to the used bins at Other Music.

He bought me tickets to an Elliott Smith show for my birthday. He made me a mix (this was pre-iPod and CD burner, and I still have the 90-minute cassette) with Gang of Four and Will Oldham and June of ’44—bands I’d never even heard of. He played guitar in an intense, brooding noise band. It’s only now that I realize how perfectly he represented the connection between Judaism and indie rock. (The guy I dated after him listened almost exclusively to Midnight Oil and Prince. He was raised Mormon.)

In many ways, indie rock is the quintessential Jewish music: It’s smart, outside the mainstream and usually headed up by skinny, overly literate, dark-haired men (and sometimes women) from blue states. Some of the biggest names in indie rock are Jewish: Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, David Berman of the Silver Jews, Ben Kweller, Dan Bern, Karen O and Nick Zimmer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, just to name a few.

But even some indie rockers who aren’t Jewish—well, they kind of look Jewish. And they fit that sensitive, emotional, skinny-and-dark-haired paradigm. Take Conor Oberst (better known, of course, as Bright Eyes). He’s been compared to Bob Dylan in countless fawning tributes, and the continuum from Dylan to Oberst, while not uninterrupted, is nonetheless a relatively straight one.

Dylan was the rebellious intellectual troubadour who—though he changed his name—could do little to hide the fact that physically he looked about as stereotypically Jewish as they come. He used that fact to his advantage, playing to both the Jewish intelligentsia and the heartland. He had an appeal that was at once both high culture and deeply red-blooded American, and perhaps it was his musical genius that helped pave the way, years later, for indie rockers like Oberst and Stephen Malkmus, another non-Jew who nonetheless seems to take Judaism’s aesthetics to heart. (Wesleyan in the mid-’90s would not have been the same place without Stephen Malkmus.)

And how could we forget Jewish indie rock forebears such as precocious little Leonard Cohen, who published his first book of poetry at 15, long before he was getting blowjobs at the Chelsea Hotel (by some shiksa, no doubt!)? Or Jonathan Richman, the Natick, Mass. native who was seized with the desire to get the Modern Lovers off the ground while on a trip to Israel when he was 19? Even after he became famous, he still looked like a guy you could’ve gone to overnight camp with—the shaggy, Jewfro-ish hair, the sheepish looks and of course, the big nose. Not to mention that he was also a guy you could take home to your parents—he was notoriously anti-drug. His impact on today’s musicians is undeniable, but his Jewish roots were also a significant influence on both his music and his persona.

Many of Judaism’s most dearly held traditions are also prevalent in indie rock. Studying the Talmud—constantly looking for new textual interpretations, and divining meanings out of symbols and allusions—is only slightly more rigorous than the degree to which indie rock devotees debate the meaning of certain bands’ lyrics and other seemingly minute details about their favorite indie rockers. On the indie rock discussion board I Love Music, recent topics ranged from “Boards of Canada: Classic or Dud?” “Best use of a police siren in a song, What is.” (One can only imagine what an indie rock yeshiva would look like.)

Likewise, Jews’ emphasis on education has a parallel in indie rock, where it often seems like the game is to come up with lyrics that are more clever than anyone else’s. Take a band like the Decemberists, whose latest album, Picaresque, may leave you scrambling for your Kaplan SAT prep flash cards: any idea what palanquin, pachyderm or falderal means? And those are just in the first song. (Your mom, no doubt, would be proud.)

Indie rock has a classic David vs. Goliath complex, the sense that it’s constantly going up against the huge corporate music machine (then again, it usually is). Though indie record labels like Merge, Sub Pop, Kill Rock Stars and Matador have all found success with breakout acts like the Arcade Fire, the Postal Service, Elliott Smith, Belle and Sebastian, and so on, they remain steadfastly independent, refusing to sell out to the faceless conglomerates that dominate the music business. Still, like the immigrant Jewish businessmen and sole proprietors of the early to mid-20th century, indie labels must rely on their founders’ entrepreneurial spirit—and chutzpah—to survive in an increasingly cutthroat business.

Like Seth Cohen, who’ll no doubt be stuck in high school for at least the next five years, the frontmen and the business of indie rock also will be unchanging for years to come. The music may sound a little different. There may be new bands wowing the crowds at South by Southwest and CMJ. But those dark-haired brooders who’d rather read Allen Ginsberg than Motor Trend will always have a special place in this Jewish girl’s heart.

---

*Doree Shafrir is an author and host of the Forever35 podcast; she was previously a senior editor at BuzzFeed News.*
### Kinkier and Kinkier
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/kinkier-and-kinkier/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:37.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

You've probably seen it by now, but the entire [text](http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050822fa%5Ffact?ref=jewsrock.org) of Dan Halpern's article on Kinky Friedman's run for governor is online at the New Yorker [website](http://www.newyorker.com/?ref=jewsrock.org). It's full of Jewish Alice in Wonderland (Yentl In Wonderland?) moments like the following:

“Pancakes for the Governor! The Governor will have pancakes!” Little Jewford shouted, and promptly did nothing about it.
### The neighborhood, it is a-changin'
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-neighborhood-it-is-a-changin/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:37.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

In light of what's going on in Gaza, it seems almost disrespectful to talk about the real estate "battles" over Jewish music landmarks in LA and New York. "Skirmishes"? "Conflicts"? "Friendly disagreements"? No matter how you word it, the bizarre truth of the 21st century is that Jewish displacement right now means both rent hikes in Fairfax and forced evacuation on the Gaza strip.

Real estate problems are, at least, a lot easier to talk about—nobody's bringing up God here, unless you mean Mammon. Yesterday's LA Times [reports](http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fairfax18aug18,1,1302889,full.story?ctrack=1&cset=true&ref=jewsrock.org) that developers are taking over the city's Fairfax area, known for its kosher shops and Judaica vendors. With rents increasing by 20% in some places, elderly store owners are packing their Manischewitz crates and vacating institutions that have been around for years.

One of these is Hatikvah music, where both Steve "Secret Agent Man" Barri and Jerry "Stand By Me" Leiber clerked, and where Herb Alpert used to browse. Ironically, the company booting Hatikvah is owned by a Jewish guy who is a major supporter of the Beverly Hills Hillel. Apparently, shiny 90210 needs its Jewish identity more than historical Fairfax. [The KlezmerShack](http://www.klezmershack.com/archives/002804.html?ref=jewsrock.org) has the full scoop.

Now, I'm not sure a store should be preserved just because some musicians spent time there fifty years ago. But Fairfax is a historically Jewish neighborhood, with its own local flavor. (What flavor? Chicken soup, heavy on the schmaltz—duh.) LA needs family-owned bookstores a lot more than it needs another shiny skateboard shop.

In other news, [CBGB's](http://www.cbgb.com/save%5Fcbgb%5Fbenefit%5Fshows.htm?ref=jewsrock.org) still exists, apparently.
### The Kinkster campaigns for lepers, cats
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-kinkster-campaigns-for-lepers-cats/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:38.000Z
*by Kara Baskin*

Kinky Friedman is now $45, 612 richer thanks to a lucrative gambling outing in the Big Easy over the weekend. The Jewish cowboy/professional Texan cashed in at Harrah's, according to [wire reports](http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apelection%5Fstory.asp?category=1134&slug=Lucky%20Kinky&ref=jewsrock.org).

But Friedman, who plans to run for Texas governor (and will legalize gambling in the state should he win), doesn't plan to use his winnings to buoy his 2006 campaign. On the contrary. Friedman says he plans to donate the cash to a good cause: a leper colony for unwed mothers in Hawaii.

Friedman also promises to outlaw the declawing of cats and appoint Willie Nelson as head of the Texas Rangers. It's refreshing to see a Texas politician with his priorities and sense of humor firmly in place--not to mention making campaign promises he'll undoubtedly keep.
### The Situationist
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-situationist/
Last updated: 2005-09-30T00:00:00.000Z
*By Craig Bromberg*

Malcolm McLaren, Jewish? What were you expecting, bubeleh—a Scotsman in a kilt? Can you imagine the fury of the Sex Pistols issuing from anything but the mind of an alienated Jewish teenager, albeit one whose frame of reference includes British subcultures such as Teddy Boys, Rockers, Bikers, and Punks, not to mention a dash of French Situationism and a dollop of good old-fashioned shmatte salesmanship? This particular stew could only be the product of a tortured teenaged mind anxious to escape his family’s Jewish middle-class clutches.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. When you’re talking about the man who’s credited as the catalyst for so many careers—from his ex-common law wife, star fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, to the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols, not to mention Boy George, Adam Ant and Bow Wow Wow—being in flight from your Jewishness is just a minor digression. Or is it?

Malcolm McLaren, son of Pete McLaren and Emmy Isaacs, was born in the 'burbs of postwar London January 22, 1946, nine months and two weeks after VE Day. Malcolm barely knew McLaren, who left home when he was two. Instead, he was raised by his grandmother, Rose Corrie Isaacs, the charismatic, formerly wealthy daughter of Portuguese Sephardim who had been diamond dealers back in the day. When Malcolm was six, his mum remarried a man in the rag trade, Martin Levi, who rechristened the family the Edwards. The Edwardses had a nice life. Malcolm’s step dad and mum owned a shmatte factory in London’s East End, Eve Edwards London Limited, and Malcolm lived in a fine suburban house. Unfortunately, Malcolm and his step dad never got on, and by the time he hit his teens, Malcolm couldn’t wait to leave home. For awhile, he tried working as a clerk for Sandeman’s Port & Sherry, then for a gentleman’s apparel store in the Burlington Arcade. But it was art school that finally caught his fancy, and after a stint at St. Martins, he wound up at Goldsmiths’ College, home to much of Britain’s rock intelligentsia.

However it wasn’t art but the conventional pressures of fatherhood that ultimately led McLaren—and Vivienne Westwood, the woman who would be mother his two children, and for the next twenty years, be his common-law wife—to take over the lease on a shop in the sleepy part of Kings Road in 1972\. McLaren more or less inherited the store, then a popular modish boutique called Mr. Freedom, from its previous owner. He and Westwood now began successively plundering one British subculture after another in pursuit of what can only be called rock 'n’ roll clothes—a kind of haute couteur of the streets. The shop’s first iteration, Let it Rock, catered to Teddy Boys and Rockers; its second, Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die, was aimed at Bikers (or at least kids emulating Marlon Brando emulating Bikers). It’s not too great a leap to think of Malcolm, circa 1975, as a Brit version of Ralph (Lipshitz) Lauren—recycling the recent past of rock 'n’ roll instead of, say, the American West.

But then the New York Dolls came to London, and everything changed. For McLaren, the Dolls weren’t just another rock band, they were walking mannequins for rock 'r’ roll haberdashery. It was love at first zipper, and when the Dolls went back to the States, McLaren followed, attempting, somewhat comically, to steal the band from its manager, Marty Thau. Fortunately, New York held other musical treasures for McLaren: From the dark heart of CBGBs to Richard Hell’s Rimbaudian ramblings with the newly formed Television, Gotham was alive with the sound of punk. When McLaren returned to London, he had finally sorted out all the chaos in his head and turned it into SEX, the latest moniker for his shop at 430 Kings Road. And it was from this maw of fashionable recycling that the Sex Pistols emerged.

It is precisely at this point that McLaren’s story begins to walk the uncomfortable line between creative ambition and creative destructiveness, from impresario-like behavior to confidence games and Svengali posturing. For while it is certainly true that the Sex Pistols came into being in and around SEX and that McLaren already had the managerial bug before the group came together, the popular myth that he and Westwood created the band—from the very first safety pin to the very last lyric of "God Save the Queen"—is deeply flawed, to say the least.

Indeed, while McLaren insisted the band was incompetent and implied that he was pulling the strings, more often than not, the truth was exactly the opposite. When the band catapulted to notoriety as a result of their famously foul-mouthed confrontation with a prime-time TV host, it wasn’t because McLaren orchestrated it, but because the Sex Pistols spoke their own minds in the most inappropriate way. (McLaren was initially petrified that "the boys" had blown it.) In fact, the Sex Pistols were and are inordinately talented. John Lydon is one of rock’s most gifted lyricists and performers, and Jones, Matlock, and Cook are much more than a motley musical crew. Nearly all of the Sex Pistols furors were the work of the band’s (and specifically John Lydon’s) hatred of rock posturing. McLaren didn’t coach John Lydon on his singing, didn’t kick Glen Matlock out of the band, didn’t push for Sid Vicious to join the band (or to kill Nancy Spungen), and certainly didn’t plan for the group’s U.S tour to become farce. He did manage to get the Sex Pistols a tidy sum from two record companies before striking it really big with Virgin Records for "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols," and he did get the band to star in an execrable film directed by soft porn director Russ Meyer. But the band’s achievements—to create a truly contemporary and modern sound with resonant, political messages—remain unbeaten to this day.

Of course, what burns most brightly burns out quickest so the Sex Pistols were not destined to last, regardless how McLaren may have tried to fan the flames—even condoning songs he knew would be particularly offensive to Jews (e.g., "Belsen Was A Gas") and prodding Sid to every greater heights of provocation before his final injection. McLaren never cared about any of that: He wasn’t a manager but an artist—albeit one whose canvas was other peoples clothes, music, and movies.

Indeed, it took awhile before McLaren’s post-Pistols artistic career took off but that is because he immediately fell back into "managing" as soon as the Sex Pistols ended. Bow Wow Wow was the name of the band, a conduit for his fascination with pirating music via cassette tapes (thanks to the Walkman, a sexy new technology in 1980) and child pornography. (For a while, he couldn’t decide whether to start a child porn magazine called Chicken or to write a memoir to be titled "The Great Jewish Bastard.") At first, McLaren hired Adam Ant to be the lead singer, dressing him and his band in Westwood’s latest pirate fashions—430 Kings Road was now called Seditionaries—but when Adam couldn’t quite grasp the right attitude, McLaren fired Adam from his own band, hiring in his place a 14-year-old Burmese girl (Annabella Lwin) he hoped to turn into a sexpot teen lead singer. That choice alone was so provocative that on the verge of the band’s commercial success, McLaren decided he was bored of managing and began to put into place his own recording plans. (Not, however, before auditioning a certain Boy George to fill Annabella’s shoes.) and turned his attention directly to his own recording career. To some extent, this was another move necessitated by expedience instead of artistry: by the mid 80s, McLaren had been in and out of court so many times, he had become a managerial untouchable.

In the end, McLaren did finally become the artist he had always wanted to be—albeit sometimes at the cost of being The Great Jewish Bastard he has often been. To date, his discography includes six major albums, several of which are bona fide cult classics, and still eminently listenable. 1984’s Duck Rock mixes South African mbaqanga with the sounds of South Bronx’s World Famous Supreme Team, and resulted in one song, "Buffalo Gals," selling over half a million units. Fans, an aborted attempt to create a staged hip-hop opera musical, is a top café/lifestyle album, bringing Tosca, Carmen, Madame Butterfly, and classics to the street. The less successful Waltz Darling brings the same formula to a wider cast, including Bootsy Collins, Jeff Beck, Viennese waltz, and hundreds of humpback whales. This was followed by the breakthrough Paris, McLaren’s own recherche du temps perdu starring Catherine Deneuve, Sonia Rykiel, and any Gauloise-soaked voice he could bring to his blender.

Despite McLaren’s terrible voice (fortunately not often heard), some of these are very good records, but McLaren’s ambition was never to be a recording star so much as a Hollywood producer. A New York museum show touting his virtues as an impresario helped burnish the reputation he desired a kind of postmodern Diaghelevbut when it came time to the ultimate test of his talents in Hollywood, one movie project after another flopped, and McLaren found himself on the outs with the Hollywood elite. (A relationship with model Lauren Hutton didn’t go that well either.) Worst of all, once his former artists (Johnny Rotten, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones, Boy George, Adam Ant, Annabella Lwin) became famous enough to burnish their own reputations, they repeatedly repudiated their former Svengali in public. We’ve succeeded, they said. We never needed Malcolm. And when the Sex Pistols reunited in 2000, they never even called to say hello. It must have hurt.

Indeed, the last few years have been particularly hard for McLaren. For a while, he tried to start a Singaporean karaoke girl band, Jungk, then he sold (but never finished) another memoir, and concocted a bunch of new film and stage concepts but somehow it all flew beneath the radar, the one thing a provocateur must never do. Another museum show, this one on "Authenticity and Karaoke," was mounted to the usual pile of clippings, but the things McLaren once stood for--marketing in the guise of provocation and anarchy--had come increasingly to seem like the peculiar English eccentricity one might have expected from the Sitwells and Mitfords, not a modern pop star cum postmodern artist.

In 2000, McLaren pushed his eccentricity a little further than anyone expected, entering the race for London’s first popularly elected Mayor. Advocating such wonderfully dotty ideas as homes for the homeless designed by the homeless, a flag for London, decriminalized pot and brothels, and the creation of a London Sports Week, he was drummed out of the race within a month or so. These days, he is dabbling with music created on GameBoys. Still, one hopes Malcolm keeps at it. After all, it’s always nice to have an English Eccentric to poke fun at occasionally. McLaren’s home page on the Web is nothing more than his name, his signature, an e mail address and these words: "Malcolm will return shortly."

Here’s hoping that’s a promise.

Craig Bromberg is the author of The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren. Buy it online at Amazon.com.

Discography

Albums produced by or directly involving Malcolm McLaren:

The Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols Great Rock N Roll Swindle

Bow Wow Wow See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! I Want Candy When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going

CDs by Malcolm McLaren:

Duck Rock (1983) Fans (1984) Waltz Darling (1989)

---

*Craig Bromberg is an author and content strategist; he wrote The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren.*
### Back to the future: Why does Jewish grunge exist?
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/back-to-the-future-why-does-jewish-grunge-exist/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:38.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

“Jewish music goes grunge,” the Forward announced last [week](http://www.forward.com/articles/3783?ref=jewsrock.org), introducing readers to the religious band Heedoosh. Listing the band’s influences as Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Radiohead and Oasis, the article explained that Heedoosh is one of the first bands “to use the angry howl and bludgeoning sounds of grunge to put a novel spin on the traditional Jewish song.” While this is certainly a mark of distinction, it begs the question: where were these guys in 1992? The lead singer of Alice in Chains is dead. The lead singer of Nirvana is dead. Radiohead has been making art-rock for unhappy cyborgs for the past five years (arguably longer). And as for Oasis—well, I love singing “Wonderwall” in the shower, but that doesn’t mean the band is either grunge-related or—new album non-withstanding—terribly relevant.

Heedoosh is playing [Yidstock 65](http://www.yidstock.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) this Sunday, and a quick glance at the festival’s line-up reveals a similar time warp. Musicians compare themselves to Hendrix, to Santana, to Phish. Brooklyn band [Eden](http://www.yidstock.com/bands.htm?ref=jewsrock.org), who list their influences as Third Eye Blind, Tonic, and the Wallflowers, spell it out for us: they combine “the 90s modern rock sound” with Jewish music. In a way, this makes sense: these 90s rockers are playing a show called “Yidstock”. If the name tells us anything, it’s that this entire festival is looking over its shoulder at the past.

Maybe this is crotchety of me. Nobody asks Christian rock bands like Evanescence to be terribly with-it, after all. But I think it’s condescending to expect religious bands to be backwards just because they’re religious, especially when there are good, innovative musicians out there making Jewish music. See [Barbez](http://www.barbez.com/?ref=jewsrock.org), for example, who meld Eastern European klezmer with French melancholia and Weimer flair, and somehow cause the mish-mash to rock. Barbez are experimental but highly listenable, as long as you like chaos: [Pitchfork](http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/b/barbez/barbez.shtml?ref=jewsrock.org) called their sound “Satie melting into the Stooges.” That’s forward-looking, and I think it’s fair to ask other Jewish musicians to try to be as awesome.
### Cute as a kreplach
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/cute-as-a-kreplach/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:38.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

Via [Gawker](http://www.gawker.com/?ref=jewsrock.org), via [Proceed at Your Own Risk](http://rjr10036.typepad.com/proceed%5Fat%5Fyour%5Fown%5Frisk/2005/08/its%5Fstill%5Fmy%5Fgr.html?ref=jewsrock.org), via the [Forward](http://www.forward.com/main/printer-friendly.php?id=3789&ref=jewsrock.org): gay Jewish rapper Andrew Singer, aka [Soce the Elemental Wizard](http://www.socetew.com/?ref=jewsrock.org). He may be the only guy in hip-hop whose beats sound engineered by Stephen Merritt, but as they point out over at Proceed at Your Own Risk, he's so not the only gay Jewish rapper out there. See [God-Des](http://www.god-des.com/index-2.html?ref=jewsrock.org), for example, who is proud to consider herself the Jewish lesbian version of Eminem.
### The Jewish case for gentile rock & roll
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-jewish-case-for-gentile-rock-roll/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:39.000Z
*by Spencer Ackerman*

On balance, you need to conclude that the  
late-19th century intellectual architects of Zionism were vindicated.  
It's true in some trivial sense that their contention that a Jewish  
homeland would mean a future of safety for all of us didn't exactly pan  
out. But come on: there was a holocaust in Europe, and it never could  
have happened if there was, say, a contemporaneous Israeli Air Force.  
End of argument. But Herzl, Ahad Ha'am, Hayyim Nahman Bialek and the  
rest did get one thing wrong: the Jews can never be completely  
self-reliant. No people can (though the Kurds seem to be the  
exception). This is certainly not to be held against the early  
Zionists, who can hardly be expected to have anticipated the age of  
globalization. But it brings me to another unfortunate blindspot of  
this website: we need to acknowledge the gentiles who have paved the  
way for Jewish rock. Much as Yad Vashem devotes space for the Avenue of  
the Righteous… actually, let's stop this analogy in its tracks. Celebrating  
the achievements of the righteous gentiles of rock & roll is too  
great a task for a mere blogger. So let's simply tip the kippah  
to the contemporary good-for-the-Jews rock groups. Which brings me to  
my girlfriend's former band, the Shemps. Did I mention they've [just released a CD](http://www.disgruntledmusic.com/prod%5Finfo.cgi?num=REZ007-2&ref=jewsrock.org), on which she plays guitar? And that you--Jew boy--should buy it? The  
Shemps' other guitarist, Squeaky, actually is himself a Tribesman.  
Their singer's previous bands, Milhouse and Indecision, have in their  
various iconographies flirted with Devil worship and a self-abnegating  
Catholicism, so one could expect to find Judiasm in the middle ground  
there. But perhaps their greatest contribution to the Jewish people  
comes from their bassist, Bill, whose Greedy Bastard fanzine  
was never hesitant to acknowledge Jewish punk rockers. Not that Bill  
stopped there: if you can find a copy of his awe-inspiring wedding  
video, you'll be taken on an unforgettably harrowing tour of the  
seedy underbelly of Jewish and Italian ritualism. The bottom line: if  
you like your garage rock raucous and you think live performances  
should serve to hurl invective not at the band but at the audience, the  
Shemps are your new favorite band. At  
this point I should say that I owe an apology to Sue's replacement in  
the Shemps. My behavior at your recent Greenpoint show with Lost Locker  
Combo reflected poorly on me. Your sexuality is not in question, and is  
not an appropriate subject for between-song commentary. I apologize  
unreservedly and without qualification. And as long as we're talking about current good-for-the-Jews rockers, I want to linger a moment on [Lost Locker Combo](http://www.myspace.com/lostlockercombo?ref=jewsrock.org).  
Did you check out their hot black-Irish glockenspiel player? Something  
tells me she has herself quite a soft spot for the Jewish people.  
What's more, my intuition suggests she also has quite an exquisite and  
subtle literary sensibility. The Jews are only uplifted by gentiles  
like her. See?  
Jewish rock can coexist with its gentile counterpart and provide a  
mutual benefit. It's in this manner we reconcile the enduring wisdom of  
Zionism with the post-national future.
### The Holy Trinity of Brooklyn Rock
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-holy-trinity-of-brooklyn-rock/
Last updated: 2005-09-21T00:00:00.000Z
*By Jonathan Karp*

Barry Manilow. Photo courtesy Carol Marshall.

In 1982, as a college freshman, I took the socially precarious risk of writing an essay in The Brown Daily Herald in which I confessed my admiration for the music of Barry Manilow. I described my furtive trip to the campus ticket outlet, where, in a lame effort to establish myself as a cool customer, I first inquired about Elvis Costello before easing my way into the purchase of the Manilow tix. The night of the show, I snuck away from the dorm, telling no one where I was going. I met a friend from another college outside the arena.

The concert was a life-changing experience. I had never seen a performer connect with an audience in such an entertaining and emotionally direct way. The conventional wisdom about Manilow, much of it negative, seemed so superficial and mean-spirited that I felt compelled to make the case for his greatness: Don’t judge him by the clothes or the hit singles or the overt sentimentality, I argued. Listen to the album cuts! Appreciate the craft of his songwriting, the inventiveness of his arrangements, the purity of his expression, his self-deprecating self-awareness. Applaud him for having the talent to overcome his innate discomfort with performing, for we are all at some point in our lives reluctant performers.

The article made quite an impression on my peer group. To this day, college friends remember me—if they remember me at all—as a Barry Manilow fan. At reunions, people I barely knew have approached me and said, "Do you still listen to Barry Manilow?" Just last month, when Newsweek published a positive story on Manilow’s latest comeback, the magazine’s arts editor, classmate Jeff Giles, felt compelled to alert me to the piece, as if my long cultural excommunication had been lifted.

As the years have passed, my appreciation for Manilow has only deepened and grown. Reasonable minds can disagree, and I realize I’m going out on a limb here, but it is not out of the realm of the possible that Barry Manilow is God. He may or may not have written the songs that make the whole world sing, and those songs may or may not be responsible for the births of masses of children conceived under the spell of his romantic balladry, yet one cannot deny his omnipresence (in elevators and, now, Las Vegas), his omniscience (how else could he have won a Tony, a Grammy, and an Emmy?); or his omnipotence (over women of a certain age).

Here comes my big theological leap, which will appeal most to Catholic fans of Jewish rock: If Manilow is indeed God, Our Father, then by logical extension it must follow that his musical neighbors, the Neils—Diamond and Sedaka—must be the Son and the Holy Ghost. Together, this trio of songwriters shall forever be recognized (by me) as the Holy Trinity of Brooklyn Rock.

Separated in birth by only six years, they personify the journey of the musically gifted, middle-class outsider who parlayed songwriting smarts into an unlikely career as a solo star. Musicians first, tunesmiths at heart, performers by necessity (driven more by a desire to share their songs than to be singers) their careers overlap in unusual ways.

Sedaka and Manilow attended Juilliard, where they studied classical piano. Diamond has said in interviews that Sedaka was an early musical influence on him. Manilow and Diamond were up for the lead role in the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer, have recorded duets with Barbra Streisand, and, in perhaps their greatest shared example of assimilated Jewish identity, have released Christmas albums (as has Streisand, creating the opportunity for a special "Jews for Jesus" promotion at your local Virgin Megastore).

Although all three were raised in Jewish households, Sedaka is the only one who has strongly identified himself as a Jewish entertainer: in interviews, on songs such as "The Immigrant," and in a new album of Yiddish folk songs, Brighton Beach Memories. Interestingly, in an interview with Belfast Telegraph writer Joe Jackson, Diamond concurred with a comment reportedly made by Sedaka about "the oppressed cry at the heart of Jewish music," but only to an extent. Writes Jackson: "Diamond’s music definitely does contain echoes of what one of his original heroes, Neil Sedaka, once described as 'the cry’ at the heart of Jewish music. 'But although I do feel that connection to my own racial history, it probably had more of an influence on my early music,’ says Diamond. 'I was also exposed to singers like Sinatra, rock, folk, blues and gospel, so my music evolved over the years. Yet maybe Neil \[Sedaka\] is right to suggest a lot of what we create, and are, is rooted in the Jewish background. But I think the sadness in many of my songs comes as much from the person I’ve become as it does from whatever was carried within my genes.’"

The only thing publicly Jewish about Barry Manilow is his nose. In fact, when Manilow suffered a broken beak in an accident in June of 2003 and faced possible reconstructive surgery, The Guardian, a British newspaper, began a campaign to "to save one of the world’s wonders." Among those engaged in the campaign were sculptor Mark Quinn, who said, "To lose the Manilow nose would be like knocking the nose off a classical statue. It would be like Samson losing his locks."

Art critic Adrian Searle was even more aghast at the prospect of a reconfigured schnoz. "I feel as if the Taliban just decapitated another Buddhist statue, that some Japanese tycoon wants his beloved Van Gogh cremated along with his corpse. The suggestion that the Manilow nose may be in any way altered, diminished, relined or consolidated without awaiting a full conservation report is a cause for great cultural concern. Perhaps UNESCO can help." Fortunately, no international aid—or plastic surgery—was necessary, and Manilow’s nose remains a beacon for all.

Sedaka and Manilow have written most of their songs with lyricists, so personal spiritual references in their work are rare, though Christian listeners may detect a messianic resurrection theme in the superb 1974 comeback album, Sedaka’s Back. Manilow’s songs consistently espouse self-empowerment and universal humanism, best expressed in "One Voice":

Just one voice, Singing in the darkness, All it takes is one voice, Singing so they hear what’s on your mind, And when you look around you’ll find, There’s more than one voice.

Diamond writes virtually all of his songs by himself—he’s a solitary man, after all. "America" is his Irving Berlin/immigrant/bootstraps anthem. (Manilow has one, too—"Let Freedom Ring," written with Bruce Sussman). If there’s a Jewish sensibility in Diamond’s lyrics, I haven’t heard it. His great pop song, "I’m a Believer," epitomizes the secular thrust of his writing—he’s a non-denominational romantic and his writing is best when he’s unspecific and he lets the melody do the work. I’ve always been mystified that Diamond considers "I Am...I Said" one of his best songs, if only because it contains one of the clumsiest lyrics in Diamond’s estimable catalogue: "I am...I said/To no one there/And no one heard at all/Not even the chair." The chair? Diamond is much better when he’s direct. "Forever in Blue Jeans" is a classic: seductive, sly, simple, and sincere all at once.

All three performers have at times taken a beating in the press—mostly for their glitzy stage apparel and old-fashioned performance style. There’s a little bit of Jolson in all of them, and Manilow, whom Bill Zehme, writing in Rolling Stone, has called "the showman of our generation," in particular owes a debt to another great assimilated Jewish-American entertainer, Danny Kaye. Their Jewishness, however, is only a peripheral aspect of their isolation from the rock mainstream. Because they came of age in a pre-rock era, influenced more by Broadway, swing, jazz, and folk, it’s not surprising that the Holy Trinity remain outsiders. Billy Joel, born in 1949, only ten years after Neil Sedaka, represents the apotheosis of the assimilated Jewish rocker. His best song about guilt describes Catholic guilt— "Only the Good Die Young"—inspired by his own trips to Mass as a young man in a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism. Joel has identified himself as being Jewish, but like the others, he doesn’t seem to find overt musical inspiration in those roots.

Ultimately, the Holy Trinity of Brooklyn Rock should be worshipped for their songwriting. They are the legitimate heirs to the Gershwins and Irving Berlin. Like fellow Brooklynite Carole King (to whom an entire religion ought to be devoted), they applied the craftsmanship of Tin Pan Alley to the pop sensibilities of their era and created a new catalogue of standards, whether it’s Sedaka’s "Laughter in the Rain" or Manilow’s "I Made It Through the Rain"; Diamond’s "Solitary Man" or Sedaka’s "Solitaire"; Diamond’s "Beautiful Noise" or Manilow’s "Beautiful Music." They wrote. They emoted. They moved us. They didn’t always dress so well, and sometimes they gesticulated too much, but their work will endure. For that, we should say a grateful Amen.

---

*Jonathan Karp is the publisher of the Simon Six imprint and the former president and CEO of Simon & Schuster.*
### Anti-Semitism claims the Rolling Stones
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/anti-semitism-claims-the-rolling-stones/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:39.000Z
*by Spencer Ackerman*

By now, you've surely read about the anti-Bush jeremiad on the Rolling Stones' forthcoming album [A Bigger Bang.](http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/336079p-287048c.html?ref=jewsrock.org) My first thought was dread. Most rock against Bush has been the domain of one-dimensional frauds like [Conor Oberst](http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/002095.html?ref=jewsrock.org),  
with the gigantic exception being Sleater Kinney (jewish). Whatever  
happened to subtlety, or a deft acknowledgement of the improbable  
circumstances of pampered rock-and-rollers moaning about  
disenfranchisement? You know, like in "Street Fighting Man," by… well,  
the Rolling Stones. Then my thoughts turned to horror. This is the Rolling Stones. The post-Some Girls  
Rolling Stones. The post-Bill Wyman Rolling Stones. The post-Luciana  
Morad Rolling Stones. The only Stones we have left. Jesus. But  
then it got even worse. The anti-Bush track in question, as you've no  
doubt heard, is titled "Neo-Con." I also know that you, like me,  
grabbed a baseball bat to protect your sister from the forthcoming  
onslaught of pillaging Cossacks. For the word "neo-con" is nothing more  
than an anti-Semite's euphemism for "Jew." After all, there's an entire  
cottage industry on the right devoted to throwing the term down the  
memory hole. In January 2004, David Brooks wrote an [infamous New York Times column](http://www.justinlogan.com/justinlogancom/2004/01/neocon%5Fas%5Fcodew.html?ref=jewsrock.org) putting "neoconservative" in scare quotes, suggesting that a [self-identified intellectual strain](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0028740211/qid=1123771554/sr=1-1/ref=sr%5F1%5F1/104-1302712-3571116?v=glance&s=books&ref=jewsrock.org)was  
just a figment of fevered imaginations, before arguing that so-called  
neoconservatives barely even know one another. He then delivered the  
coup de grace: in the minds of Bush's enemies, he wrote, "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish'." Any love affair liberals had with David Brooks--the urbane, intellectually honest conservative--ended with that essay. Brooks was hardly alone. My TNR colleague  
Lawrence Kaplan accused practically everyone opposed to the Iraq war  
("a chorus of voices from the left, right and center") of anti-Semitism in a pre-invasion [Washington Post op-ed](http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A23009-2003Feb17%C2%ACFound=true&ref=jewsrock.org).  
But Lawrence's piece was mostly read by the political class, for whom  
this sort of toxic partisan combat is basically to be expected. Brooks,  
by contrast, made the mistake of mainlining the  
antiwar-ipso-facto-anti-Semite canard into the bloodstream of Blue  
America, and the uproar was so furious he released a simpering  
statement claiming it was all just a joke that went awry. But it's been awhile. In the interim, the war has gone from disaster to [hopeless nightmare](http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050214&s=ackerman021405&ref=jewsrock.org).   
The neocons are backed into a corner--and the Stones have just called  
them out. (Well, called out Bush, and, apparently, Condi.) One  
counterthrust could be to pan the song as a stinker, as the past 25  
years of the Stones' catalogue suggests it will be. But I doubt that's  
how it'll play out. Who's going to be the first neo to call Mick Jagger  
a Jew-hater? My bet is John Podhoretz.
### Thank G-d for Nasser
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/thank-g-d-for-nasser/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:39.000Z
*by Spencer Ackerman*

In the mid-50s, a modern-day  
Amalek seized power in Egypt. Merging a fierce critique of European  
colonialism with a strident pan-Arabism, Gamal Abdel Nasser became the  
savior of the Arabs. The final component to Nasser's charisma was an  
anti-Semitism even more virulent that the young state of Israel had  
contended with from Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Hitler ally who had been  
mufti of Jerusalem. Eventually Nasser self-destructed by overplaying  
his hand. In May 1967, he began preparations for a "final battle" with  
Israel, evicting the United Nations from the tenuous ceasefire line in  
the Sinai peninsula. But Israel, not exactly content to see the Jewish  
people come close to extinction for the second time in barely a  
generation, struck first, destroying the Egyptian Air Force on its  
runways, the opening salvo of a climactic June confrontation that  
changed the Middle East forever. The first bomb dropped on the  
Egyptians, I'm reliably informed, had a Hebrew message painted on it,  
one that roughly translates to, "What up now, bitch?" Before  
Nasser imploded, however, he prompted a mass exodus of Egyptian Jews  
who understood what was in store for them if they stayed. And here we  
have to admit that we owe something of a debt to our enemy. All actions  
have unintended consequences. Nasser's was to bring the Mizrahi family  
from Cairo to New York. Less than twenty years later, one of its  
children, the delinquent Sylvain, hooked up with a gang of rock &  
roll transvestites. He added an extra "Sylvain" to his name, dropped  
his Sephardic last name, put on some rouge and some platforms, and  
helped bequeath unto the world the legendary New York Dolls. It's  
something of a stretch to say no Dolls, no punk rock, no salvation of  
rock & roll--but not by much. It's a bit more of a stretch to say  
to Nasser, no Mizrahi emigration, no Sylvain Sylvain and then no  
all-the-rest. But would you really want to risk it? My  
grudging appreciation for Nasser came as I caught the reformed Dolls at  
the 9:30 club in D.C. last night. I should say a third of the New York  
Dolls, since Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummers Billy  
Murcia and Jerry Nolan have sadly passed away. But Sylvain and a  
living-dead David Johansen led a furiously sloppy performance of Dolls  
classics, something mind-boggling for men in their late 50s (being  
generous). There's a reason why Johnny Thunders was the lead guitarist  
way back when: at one point, Sylvain delivered a solo so ragged that it  
sounded like an electrified version of how he must have delivered his  
Torah portion. But he more than made up for it with the rest of his  
repertoire--and especially with his Johansen-baiting banter between  
songs--and in appreciation I yelled out how good Syl is for the Jews.  
He may not have heard it, but Johansen must have, because when Sylvain  
promised an adoring audience that we'd see him again soon, Buster  
Poindexter shot back, "Yeah, at the next seder." Syl, you can drink  
Elijah's wine from my table anytime. After last night, I have to say it: thanks, Nasser. Now go back to rotting in hell.
### And how can there be Yankees without Jews?
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/and-how-can-there-be-yankees-without-jews/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:40.000Z
*by Spencer Ackerman*

You can make the case that the defining episodes in Philip Roth novels all involve masturbation, either into chopped liver (Portnoy's Complaint) or onto a gravestone (Sabbath's Theater). For me, Roth's greatest moment of sublime insight into the Jewish condition comes in The Counterlife, when Zuckerman is confronted by a rabid fan in Jerusalem who pantomimes catching a fly ball over the Wailing Wall. He despairs that moschiach is  
delaying his return until the Israelis come to their senses and  
establish a professional baseball league. "How," he asks Zuckerman,  
"can there be Jews without baseball?" Answer that, rabbi. Actually,  
George Steinbrenner has answered it for you. On Monday, the Staten  
Island Yankees--the class-A affiliate of the Bronx Bombers--will host a  
[Jewish heritage appreciation night](http://www.siyanks.com/news/?id=3204&ref=jewsrock.org).   
There's going to be "traditional Jewish food," raising all sorts of  
questions about the ballpark propriety of matzoh brie or kugel. The  
main draw is ostensibly the 7 o'clock match up against the Aberdeen  
Iron Birds. But since the Birds are at the bottom of the  
division--while our Staten Island Yanks dominate with a 30-16  
record--the premier attraction looks more like it'll be the Fools of  
Prophecy, a multi-instrumental Israeli group. A quick visit to the [soundclips section](http://www.israel-music.com/the%5Ffools%5Fof%5Fprophecy/the%5Ffools%5Fof%5Fprophecy/?ref=jewsrock.org) of what I take to be the Israeli version of [Insound](http://www.insound.com/?ref=jewsrock.org)reveals that the Fools sound a bit like the Happy Mondays, complete with trippyness and improbable percussion. (No word on [Shaun Ryder-esque crack use](http://www.chavscum.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=350&ref=jewsrock.org), though.) Staten Island's  
powerhouse season is bittersweet for me. I live in a state of constant  
anxiety about the real Yankees. For the first fifteen years of my  
life--the formative ones in anyone's baseball fandom--my beloved  
Bombers consistently broke my heart, despite the Hall-of-Fame efforts  
of Mattingly and Winfield, to say nothing of greats like Dave Righetti,  
Willie Randolph (I wore his number 20 in little league), and  
mid-megalomania-era Rickey Henderson. The default status of my Yankees  
was faded glory, where greatness was too elusive to be reclaimed. I  
cursed Dallas Green (yeah, you remember him) for not being Casey  
Stengel or Billy Martin. As a result, the 1996 resurgence of what the  
ignorant or classless refer to as the Evil Empire has always felt  
precarious to me, something I've [endlessly agonized](http://www.nypress.com/15/13/nyc/nyc3.cfm?ref=jewsrock.org) over [in print](http://tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031110&s=diarist111003&ref=jewsrock.org).  
This blighted season, with the Yanks about five games behind the Boston  
Menstrual Stains and in a wild-card chase with the A's and the Indians,  
is eerily familiar of my childhood. (Though with a lot more RBIs and  
with the greatest closer of the era, who's poised to finally get his Cy  
Young Award. But still.) It's  
pretty clear my condition is some kind of a Jew thing, though, as I've  
learned, Catholics can understand. Roth surely gets it. So, wherever he  
is right now, would Johnny Ramone--there's a reason why they play  
"Blitzkrieg Bop" at the Stadium. If the Yankees were a band, they'd be  
Ramones. And don't try to tell me the Ramones would be the Mets because  
of Queens. You're wrong. I recognize  
that the Ramones' coulda-woulda-shoulda mythos makes them an uneven fit  
for the Yankees, but the never-say-die attitude and the wildly erratic  
quality control--from classic to stinker with rarely a middle  
ground--prvoes they're a perfect match for their favorite team. All of  
which means that the Yankees are the ideal Jewish baseball franchise  
(the antisemites of the world will probably agree), as the Fools of  
Prophesy will surely recognize on Monday.
### The Ballad of Curly Oxide
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-ballad-of-curly-oxide/
Last updated: 2005-09-12T00:00:00.000Z
*By David Segal*

This American Life is re-airing the story of Curly Oxide and Vic Thrill this weekend, and if you’re looking for some background about that tale, you’ve come to the right place.

Where are you? Jewsrock.org launched just a couple weeks ago, and it’s a site dedicated, as you can see with a few clicks, to the contributions of the Judaic-Hebraic tribe to the world of pop. Look around and enjoy yourself. We’ve got a ton of excellent essays, a rather exhaustive list of Jews in rock and a damn fine merchandise operation, if I do say so myself.

I’m a co-founder of this site, a reporter at the Washington Post and the narrator of the tale of Chaim and Billy. If you don’t catch the story on the radio this weekend, head to thisamericanlife.org on Monday, or any day after that, and listen on your computer. The episode, as you’ll see on TAL’s website, is called "My Experimental Phase."

A lot has happened since the story first was broadcast, last June. For starters, a whole bunch of movie producers came calling. Hollywood went bananas for this tale. As a friend pointed out to me, the story has the classic three-segment structure of every great drama: boy has Torah, boy loses Torah, boy gets Torah back again. The whole process of turning this yarn into a film has, however, been pretty fraught, mostly because Chaim decided that he was done with fame. He is raising two kids in the Hasidic tradition, living in an Hasidic community and happily married and content with his life. A biopic was something that didn’t appeal. Especially a biopic about what he calls his "troubled past," his year and a half long flirtation with the rock and the modern world.

The status of the movie—whether it will be made, and if does get made, when—is something I don’t know about. I don’t own the rights to the lives of Chaim and Billy and the negotiations were out of my hands, as well as the hands of This American Life. What has been reported is that Tina Fey, of Saturday Night Live fame, heard the story on the radio and decided it would be her next film project. She and Paramount Studios made a very aggressive bid for the property. Billy is co-operating, and I believe will have some sort of production credit, if it all comes to fruition. He is also writing a book about the experience for Random House. Chaim made it clear to Paramount a few months ago that he is very much against the idea of a film, even one that changes names and relevant details.

I came across the tale of Curly Oxide because I was the rock critic at the Washington Post up until late last year, and Billy sent me the first Vic Thrill album. It was really rare for me to find an album I’d never heard of and really swoon for it, but that’s what happened when I put on "CE-5." I liked it so much that I just called Billy at home in Williamsburg and basically said, "Who the hell are you and how did you make such a great album?" I had a local radio show at the time, in D.C., and we’d have on performers now and again, so I invited Billy on for a phone interview.

During our initial conversation, he said something like, "Oh and for a year and a half I performed with a Hasidic Jew who went to Yeshiva by day and sang with us by night." I thought, "Damn, that sounds like a story." And though we didn’t talk about Curly Oxide during the subsequent on-air interview, I asked Billy enough questions to realize that this was an amazing episode. I tried to pitch the story to the Washington Post, but the Post has a hard and fast rule against profiling people whose last name you don’t use. Not allowed. (Oxide wouldn't cut it, since this, you won't be surprised to learn, is not actually Chaim's last name.) So I wrote This American Life and a producer there named Alex Blumberg liked the concept. We interviewed the two of them one day in the Vic Thrill salon. It was the first story I’d done on the radio.

Billy was really pleased with the results. Chaim was not. It took him by surprise, a little, that so many people in the Hasidic community listened to the story. And as he makes clear in the piece, singing in a rock band is not something any Hasid is supposed to do.

A lot of people think that the story ended on a sad note, with Chaim moving out of town and away from a life of freedom and fun. I don’t see it that way. Chaim lives in a world steeped in traditions, many of them restrictive, but those traditions and those restrictions are really a source of joy and the basis of a strong community that he really enjoys. He definitely gave up something, but the guy is happy, and not happy the way people in cults are happy. He really loves being a dad, being a husband and being part of this world. He’ll talk to me about the beauty of the Sabbath. He’ll talk about the bliss of giving his son a plastic lawn mower. His life is quieter and simpler, but it is full of many things that he cherishes. He gave up something, it’s true, but he gained a lot more than what he surrendered. I talk to him pretty regularly. He’s doing really well.

Billy, meanwhile, has just come out of the studio, where he’s been working on his second album. I’ve heard a few tracks and they’re might great. I’m in the tank for this guy, as should be obvious by now. Last week told me that he was heading to Europe for some shows with Iggy Pop.

I’ve typed enough, I think. If you’ve got some questions about all this, head to the Forum, and look for the Curly Oxide thread. I’ll answer the ones I can.

---

*David Segal is a reporter for The New York Times and a co-founder of JewsRock.org.*
### Where's the Jewish reggaeton?
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/wheres-the-jewish-reggaeton/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:40.000Z
*by Spencer Ackerman*

I haven't heard this guy [Mitsubishi](http://www.hasidicreggae.com/?ref=jewsrock.org)\--you  
know, the Hasidic reggae singer--but that's never stopped me from  
judging someone's career before. My advice, offered sincerely, to my  
through-the-bedsheet friend is this: you're too late. It's not like  
you've got a bad idea. I would love to have seen a Zionism-on-Zion  
soundclash way back when. If you [gained a little weight](http://www.hasidicreggae.com/index.php?section=file&album%5Fid=12&id=46&ref=jewsrock.org), you'd even look a bit like [Prince Far I](http://www.princefari.com/main.htm?ref=jewsrock.org).  
But your time, unfortunately, has passed. Bow out gracefully. These  
days, we're looking not for Jewish reggae, but Jewish reggaeton. Don't tell me it's not out there. The themes are on display. Take a look at Pitbull's album M.I.A.M.I. As in [Money Is A Major Issue](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002CHI60/qid=1123599148/sr=2-1/ref=pd%5Fbbs%5Fb%5F2%5F1/102-6675437-0459355?ref=jewsrock.org). That's not necessarily a Jewish sentiment. But it's not not a Jewish sentiment, either. Plus, Jews and crypto-Jews are sprinkled throughout the Latin American landscape. The [Jewish Agency has offices](http://www.jafi.org.il/aliyah/english/article.aspx?id=410&ref=jewsrock.org) in Costa Rica, Mexico, El Salvador, Panama (move that yayo, Hebrew!), Venezuela and elsewhere. Some of those Jews have got to be in the music industry. It's only a matter of time before someone with bad sinuses remixes ["Oye Mi Canto."](http://www.dapslyrics.com/display.php?sid=7028&ref=jewsrock.org) (Cue the honey-voiced chorus: "Sat-mar-im (Ha!), Lu-bavitch (Ha!)…") In fact, there may even be something brewing right now. [Eugene Hutz from Gogol Bordello](http://www.gogolbordello.com/related/?ref=jewsrock.org)  
is behind the most enticing crosspollination of reggaeton north of the  
Carribean. It's my understanding that he's not himself Jewish, but he's  
going to be in the cinematic adaptation of [Everything Is Illuminated](http://wip.warnerbros.com/index.html?site=everythingisilluminated&ref=jewsrock.org),  
so that's got to count for something. (Though he'll be playing the  
Ukrainian tour guide, so maybe not for much.) What's more, he's a  
gypsy, so he would have gone up the chimney with us as well. Put it all  
together and that makes him Jewish enough. One  
last thing. Even if there aren't Jewish reggaeton singers or producers  
for the time being, that probably won't limit Jewish involvement in the  
genre. My favorite bad-for-the-Jews Jew is [Jerry Heller](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry%5FHeller?ref=jewsrock.org),  
the yid behind NWA. Though the charges have never stuck, Ice Cube has  
long contended that Heller and Eazy-E conspired to rob the rest of the  
group blind. Heller himself has been known to work with Latino  
rappers--and who knows where the next Jerry Heller  
might be in the music industry. So, as a people, our message to  
reggaeton appears to be this: Embrace the Jews. There's an easy way and  
there's a hard way. Ask Cube.
### Twice in a Lifetime
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/twice-in-a-lifetime/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:40.000Z
*by Spencer Ackerman*

If I may propose a solution to the problem of moving [9,000 fanatics out of Gaza](http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/disengagement.jhtml?contrassID=23&ref=jewsrock.org):   
Buy them tickets to the upcoming Hellfest, a three-day, 187-band punk  
and hardcore extravaganza scheduled for the end of the month in the  
Jew-friendly environs of New Jersey. Granted, there are some logistical  
problems here. For one, the fest will commence at the end of next week,  
a few days after the disengagement. For another, the ex-settlers might  
have a problem with the [tattoo exhibition](http://www.hellfest.com/tattooing/?ref=jewsrock.org). Finally, they're not going to take well to certain bands--namely, um, [Ramallah](http://www.hellfest.com/performers/view.php?id=18&ref=jewsrock.org).  
But whatever. When it comes to the extremists who threaten violence  
against the IDF for the retention of a sick fantasy, I'll quote the  
great Jewish sage John Lee Hooker: it serves you right to suffer. Whether  
or not metalcore can soothe the savage settler soul, Hellfest is  
offering a true milestone in the rock history of the Jewish people: the  
heretofore-inconceivable reunion of Lifetime on August 20\. Being so  
badly traveled, I still have no idea whether the New Brunswick-based  
Lifetime is a regional delicacy. If so, it's a crime. What Jawbreaker  
did for pop-punk--the exploration of manic depression by grafting  
morose vocals to frenetic music--Lifetime did for pop-punk's more  
heavily tattooed cousin, hardcore. Actually, that's a bit of a stretch:  
Lifetime was emotionally complicated but not as depressed, and they  
devoted their exuberant blend of hardcore largely to the question of  
what makes love so frustrating. Should any of this be unclear, all  
questions will be answered by the purchase of their classic 1995 album [Hello Bastards](http://jadetree.com/releases/product/JT1021?ref=jewsrock.org),  
which ranks as one of the greatest punk records of the 1990s. When  
frontman Ari Katz bellowed, he left nary a dry undergarment among  
Lifetime's many devotees, and I'd like to think that was at least  
partly the result of his refusal to change his name to something less  
Semitic but more conventionally punk rock. Talmudic debates rage today  
about the relative merits of Lifetime's (excellent) follow-up, [Jersey's Best Dancers](http://jadetree.com/releases/product/JT1034?ref=jewsrock.org). Their two-day breakup shows in early 1998 at New Brunswick's since-bulldozed Melody Bar are widely remembered as the saddest but most glorious days in New Jersey punk history. (They were packed to the rafters and, to my great regret, I didn't get in.) Their impact was tremendous, at least on the Northeast Corridor. Expectations for [Kid Dynamite](http://www.jadetree.com/bands/artist/kid%5Fdynamite?ref=jewsrock.org),  
the next project for Lifetime guitarist Dan Yemin (a doctor!), were  
enormously high, and while I didn't get into them, I was clearly an  
outlier. If you've heard of that god-awful group Saves The Day, it's  
only because those weasels spent their early years blatantly stealing  
every trick on Hello Bastards and performing them with  
a fraction of the intensity. So great was the enthusiasm for Lifetime  
that STD built a loyal (if deluded) following. Yet  
a reunion has been a hope beyond hope. The band's unfortunate implosion  
was accepted, albeit bitterly, as final. (Though a very funny practical  
joke was played [here](http://www.jadetree.com/news/article/19/184?ref=jewsrock.org).)  
After all, the kids still had two classic LPs, not to mention that  
"Boy's No Good" seven-inch. (By the way, avoid their first disc, Background, like a ham-and-cheese sandwich.) However, [according to their label](http://www.jadetree.com/news/article/19/593?ref=jewsrock.org),  
the emocore juggernaut Jade Tree, and Hellfest's promoters, everything  
changed when CBGB fell into mortal danger, spurring a reactivated  
Lifetime into taking the stage for a benefit. Even more menschy, Lifetime is [also](http://www.jadetree.com/news/article/19/598?ref=jewsrock.org) foregoing the proceeds of their show to benefit a New Brunswick  
immigrant-labor foundation, a greyhound rescue association, a  
gay-rights organization and an environmental group. You can see how big  
an event Lifetime's reunion is. Wherever you are, grab your friends,  
organize travel plans, pay Hellfest the (sheesh) $100 they're asking,  
and prepare for an experience almost as satisfying as watching Israel finally withdraw from Gaza. (You  
may be wondering: Am I myself going to attend? It's doubtful -- look at  
that ticket price. Though if a Hellfest promoter wanted to give me and  
my New Brunswick-born-and-raised-and-scenestery-girlfriend free  
admission out of gratitude for this hefty plug, I wouldn't turn it  
down.)
### Not every Jew rocks as hard as he'd like to, or as hard as other Jews
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/not-every-jew-rocks-as-hard-as-hed-like-to-or-as-hard-as-oth/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:41.000Z
*by Spencer Ackerman*

I learned this lesson at a young age when growing up in Brooklyn. Hi, Jew-rockers: Spencer Ackerman here from the decidedly un-rock & roll [New Republic](http://www.tnr.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) magazine. (Actually, you'd be surprised.) Kara has been kind enough to let me blog here over the next few days. By way of introduction, I'd like to explain why the whole conceit of this website is wrong.

It's not that Jews don't rock. It's demonstrably true that many do. But can we really speak of "Jews" rocking? Lou Reed, sure. Sylvain Sylvain, you bet your tuchis. But the guy from Biohazard? Come on, and I'm from Brooklyn -- as I conspicuously mentioned above and will continue to mention as long as this forum is available to me. I just feel that we're making a mistake if we get too invested in the idea that The Tribe rocks, as if rock & roll prowess were included in the Covenant.

Think of it this way. The contributions blacks have made and continue to make to rock & roll are tremendous and irreplaceable. Think Bad Brains. Think Hendrix. More recently, think Dirtbombs. But the idea that black rockers owe a kind of racial solidarity to one another tends to lead to the promotion of some pretty wretched bands, like, oh, I don't know, Living Colour. It saddened me when Mos Def, a fellow Brooklynite (told you) decided to include some Living Colour-ish riffs on his disappointing [New Danger](http://www.mosdefmusic.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) LP. (Didn't some of LC actually play on the record? I don't know.) Does Mos really like Living Colour--I guess it's possible--or did he feel he ought to like Living Colour? There's honor in calling attention to those who paved the way. But sometimes it can risk the beatification of musically inferior acts. And I don't want to see Jews--not anyone, really, but especially not Jews-- falling into that same trap.

None of which is to say that there isn't a place for celebrating the musical achievements of Tribesmen. When I was 15, I remember getting my hands on a copy of the brilliant one-off fanzine Mazel-Tov Cocktail. (MTC was the work of Jenn Bleyer, who went on to found and edit [Heeb](http://heebmagazine.com/?ref=jewsrock.org).) The pride I felt when I learned of the judaica undergirding much of punk rock, from the 1970s to the mid-90s! But, upon further reflection, I had to admit: some of those bands and labels truly sucked.

All I ask is this: by all means, let's recognize the rocking that Jews have done. Let's just not set the bar so low that any Jew can clear it. After all, we tend to be short people with dubious athletic ability. Or maybe that's just me.
### That Land Is Your Land
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/that-land-is-your-land/
Last updated: 2005-09-03T00:00:00.000Z
*By Paul Farhi*

Arlo Guthrie

Arlo Guthrie remembers his boyhood Hebrew tutor as "a sweet guy, a nice guy." Every week for an hour or so, the young rabbi would travel to the Guthrie’s home in Queens to teach Torah to the boy and his younger brother and sister. When he turned 13 in 1960, Arlo showed off some of what he had learned at his Bar Mitzvah, an event attended by his famous but ailing father, the legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie.

It was many years later that Arlo Guthrie heard the name of his rabbi again. By this time, Meir Kahane was no longer the gentle teacher who would visit the Guthries in Howard Beach each week. To the adult Arlo, this Kahane seemed unrecognizable. Kahane had become a firebrand, a charismatic public speaker, a political leader, and—in the eyes of many—a Jewish racist.

The unlikely story of Arlo Guthrie and Meir Kahane is one of two roads crossing briefly, then diverging sharply. Following in his father’s footsteps, Arlo Guthrie became a respected folksinger ("Alice’s Restaurant," "Coming into Los Angeles"), a prominent member of the Woodstock Generation, and a longtime peace activist. Kahane became nothing less than one of the most polarizing figures in modern Jewish history.

The founder of the Jewish Defense League, the Brooklyn-born Kahane is perhaps better known as the leader of Israel’s radical Kach party. In his many articles, speeches, and books, Kahane advocated the forcible expulsion of all Arabs from Israel, the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza territories, and the unrestricted building of Jewish settlements. His was an uncompromising hard line: "When Israel liberated \[the West Bank and Gaza\] in 1967, the normal, sane thing to have done would have been to drive the scum out," he wrote in May 1989, going on to explain, "The Arabs are the deadly enemy of the Jewish state, who would bring on us a slow Auschwitz—not with gas, but with knives and hatchets."

Kahane won election to the Knesset in 1984 but was later banned from political activity in Israel because of alleged subversive activity. He was assassinated in New York in 1990 by an Egyptian-born American who was later linked to a terrorist cell that carried out the World Trade Center bombing in 1993\. His son, Binyamin Zev Kahane, was murdered with his wife in Israel in December 2000.

Although few people realize it, Arlo and his siblings were raised Jewish by their mother, Marjorie Mazia, Woody Guthrie’s wife of 22 years. Guthrie and Mazia had met in New York in the early 1940s, when she was a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company and he was a rising young singer and writer of protest songs and odes to the struggles of people in the Oklahoma and Texas Dustbowls. The couple moved to Coney Island in 1942 (they married three years later), and lived in a heavily Jewish neighborhood across the street from Marjorie’s parents, Isadore and Aliza Greenblatt, a well-known Yiddish poet. After the birth of their three children—Arlo, brother Joadie, and sister Nora—the Guthries moved from Brooklyn to Howard Beach, a middle-class section of Queens.

Arlo Guthrie describes his childhood "as a typical Jewish upbringing for the time," though the family was never formally associated with a synagogue. While his father’s health was often uncertain—Woody Guthrie eventually died from Huntington’s disease, a degenerative nervous-system disorder, in 1967—the family frequently visited Marjorie’s parents for Shabbat dinners and holiday celebrations. The children played games and met friends at what Arlo remembers as "a Jewish Y."

At the urging of her parents, who had briefly emigrated to Israel and returned, Marjorie sought out a rabbi to provide religious instruction for her young children. Around 1958, she found Kahane, then in his mid-twenties and only a few years out of yeshiva in Brooklyn. "My memory of him is really not that good," recalls Arlo, now 56\. "All I really remember was him coming to our house. He was a sweet guy, but not really all that enthusiastic about teaching us. I guess it was something he had to do." In fact, despite Kahane’s instruction, Arlo never learned to speak or read Hebrew.

Some years later—Arlo isn’t sure when—he heard Kahane giving one of his typically inflammatory speeches. He was stunned. "I thought it was just so crazy," he said. "I couldn’t believe it. I thought, that’s not the nice guy I knew." Today, he says, the joke in his family "is that \[Kahane\] is my fault. He seemed like such a nice guy before he met me!"

Guthrie has spent many of his adult years exploring religion and spiritual themes. He has studied Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and operates the Guthrie Center and Foundation, an interfaith worship and educational organization in Great Barrington, Massachusetts ("It’s basically bring your own God," he says.) While Kahane was a peripheral figure to him, he observes of his one-time mentor, "I’m at the opposite end of the political spectrum from him. ... It seemed to me he became so embittered. When you become so angry, you lose the ability to overcome your enemies because your heart closes up. It’s a common mistake we all make. The position of our teachers and leaders often becomes Us against Them. Then you find yourself in the never-ending cycles of violence that we’re in today. It won’t stop until we stop following people who are charismatic, but are saying the wrong things."

Arlo Guthrie’s brief encounters with Meir Kahane weren’t the only unusual collaboration that took place in his family during those years. As it happened, Woody Guthrie and his mother-in-law, Aliza Greenblatt, had begun discussing and exchanging their work some years earlier. Unlikely as it sounds, the Okie balladeer and the Yiddish poet had much in common. Both were bound by common social concerns—hatred of fascism, love of working people, identification with the oppressed. In addition to reading and discussing her poems with him, Greenblatt exposed Guthrie to Jewish history; he also studied Torah (although Arlo suspects that he did so mainly to impress his future father-in-law). From these conversations and readings, Arlo Guthrie says his father wrote "barrels" of Jewish-themed songs, on everything from Hanukah to the Holocaust. Arlo intends to reclaim a bit of this family history. Working in collaboration with his sister Nora and the musical group the Klezmatics, Guthrie will release an album of his father’s Jewish songs sometime in 2004.

---

*Paul Farhi is a journalist and retired media reporter for The Washington Post.*
### Not by himself
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/not-by-himself/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:41.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

This week’s [Village Voice music section](http://www.villagevoice.com/music/?ref=jewsrock.org) has articles about not one but two newly relevant Jewish rock stars of ages past. George Smith’s [round-up](http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0531,smith,66384,22.html?ref=jewsrock.org) of glammy new releases ends with an endorsement of T. Rex’s Born to Boogie, now out on DVD and CD. The live album, Smith says, “sets up Bolan's quartet as way more thundering and jammy hard rock than the studio LPs let on.” Meanwhile, Jason Gross [reviews](http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0531,sotc1,66406,22.html?ref=jewsrock.org) a recent show by reunited seventies power-pop trio the Raspberries, headed by “buff-looking” MOT Eric Carmen. You might remember Carmen from another, less hip incarnation: between Raspberries then and Raspberries now, he was the author of such gooey power ballads as “Hungry Eyes” and the immortal “All By Myself.”
### Name game
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/name-game/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:41.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

"Institute" sounds to me like a German post-rock DJ collective, but it's the name of Gavin Rossdale's new band. And "Diistort Yourself" sounds like the name of a Candlebox album from 1992, but it's what Institute is calling their first album, which, [according to Rossdale](http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/%5F/id/7522978/institute?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single1&rnd=1123175191192&has-player=true&ref=jewsrock.org), is a move away from the thick, melodic soup of Bush's grunge days. In order to find a harder sound, Rossdale has recruited two members of Helmet: Chris Troyner on guitar, and Page Hamilton as producer. Of course, Rossdale is not only MOT but also BF to Gwen Stefani, whose voice appears on one of the tracks. Any chance he's the guy who convinced her to cover Fiddler on the Roof?
### The Jews of Christian rock
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-jews-of-christian-rock/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:42.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

The “Jewish” in “Jewish rock” means something totally different from the “Christian” in “Christian rock.” When we talk about Jewish rock bands, we generally mean bands, secular or religious, with Jewish members. Often these members are loud and proud about their Jewish identities, but they certainly don’t have to write power-ballad takes on “Oseh Shalom” to be Jewish rockers. “Christian rock,” on the other hand, very specifically denotes religious music. Jewish rock musicians are Jews in bands; Christian rockers are making music about their faith.

This is a strange semantic double-standard to begin with. It gets much murkier when you consider the Jewish musicians of Christian rock.

Take the OC Supertones, for example. Since the ska mini-craze of the mid-‘90s, these guys have been doing a whole horns-for-Jesus thing – but lead singer Matt Morginski was born Jewish. A review on [Jesusfreakideout.com](http://www.jesusfreakhideout.com/cdreviews/AdventuresofOCSupertones.asp?ref=jewsrock.org) helpfully points out that Morginski’s Jewish heritage informs a track called “I Love God” off the CD Adventures of the OC Supertones; another song on the album is called “Adonai.”

Weird. Weirder still is [John Reuben](http://www.johnreuben.com/?ref=jewsrock.org), the Jewish Christian rapper. Reuben (born John Reuben Zappin) mentions being a messianic Jew—that is, a Jew for Jesus—but much of the press about him seems to just call him a Jew. Witness this mind-bending quote from [Phillyburbs.com](http://www.phillyburbs.com/musicguide/christianrap.shtml?ref=jewsrock.org): “Christian rappers have trouble gaining credibility. Same can be said for white rappers (save Eminem). Combine the two, make the rapper Jewish and you have John Reuben.”

We’re not sure what to make of the Jews of Christian rock. Surely it doesn't make sense to include them in our Challah Fame, but then, as one fan put it in an e-mail, “Aren’t Jewish Christians just as good as any other Jew?” Hard-liners will think this issue is completely absurd, and it probably is. We’re just fascinated by the ambiguity in the words “Jewish” and “rock,” the way they allow a Christian rapper to count as a Jewish rocker.
### Talmud
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/talmud/
Last updated: 2005-08-25T00:00:00.000Z
*By Mark Caro*

(Reprinted with permission from Passing Stone magazine)

It’s Saturday night at the packed Mogen David Center, and the Havdalah candles are swaying in the air.

"Tal-Mud! Tal-Mud! Tal-Mud!"

The faithful are chanting requests over the din:

"Tallit Like It Is!"

"Dock of the Bagels!"

"Kabbala-la-Love You!"

"We 'Kabbala-la-Love You,’ too!" Rabbi Eleazar Preslamowitz calls back from the stage, flicking his upper lip into his trademark sneer and wiping his sweaty brow with a rhinestone-studded yarmulke. He flings the yarmulke into the female half of the audience, where it’s devoured like the last latke at a Hanukkah party for chozzers.

Meanwhile, Rabbi Moishe Springstein whirls toward his bandmates, waves his mezuzah-shaped guitar pick in the air and counts it off: "Echad, schteim…echad, schteim, shalosh, arbah!"—and immediately the band, the crowd and the room itself are davening as one as Preslamowitz croons, "That’s All Right, Matzah!"

Yes, Talmud is in da house.

Who’d have thunk this scholarly minyan of rockin’ rabbis would still be around after so long? Then again, who would’ve ever doubted them?

Let’s face it: Talmud has been with us forever.

So it was, at long last, that yours truly, a longtime Talmudic scholar, got to meet the objects of his devotion as they sat backstage before the show, chillin’ and kvellin’, while waiting for the sun to set. The dozen current bandmates were munching little bitty squares of lox on little bitty bagels, as their contract required the auditorium to provide, though Rabbi Nigel Gelfilte, one of the relatively newer members, garrumphed, "You never can get the lox to fit perfectly on the bagels. You have to keep folding it."

Still, the members were in a reflective mood, willing and eager to delve into their endless history, even at the risk of becoming lost in the arcania that is…Talmud.

Passing Stone: So when did it all begin?

Rabbi Moishe Springstein: Oysh, who can really say?

Rabbi Chaim Yorman: That’s a big question.

Rabbi Menachem Jagger: It’s like asking, "When did the sun first come up, and before it came up where was it?"

Rabbi Shlomo Diddley: And what was it doing?

Rabbi Buddy Challah: But I think most people became familiar with us after the single "Shma Sharona."

Rabbi Eleazar Preslamowitz: Yeah, when people think of the birth of Talmudic rockers, they think of the 5710s.

PS: Of course, that’s when you had your legendary appearance on "The Ed Culligan Show."

(The Talmud members nod their heads together, going, "Mmmm.")

Diddley: My man Eleazar here was davening so rhythmically to "Don't Be Verklempt," they only showed him from the waist down.

Preslamowitz: Still, they had us back often enough. What else did we do on there?

Yorman: "Brisket on Home to Me."

Springstein: "One Last Knish."

Jagger: "Latke Largo."

PS: Then there was the incredibly successful album and stage show West Bank Story, a musical tale of forbidden love. I still think one of your most haunting tunes is "The World Is a Shtetl."

Challah: That album gave us a bunch of instant standards: "Stand By Your Manischevitz," "Kipah Pa Don’t Preach"…

Yorman: And don’t forget "Bertha Kibbutz Boogie."

Challah: How could anyone ever forget "Bertha Kibbutz Boogie"?

(Everyone laughs.)

PS: But "Bertha Kibbutz Boogie" raises a serious point: Talmud has always boasted an incredible amount of range. Who else could go from the bubblegum of "Meshuga Shuga" to a 25-minute epic like "In-Haggadah-Da-Vida"?

Rabbi Nigel Gelfilte: Oh, I love the 6-minute Jew’s harp solo on that one.

PS: And after a catchy ditty like "Kishke on the Bus," you come back with an ornate, thematically ambitious concept album like Oz Moses.

Springstein: Look, we’ve got a lot of rabbis and a lot of ways to rock, nu?

Rabbi Immanuel Cantor: I particularly consider Oz Moses to be a high water mark, with its powerful narrative about the title character’s Exodus to a strange land, where he celebrates "Mishnah at the Oasis."

Diddley: I never understood that bit about the wizard, though.

Preslamowitz: Me neither.

Challah: But don’t forget, that album launched rock's Oy! movement.

Jagger: Oh, sure. That’s where band Midnight Mohel came from.

Preslamowitz: Self-righteous Aussie bastards.

(The bandmates laugh and slap each other high fives.)

Jagger: My favorite song from that period was "Puttin’ on the Mitzvah." Probably because it was a smash.

Springstein: You always kept one eye on the charts.

Jagger: Someone had to.

PS: Of course, then came the epic Ark of a Davener album, which included the pleading "Tell Her, Noah" and the climactic "It's Raining Menorahs!"

Challah, Jagger and Preslamowitz (in unison): "Hallelujah!"

(They dissolve in giggles.)

Diddley: Wasn’t "Midrash Train to Georgia" on that one, too?

Cantor: No, that was Shabbat out of Hell.

Diddley: Oh, Christ, of course.

PS: May I just say that I’ve studied Shabbat out of Hell perhaps most of all? I find that album’s centerpiece, "Paradise by the Eternal Light," to be transcendent.

Springstein: Oh, yeah, that was a good 'un.

Challah: You know who did the play-by-play on that one, the part where they’re "going all the way" to nirvana?

PS: Who?

Challah: Al Sharpton.

PS: You’re yankin’ my T’fillin!

Challah: Swear to Adonai. He was a closet Talmud fan.

PS: But I’d like to get back to the question about your stylistic range. You cranked up the power riffs on "Friday Night’s Alright for Shabbat" and "Highway to Hillel," and then you went through that dance phase.

Jagger: Are you referring to "The Macaroona"?

Cantor: That and "Hora with No Name," I bet.

Springstein: I’d throw "Ballroom Blintz" in there, too.

Gefilte (singing to himself): "Are you ready Moishe? Uh-huh. Shlomo? Yeah. Menachem? OK. All right fellas. Let’s gooooooooo!"

PS: And you really got your groove on with "Kosher Thing (Do Whatcha Gotta Do)."

Preslamowitz: Look, we like to study. We like to get down. It’s as simple as that.

PS: We haven’t talked about your most uncharacteristic album: Talmud Flaps.

(There’s much muttering among the bandmates.)

Diddley: The less said about Talmud Flaps, the better – know what I’m sayin’?

Yorman: Next question.

PS: OK. You have thrived in all sorts of times: repressive, permissive, war time, peace time. How do you explain your longevity?

Springstein: The times change, but the basic lessons, the basic stories remain the same, and the more you go back to them, the more you can get out of them. Whether you’re rolling in the riches or getting beaten like bitches, you’ll always get something out of a cautionary tale like "Change the Lox," a lament like "Torah Hole (in My Heart)" or the simple confessional "You Make Me Shiva."

(At this point Talmud’s road manager, a 6-foot-5, 320-lb. gentleman named Phat Schmaltz, enters the green room.)

Phat: Hey, fellas, that third star is up in the sky. Time to get those candles lit and those tocheses moving.

A candle-lighting, a splash of wine (the finest kosher Pinot Noir I’ve ever tasted) and a few playful tallit whips to the tushie later, I’m back in the auditorium, a fan and worshipper once again, as Talmud continues to turn live rock into a religious experience.

Evidence of the band’s never-abating powers can be heard everywhere, from the way Diddley’s spiky guitar leads add teeth to Springstein’s biting delivery of "You Don’t Seder," to the fist-pumping anthemic finale "Shul’s Out." They perform their two "Shalom" songs: the wistful "Shalom Again (Naturally)" and playful "Shalom Shalom" ("You say 'Shalom,’ and I say 'Shalom’/Shalom Shalom/I don’t know why you say 'Shalom,’ I say 'Shalom’").

When Talmud returns for its final encore, everyone knows what song is coming, yet we still feel its force anew. We lock arms around shoulders and raise our voices together as only the righteous can do, projecting our song from the Mogen David Center to the heavens: "Na na na na-na-na-na/Na-na-na-na/Hey Jew."

---

*Mark Caro is an author and host of the Caropop podcast, and a former Chicago Tribune reporter. This essay originally ran under the joke byline “Ben Fong-Torahs.”*
### First Bob Dylan does a Victoria's Secret commercial, and now this
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/first-bob-dylan-does-a-victorias-secret-commercial-and-now-t/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:42.000Z
*by Kara Baskin*

Rolling Stone, once the anti-corporate vanguard of underground style, is now allegedly modeling itself after Donald Trump. This is very painful, not least because the man's hair would have once gotten him evacauted from the RS premises. But the times just might be changing. The [New York Post](http://www.nypost.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) via [Gawker](http://www.gawker.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) reports that RS founder Jann Wenner is in talks to do an Apprentice-style reality show on MTV. Aspiring writers would set out to cover stories for the magazine, and one lucky wordsmith would get published. However, getting published in Rolling Stone isn't quite the outlaw badge of honor it once was. (Jann Wenner, if you're reading this, I'm only lying for the sake of the next paragraph. I would love to work for you. Why did you stop taking my calls?)

This bizarre rumor leads me to wonder: What would have happened if the show were taped during Rolling Stone's 60s and 70s heydey? I picture Hunter S. Thompson ravaging the hotel minibar while Cameron Crowe berates him for not being a team player; Lester Bangs breaking down in tears and collapsing on the boardroom table after a firing; and Joe Eszterhas getting booted from the show after Annie Leibovitz slips shots of him in compromising positions to the tabs. (He would eventually triumph, of course, going on to write a screenplay about it, perhaps casting Sharon Stone.)
### No love for Dave Grohl
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/no-love-for-dave-grohl/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:42.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

There’s no Courtney Love character in “Last Days,” the new Gus Van Sant [movie](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0403217/?ref=jewsrock.org) about the suicide of a Kurt Cobain-esque rock star, but that doesn’t mean Ms. Love is going to let her role in the drama be forgotten. In this month’s issue of [Spin](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0403217/?ref=jewsrock.org), she accuses former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl of “taking money from \[my\] child for years,” alluding to a long-running royalties battle with Cobain’s surviving bandmates. E! Online points out that Love is $4 million in debt due to legal bills alone—making it a little hard to have much sympathy when she accuses Dave Grohl of stealing her daughter’s piggybank money.
### Unfaithful reporting
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/unfaithful-reporting/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:43.000Z
*by Kara Baskin*

Rumors of Marianne Faithfull's ill health have been greatly exaggerated.

[The New York Post](http://www.nypost.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) and several other sources reported last week that the weathered legend was rushed to the hospital with chest pains and suffered a heart attack. Supposedly, these woes forced her to relinquish a role in an onscreen adaptation of Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and cancel her current European tour to promote new album [Before the Poison](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0006Z3DDA/qid=1122122873/sr=8-1/ref=pd%5Fbbs%5Fsbs%5F1/002-0018624-5439205?v=glance&s=music&n=507846&ref=jewsrock.org). The faux health scare even prompted her to quit smoking. First heroin, now cigarettes--what was a diva to do?

Fight back. She set the record straight with the [World Entertaniment News Network](http://www.wenn.com/?ref=jewsrock.org). "These horrible rumors are completely untrue," she sniffed as only the British can. "It's upsetting that so many of my friends and family have been forced to worry unnecessarily about my health."

Was she saying this while living, strung out, on a wall in Soho during much of the 1970s? No matter. Faithfull plans to continue her tour, smoldering cigarette firmly in place.
### Talkin' Hava Nagilah Blues
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/talkin-hava-nagilah-blues/
Last updated: 2005-08-16T00:00:00.000Z
*By Seth Rogovoy*

Frank Driggs Collection/ Hulton Archives/ Getty Images

For Bob Dylan fans, reading the Bible—the original, not the sequel—is an experience filled with moments of déjà vu.

"No human can see my face and live," God warns Moses at one point. "The soles of their feet …their appearance was like fiery coals, burning like torches," reports the prophet Ezekiel at another.

These verses sound familiar to those who have already absorbed a different kind of Torah passed down from a different kind of Jewish prophet: the received words and wisdom of Bob Dylan. "The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning," sings Dylan in "The Wicked Messenger." And on the chorus of "I and I," Dylan’s voice sneers, "No man sees my face and lives."

One of the most rewarding ways of approaching Bob Dylan’s lyrics is to read them as the work of a poetic mind apparently steeped in Jewish texts – Torah, Talmud, liturgy, and works of mysticism, or kabbalah—and engaged in the age-old process of midrash, riffing on the texts in order to elucidate or elaborate upon their hidden meanings.

One of Dylan’s best-known works of mystical midrash is his whimsical retelling of the Akeidah, the story of Abraham and Isaac, which Dylan posits as a conversation between two jaded, cynical hipsters in "Highway 61 Revisited":

G-d said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son.’ Abe said, 'Man, you must puttin’ me on.’ G-d said 'No.’ Abe said, 'What?’ G-d said, 'You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin’ you better run.’ Abe said 'Where you want this killing done?’ G-d said, 'Out on Highway 61.’

The Abraham and Isaac story, of course, is one of the core myths of Western civilization. But as far back as 1965, lyrics by the son of Abe Zimmerman reveal a familiarity with Torah far beyond the basics of the average Sunday school education. The song "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," one of his most beautiful and enduring love songs, gains added heft and resonance when one realizes how much of its symbolism is drawn from chapter five of the book of Daniel. And any Dylan fan stumbling on these verses in chapter 26 of Leviticus—"Your strength shall be spent in vain… I will make your heaven like iron… You shall eat and not be satisfied..."—will recognize them as the raw material from which he shaped the 1967 song, "I Pity the Poor Immigrant."

"All Along the Watchtower," another staple of Dylan’s repertoire from the late 60s, draws its imagery explicitly from the book of Isaiah, and as if to make the connection more explicit, in recent years in concert Dylan’s guitarists have prefaced the song with the opening theme music from the Zionist film epic, Exodus.

Although facts about Dylan’s Jewish upbringing and practice are hard to come by given his notorious penchant for privacy and outright deception, evidence from his lyrics, his public statements, and some undisputed biographical items add up to a convincing portrait of a mind profoundly shaped by Jewish study and belief. Although Dylan grew up in the cold, hard, iron-mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, isolated from any semblance of Jewish communal life, his family retained enough connection with Jewish tradition to observe the dietary laws, to mark the weekly Sabbath, and to bring a rabbi to town when it came time for Dylan to become bar mitzvah in 1954\. Teenage Bobby Zimmerman spent the next three or four summers at a Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin, and as a freshman at the University of Minnesota in 1959, he enrolled in a Jewish fraternity.

After his father died in 1968, Dylan began re-exploring his Jewish roots at the urging of famed folk presenter Harold Leventhal. The next two summers Dylan took the first of many subsequent trips to Israel. He was photographed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on his 30th birthday in 1971, and on a visit to a kibbutz he and his wife Sara reportedly flirted with the idea of settling their young family there. After attending the wedding of friends in New York’s Hasidic community, Dylan faced accusations of being a "Zionist" who supported Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League—charges which he says in his recent autobiography, Chronicles, came as a welcome diversion from the burden of being labeled "the voice of a generation."

Around this time, Dylan’s lyrics became infused with imagery drawn not only from the Bible but from works of Jewish mysticism as well as liturgy typically familiar only to practitioners of traditional Judaism. Several of the songs on the 1970 album New Morning, including "Father of Night" and "If Not for You," for example, are freely restated versions of the morning prayers and blessings recited daily by Orthodox men.

Dylan’s 1974 album, Planet Waves, included self-penned liner notes referring to "Hebrew letters on the wall/Found Jacob’s ladder/Where Joshua brought the house down." The album’s most enduring song, "Forever Young," was a loosely poetic rewrite of the traditional blessing Jewish fathers give their children every Friday night before the Sabbath Kiddush, which Dylan personalized for his son Jakob with a reference to building "a ladder to the stars." This album also marked the debut of Dylan’s new publishing company, Ram’s Horn Music, presumably alluding to the shofar blown at the High Holidays. On the following album, Blood on the Tracks, Dylan referred to the obscure Talmudic notion of the ruach shtus, "the wind of idiocy," in one of his best songs of the period, "Idiot Wind."

But wait a minute—isn’t Bob Dylan a born-again Christian? Certainly his most overtly religious songs were the gospel songs he recorded between 1979 and 1981\. Nevertheless, in 1982, Dylan’s son Samuel became bar mitzvah, and by 1983, when Dylan was reportedly hanging out with Lubavitcher rabbis in Brooklyn, overtly Jewish themes colored the songs on the album Infidels—the sleeve of which featured a photograph of Dylan overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, taken on a visit earlier that year for son Jesse’s bar mitzvah. The song "Neighborhood Bully"—a drippingly sarcastic overview of Jewish history and persecution through the lens of contemporary Zionism—evinced a strongly nationalistic identification with Jewish peoplehood.

Over the next decade, Dylan made several appearances on telethons for Chabad, in one calling the Jewish outreach movement his "favorite organization." During this time, he made several more visits to Israel; he opened a shopping complex in Santa Monica replete with an office, a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, and a synagogue; and he saw his daughter, Maria, marry and begin raising a family with Orthodox singer-songwriter and fellow Minnesotan Peter Himmelman.

Dylan’s songs continued to reflect the mind of one steeped in a Jewish world view: on Oh Mercy, "Everything Is Broken" portrayed the kabbalistic view of a world in a state of disrepair, and "Political World" includes a vivid description of kiddush HaShem, the religiously-inspired martyrdom of those who were dying in Auschwitz around the time Dylan was born.

When Dylan accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in 1991, his speech included this inscrutable passage:

"…You know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you, and if that happens, G-d will always believe in your ability to mend your ways."

Those familiar with the traditional practice of reciting Psalm 27 every day for the month leading up to and the weeks following the High Holidays recognized these lines as a loose approximation of the psalm. Dylan apparently read them in the Metsudah Siddur—a modern prayerbook with English translation favored by baalei teshuvot, or returnees to Judaism—which includes a rabbinical commentary that elaborates, "Even if I were so depraved that my own mother and father would abandon me to my own devices, G-d would still gather me up and believe in my ability to mend my ways."

Dylan has apparently continued to find inspiration in scripture in recent years. In "Not Dark Yet" on his much hailed comeback album of the late 90s, Time Out of Mind, Dylan sings: "I was born here and I’ll die here against my will," paraphrasing Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers, from the Mishnah) 4:29: "Against your will you were born, against your will you die." And that album’s single, "Love Sick," borrows its unusual central complaint from King Solomon’s love poetry as expressed in the Song of Songs 2:7: "\[Bereft of your presence\], I am sick with love" or, to put it more poetically, as does Dylan, "I’m love-sick."

Most recently, Dylan was spotted at Yom Kippur services this past September at Congregation Adath Israel, an Orthodox synagogue in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is said to have received the third aliyah to the Torah, and to have returned in the evening for the concluding Neilah service, whose central imagery is of a penitent standing at a gate or doorway entreating G-d’s mercy to be written into the Book of Life, much as Dylan sang about in his 1997 song, "Tryin’ to Get to Heaven":

Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore I’ve been walking that lonesome valley Trying to get to heaven before they close the door.

The author of The Essential Klezmer: A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music (Algonquin Books, 2000) and the editor-in-chief of Berkshire Living magazine, Seth Rogovoy teaches a course on Bob Dylan at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. He lives in Great Barrington, Mass., with his wife and two children. He can be reached via e-mail at [seth@rogovoy.com](mailto:seth@rogovoy.com) or via his website at www.rogovoy.com.

---

*Seth Rogovoy is an author and cultural critic who publishes The Rogovoy Report and writes for The Forward.*
### Six degrees of Myla Goldberg
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/six-degrees-of-myla-goldberg/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:43.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

At last night's free [M. Ward](http://mwardmusic.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) show in Battery Park, we counted three yarmulkes and two sheitels. Of course, we also saw eighteen different pairs of vintage sunglasses and thirty-seven tattoos, but the point remains: something about Ward's gravelly voice and old-fashioned guitar seems to attract the frumsters. We don't think Ward is Jewish, although one might speculate about his drummer, Rachel Blumberg. It's not just her name that gives her Jewsrock credibility; up until this winter, Blumberg was the drummer in the [Decembrists,](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000BWVMJ/qid=1122047897/sr=8-3/ref=pd%5Fbbs%5Fsbs%5F3/102-6505076-7233769?v=glance&s=music&n=507846&ref=jewsrock.org) the band that gave the world its first (and as far as we know, only) pop song about bestselling Jewish author [Myla Goldberg](http://www.jbooks.com/nonfiction/index/NF%5FMogolov%5FGoldberg.htm?ref=jewsrock.org). We don't really think that accounts for the show's surprisingly high Orthodox presence, but in any case, we're glad to see people other than the usual hipsters getting their pre-Shabbot rock on.
### Snip me baby one more time
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/snip-me-baby-one-more-time/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:43.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

The Yada Blog knows exactly [why](http://www.atlantajewish.com/theyadablog/2005/07/brits-bris.html?ref=jewsrock.org) Britney Spears plans to have a "special ceremony" at the Kabbalah Center seven days after the birth of her babies.
### Forever their girl?
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/forever-their-girl/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:44.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

The best part about American Idol’s audition episodes—aside, of course, from Ryan Seacrest’s witty banter—is the dancing. People who can’t sing make us a little sad; people who can’t dance, on the other hand, are hilarious. Fox has taken this principle and run with it, giving us [So You Think You Can Dance](http://www.fox.com/dance/?ref=jewsrock.org)(which debuts tonight). Apparently, borrowing the auditions-to-performance winnowing structure from their old show wasn’t enough for the Idol producers, who are rumored to have conscripted one of the judges as well. And while the Yiddish Invasion would blog about Simon if we could, we all know exactly which former choreographer will be featured on the show: Sephardic sweetheart Paula Abdul. [E! Online](http://entertainment.tv.yahoo.com/entnews/eo/20050720/112188564000.html?ref=jewsrock.org) reports whispers that Paula’s summer gig is meant to act as a gentle transition off of American Idol, but we doubt it—between the People Magazine cover, the Saturday Night Live walk-on, and the twin sex/drugs scandals, she’s a publicist’s dream.
### Super Session Man
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/super-session-man/
Last updated: 2005-08-07T00:00:00.000Z
*By Bob Cook*

"Paul Stanley once told me that if I didn’t have any chutzpah, I wouldn’t have played on that session," says Al Kooper, rock 'n’ roll’s greatest utility man. If you don’t already know, Stanley (nee Stanley Eisen) is Kiss’ lead singer and like Kooper, a Jew raised in Queens; chutzpah

Photo courtesy Anthony Sanchez

is a Yiddish word connoting brazenness; and "that session" was Kooper’s big break. He bluffed his way into a Bob Dylan recording in 1965 and provided the signature, two-fingered riff that answered Dylan’s musical question: "How does it feel?"

Kooper’s chutzpah was not a one-time event, and playing the "Like A Rollin’ Stone" session was not the only piece of work that made him a rock 'n’ roll legend. More than a session man, more than a behind-the-scenes A&R guy, more than a producer, his presence, musical and otherwise, on scads of great records in the 1960s and 1970s cemented his place as one of rock 'n’ roll’s legendary figures, even if most rock 'n’ roll fans couldn’t tell you what he looks like.

Kooper says Stanley, and anybody else who wants to use the term "chutzpah" to categorize his career, has a point—especially with the Dylan session. He was watching, guitar in hand, hoping to hustle his way in, though figuring it wouldn’t be on guitar. (Kooper, in many interviews, has recalled being intimidated by the spectacular guitar player already there—that was his introduction to Mike Bloomfield.) Eventually, he bluffed his way onto the organ, though he had never played it in a recording session before. "At the time I was 21, and I was extremely ambitious, and I was a New York kid, so I was tough," Kooper says. Kooper improvised his riff, which Dylan liked so much he put on top of the mix.

However, Kooper eschews the term "chutzpah" and simply says he’s following his "muse"—like when he followed his muse out of the Blues Project and into Blood, Sweat & Tears, when his Blues Project brethren objected to him wanting to include horns. "It was the songs saying, 'You have to record me with horns,’" Kooper recalls.

He began following that muse at an early age. Born in 1944 as Alan Peter Kuperschmidt (his father changed the family name shortly after Kooper was born), at age six Kooper sat down at a friend’s piano and plinked out Patti Page’s "Tennessee Waltz," having never had a music lesson. (Kooper is a mostly self-taught multi-instrumentalist.) Around age 10, Kooper tried and failed to get his rabbi to let him play at the Conservative synagogue Kooper’s parents helped found. But he used the synagogue to his advantage a few years later. When he couldn’t find a way to get to Alan Freed’s Rock 'n’ Roll Spectacular at Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater, he organized a bus trip from the synagogue’s front door for the kids in his temple.

At the age of 12, two musical events put Kooper’s muse on overdrive. First, he discovered Elvis. Second, he discovered black gospel music. Kooper remembers that, to avoid any untoward incidents, his friends at a local black church took him in early and "put me in a projection booth with the superintendent."

"The first time I went to a black Baptist service, I thought, 'This is the way it should be,’ Kooper says. "People sing much better in gospel music because they’re so much more inspired. Having been to many churches to hear music, I can say the Jewish religion had the worst music. You certainly didn’t go to hear the cantor."

By this time, Kooper was an avid guitar player, and in 1958 he joined the revolving cast of the Royal Teens, still basking in the success of their novelty hit "Short Shorts," for his first big-time professional gig. Not that his parents were aware or supportive—Kooper says they knew he was into music, but they didn’t know how far, literally, it was taking him. "I’d tell them I was going to my friend Danny’s house for the weekend, but then I’d be in Boston, playing on Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars," Kooper says.

But Kooper continued his formal education, graduating from high school and leaving Queens for the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. He left Bridgeport after a year. "My teachers were passionless," he says. "My real college was 1650 Broadway."

1650 Broadway often gets misidentified as the Brill Building—which was actually down the street at 1619 Broadway. Many of the great (and Jewish) songwriters and musicians identified with late 1950s and early 1960s rock 'n’ roll were housed at 1650—Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weill, Kooper’s Queens compadres Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Kooper soaked up everything he could, learning about playing, songwriting, arranging, producing, engineering—and establishing himself as an ace session guitar player on what he calls "scads of obscure recordings."

"I was really lucky to be involved in the midtown music scene," he says. The concentration of talent "was amazing. You have to look in awe at that sort of thing." That most of the talent was Jewish was significant, Kooper says, but no one made a big deal out of it at the time. "I think we tucked in our everyday religion," he says. "Certainly, I can’t imagine anybody went to temple on Saturday."

Kooper’s big payoff came at the end of his time in the building, when Jerry Lewis’ son, Gary, and his band the Playboys took a song he co-wrote, "This Diamond Ring," to number one in 1964\. The song, with lyrics co-written by Bob Brass and Irwin Levine, the latter of whom would go on to write Tony Orlando and Dawn’s biggest hits, opened even more doors to Kooper’s music career. And, as Kooper says, it also convinced his skeptical parents that there was such a thing as a music career.

That career led to more frequent playing and arranging of sessions—which would later lead him to the doorsteps of Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and the Rolling Stones, all at their peak. But he was hardly the watch-the-clock, soulless type denigrated by the Kinks in their 1966 song "Session Man." (Sample lyric: "He’s not paid to think/just play.") Certainly, a sign of Kooper’s impact is that his organ part on "Like a Rolling Stone" is likely rock 'n’ roll’s most recognizable contribution by a session player, whose virtue is practiced anonymity, not raw passion. Kooper toured with Dylan as well, playing organ at his infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival "going electric" show. But Kooper had ambitions for his own music, and was too headstrong to merely let his muse linger in the service of someone else. So in 1965, on the heels of his initial Dylan success, Kooper joined up with the Blues Project, a half-minyan’s worth of New York-bred young Jewish men who shared a common heritage and uncommon tastes in music. They bred their separate influences in folk, jazz, blues and gospel music into one studio and two live albums that stand as the 1960’s best interpretations and extrapolations of the blues artists most white artists were imitating at the time.

Alas, as generally happened with Kooper’s group work, it didn’t sell well, and the band ended in acrimony. The Blues Project was collectively run, and the collective opinion was that Kooper’s plan to add horns to the psychedelic, jazzy sounds of the band was daft. So Kooper left, taking guitarist Steve Katz with him to form Blood, Sweat & Tears—a band in which Kooper was supposed to have the final word.

The band’s first record, Child is Father to the Man, released in 1968, may be the best and purest distillation of Kooper’s chutzpah ever released. About half Kooper originals and half covers of songs by artists such as Tim Buckley, Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, Kooper’s arrangements are seamless. And his originals are searing, bluesy love songs like "I Can’t Quit Her."

Like the Blues Project, it wasn’t to last. The album stiffed, and Columbia Records pressured Kooper into trying to make the band sound more commercial—including replacing himself as lead singer. Kooper bowed out to become an A&R man for Columbia (that’s how he dug the Zombies out of obscurity) though he stuck around with the band long enough to arrange one of their biggest hits, "You’ve Made Me So Very Happy."

It was at this time that Kooper also started recording his Super Session album, which, while making the Top Ten, didn’t make him an arena rock star in his own right. Not that Kooper was despondent. He was too busy following his muse, now doing so from city to city, such as his early 1970s move to Atlanta because "I liked the music I was hearing from there." Kooper discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd in one of his favorite hangouts, and formed his own label to get them going. (That label, Sounds of the South, hooked up with MCA, which was good for Lynyrd Skynyrd: Not only did it provide major-label exposure, but it also prevented them from releasing a song with the unwieldy title "Workin’ for Sounds of the South.") Kooper later took up more A&R work, this time with Polygram, where he signed Richard Thompson to his first major label deal.

Kooper, by his own description, "retired" from the music business from 1989 to 1997, though the business didn’t retire from him. Kooper’s songs and arrangements were discovered by the burgeoning rap scene, having been sampled by the likes of the Beastie Boys, Jay-Z and Pharcyde, as well as scores of lesser-known rappers. Kooper also took his muse in literary direction, with his own autobiography, 1977’s Backstage Passes—re-released with additional material in 1998 as Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards—and as a backing member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band of music-loving authors that included Dave Barry and Stephen King. He also was a frequent contributor to high-end music equipment magazines such as EQ.

In 2001, Kooper lost two-thirds of his eyesight due to a rare condition called aschemic optical neuropathy. It’s cramped his style a bit. He had to quit a teaching position at the Berklee School of Music—though he still participates in lecturing, fund-raising, and charity work for the school. Touring also has become more problematic: Kooper now plays primarily by touch, and last year he canceled a short Canadian tour when, he says, a promoter failed to rent the exact equipment he needs. "I wasn’t asking for green M&Ms," he says. "Just a normal issue Hammond B3 organ!"

He now spends most of his time at home, in Somerville, Mass., with his third wife. Kooper has one child, Brian, born in 1966 to his first wife. The boy who dreaded becoming a music teacher and later became one secretly hoped, as his parents not-so-secretly did, that his son wouldn’t go into the music business.

"I didn’t discourage or encourage him," says Kooper, "but I prayed to God he wouldn’t go into music." Brian actually became a chef and what Kooper calls a "bass owner." He regrets that Brian was never bar mitzvah'd. "My sense of humor, my cooking skills, my whole approach to life is based on being Jewish," he says. "The one thing in which I’m so un-Jewish is that I got swindled my whole life. If I had got every dollar I was supposed to get, I’d be living more comfortably. But if I hadn’t written so many songs, I’d be tending bar. My songs support me now, they look after me in my old age."

Kooper distilled the journey of his faith and his music career in his 2001 song "Living in My Own Religion," from his album Rare & Well Done. In it, Kooper explains passionately to God why he had to follow his muse, and why his chutzpah may well have been a gift from the Lord:

I wish that I could put into words How much you mean to me And I wish that I could tell you How much you have helped me To live my life so unselfishly, Lord My parents raised me up To always live inside your shadow But I must admit there were times Some times when I would stray But now I’m living in my own religion And it’s there that I shall always stay

When I was just a boy I would hear the songs of praise The Swan Silvertones & The Harmonizing Four And though these were not my people Somehow I felt captured in your gaze And from that moment on - I never thought in terms like that Anymore Ya see, no man’s color could corrupt my vision Once I was bathed in the Glory of Your Love But I seek no House of Worship to praise your name Yes I’m living in my own religion But I worship you Lord just the same

My friends may call me up on Sunday morning saying: "Come along with us to church & we will pray..." No no you see I’m already in my House of Worship And it is there I believe I’ll always stay

So take me as I am With my love of God intact And I will serve you Lord Til I’ve sung my last song I will praise you every morning And I will thank you God each night And though some may scorn me We both know just where I belong My house will always be my church You know my temple is my mind And I will worship You while others misunderstand Cause I’m living in my own religion That’s what I’m doin’ now I’m living in my own religion But I’ll always know we’re hand in hand.

(©2001 RekoopedMusic-BMI. All rights reserved. Words & Music by Al Kooper)

---

*Bob Cook is a sports and culture writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, NBC News, and the Chicago Reader.*
### CBGB might not close, but the memorials have already begun
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/cbgb-might-not-close-but-the-memorials-have-already-begun/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:44.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

New York music fans aren't sure what to make of the news that legendary rock club CBGB might have to close when their lease expires in August. On the one hand, it'll be the end of an era: the club, owned by MOT Hilly Kristal, is where American punk rock was born. On the other hand, that was nearly three decades ago, and CBGB's cultural relevancy has waned in recent years, even as their t-shirt sales have increased. The new book [CBGB and OMFUG: Thirty Years from the Home of Underground Rock](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0810957868/qid=1121695683/sr=1-1/ref=sr%5F1%5F1/102-6505076-7233769?v=glance&s=books&ref=jewsrock.org), which came out July 1, features pictures of bands like Blondie, the Ramones, and the Talking Heads, but ends, tellingly, with two-year-old photos of the Libertines—not exactly cutting-edge. Still, nothing beats the gritty pictures of the club in its prime. Taken by punk photographers like Roberta Bayley and David Godlis (whose work is also featured in our photo gallery), they document Challah Famers the Ramones, Blondie and Television. If you're in the NYC area, you can see these pictures up close and personal—the Municipal Art Society of New York's [CBGB exhibit](http://www.mas.org/Events/exhibits.cfm?ref=jewsrock.org) starts today.
### Carly Simon anticipates Forte's release
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/carly-simon-anticipates-fortes-release/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:44.000Z
*by Kara Baskin*

Carly Simon has been linked with many high-profile men over the years: Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, James Taylor...and now John Forte. Forte was an up-and-coming young musician (he can be heard singing alongside Wyclef Jean on the hit remake "Stayin' Alive") when his career was derailed by a drug-trafficking charge in July 2000\. Forte insists that he was [tricked](http://www.carlysimon.com/forte/forte.shtml?ref=jewsrock.org) into transporting a package containing narcotics. Rejecting a plea bargain and maintaining his innocence, Forte was convicted. The first-time offender was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison. He's now incarcerated in Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he has formed a jazz band with fellow inmates.

It's a long way from Fort Dix to Simon's manse on Martha's Vineyard, but Forte is a close friend of Simon's son Ben Taylor. Simon befriended Forte as well, and is his fiercest--and most powerful--advocate. The singer, who suffers from intense stage fright, has made it her mission to get Forte a new trial. This article in the [Boston Globe](http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2005/07/13/the%5Fconvict%5Fand%5Fthe%5Fsinger/?ref=jewsrock.org) offers an in-depth chronicle of the unlikely friendship between the dreadlocked, Brooklyn-bred Forte and the nice Jewish publishing heiress from Manhattan.
### Boots and bagels
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/boots-and-bagels/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:45.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

Most of the Jewish spins on a genre of music are made by people in love with the kind of music they're appropriating. [Matisyahu](http://www.hasidicreggae.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) sincerely respects reggae, for example, and the [Ju Tang Clan](http://www.jutangclan.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) seem to genuinely care about hip-hop. [Jewdriver](http://www.jewdriver.com/?ref=jewsrock.org), though, are a bit different. Since 1994, Ian Stuartstein and Max Bagels have been making skinhead punk for Jews. Musically, they sound exactly like the highly racist band Screwdriver. Lyrically, they sound like...well, given the number of Jewish-culture gags, a lot like this website, actually. The band even hands out bagels at their shows in case the audience wants something to throw at them. The whole thing is infuriating to skinheads—which is, of course, exactly the point.
### Subterranean Homeland Blues
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/subterranean-homeland-blues/
Last updated: 2005-07-29T00:00:00.000Z
*By Jeffrey Goldberg*

Do you remember the first time you felt Jewish anger? Not the inchoate, pre-adolescent, Patrick-Malone-called-me-a-kike-on-the-playground-rage—which is anger, certainly, but it is anger directed against some dipshit-junior-varsity pogromist with bad teeth who you knew, even then you knew, would grow up to drive a Doritos delivery truck—but real blood-in-the-face anger, when someone you assumed to be intelligent surprised you by saying something just crushingly ignorant about the tribe?

The first time I felt such anger, I remember, was in June, of 1981\. The cause of this anger was a New York Times editorial about the Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak.

You’re probably wondering what Osirak has to do with rock and roll. Quite a bit, actually. Give me a minute, and you’ll see.

I was, like most Jews, immoderately happy to learn that Israel had set back Saddam Hussein’s evil ambitions. It was the same sort of happiness and relief people older than I am felt when Israeli commandos flew under cover of night to Uganda in order to rescue Jews from certain death.

The Osirak attack seemed wise, given Saddam Hussein’s unclothed desire to transform himself into a modern-day Saladin. To do so, he was readying himself to take the dire step demanded of Arab leaders by the camp of Muslim rejectionists—obliterating Israel from the map. And the strike itself was elegant, balletic, pinpoint; the target was destroyed, and the Israeli planes returned safely home.

Now, I will admit to contradictory feelings about Jewish power: I was, in my teenage years, already shading left. I was a member of a socialist Zionist youth movement, and to my comrades and me, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, while justifiable in 1967, seemed—to the extent that anyone thought about such things in the innocent days before the first Palestinian Intifada—like a terrible and arrogant and self-damaging idea fourteen years later. On the other hand, Osirak was not about territorial expansion, but territorial protection. F-16s—Jewish F-16s flown by Jewish pilots—destroyed a factory whose raison d’etre was mass Jewish death. If we had had a Jewish Air Force in the time of Auschwitz, we would not have had Auschwitz.

So my feelings about the Osirak attack were mostly uncomplicated ones, of happiness and pride and relief. But then I read the Times—my newspaper. In the liberal Jewish homes of the tri-State area, the New York Times was—and is—not merely a daily source of news, but a kind of religion unto itself, and its catechism could be found in the columns of the editorial page. On June 9, the Times printed an editorial under the headline "Israel’s Illusion."

"Israel's sneak attack on a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad was an

act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression," the editorial read. "Even assuming that Iraq was hellbent to divert enriched uranium for the manufacture of nuclear weapons, it would have been working toward a capacity that Israel itself acquired long ago. Contrary to its official assertion, therefore, Israel was not in \`mortal danger’ of being outgunned."

My memories of events twenty-years ago—and ten minutes ago—are usually indistinct, but about this editorial I remember vividly what I felt, which was betrayal. The Times was owned by Jews and run by Jews. The editorial page was run by a man, the masthead said, named Max Frankel, which was most certainly not an Irish name.

How could they? Don’t they have any sense? Who were they trying to impress?

I had moments of doubt—What if Israel was actually in the wrong? After all, the prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, was not my sort of prime minister—he was Herut, a revisionist, a Jabotinskyite, a mortal enemy of my Zionist and socialist youth movement.

I erred on the side of Israel, of course; I could do no other thing. But being on Israel’s side was sometimes a discomfiting place to be.

And then along came Dylan. Specifically, Jokerman, and even more specifically, the best bad song on Jokerman, or on any other Dylan album: "Neighborhood Bully."

Many people, of course, are rescued by Dylan. It just never occurred to me that I would be one of them, especially not in 1983: In 1983, Dylan, as far as I knew, was still a meshumad, who abandoned his people for—what, exactly?—for the chimera of Christian peace? The man had become, in the words of Larry Yudelson, the Dylanologist, "the most famous Jewish apostate in American history." It was a terrible day when that bit of news broke: The sadness I felt when I heard that Dylan had joined the other team was matched only by the relief that flooded me when I learned that Cat Stevens’ real name was not, as I had been led to believe, Stephen Katz—making the emergence of Yusuf Islam on the world scene a nettlesome thing, but not a catastrophe for my too-often-vexed tribe.

So there I was, staring at the cover of "Infidels"—is Dylan really standing at the Western Wall?—and "Neighborhood Bully" began to play on the record player. This, to my shock and surprise, is what I heard:

"Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized, Old women condemned him, said he should apologize. Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad. The bombs were meant for him, He was supposed to feel bad. He’s the neighborhood bully."

Did Bob Dylan just sing what I thought he sung?

"Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace, They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease Now they wouldn’t hurt a fly. To hurt one they would weep. They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep. He’s the neighborhood bully."

He did, didn’t he?

I listened to it twenty times. It took my breath away. Dylan wasn’t apologizing; he wasn’t asking forgiveness for his tribe, or even for his tribal feeling. He certainly wasn’t cringing, and he wasn’t wringing his hands in the American Jewish style. He was singing like a shtarker. Dylan was a shtarker! A two-fisted Jew!

This was a voice of unmediated resentment, and the voice of pride—pride in the outsized achievements of our pitifully small tribe, and pride in our stubborn refusal to agree to our own extinction.

"Neighborhood Bully" was written with acid, and there’s not much wit in acid. But that is the point: "Neighborhood Bully" wasn’t meant to be clever or detached. Dylan was not committing an act of poetry. "It’s just him screaming," Bob Levinson, a leading student of Dylan—he teaches a course on Dylan’s lyrics at the New School University—told me. "But it’s the scream that was in his mind at the time. That’s how Jews were feeling. It was a \`fuck you’ song."

The critics, Levinson said, hated it. "Everybody felt it was preachy and had no subtlety, completely black and white. They said it’s a non-Dylan song. But it is a Dylan song. That’s the beauty of it. You have to deal with it as a Dylan song." In other words, you have to deal with Dylan as a Jewand not as an ordinary, temporizing, self-conscious Jew—but a Jew with dangerous feelings.

"Neighborhood Bully" was a gift, a strange gift, from a Jewish prophet, and it was sui generis.

Until 1989, when it happened again. Another unapologetically defiant song issued forth from another stand-up Semitic rock star.

Lou Reed’s "New York" is a frenetic and raw exploration of moral and physical decay in Reed’s beloved city. One track, though, is—superficially, at least—entirely off-theme. It is called "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim." Its targets are different than those of "Neighborhood Bully", but it is about the same phenomenon: Betrayal, and a specific form of betrayal: Betrayal of the Jews by people who should know better.

"Good evening, Mr. Waldheim And Pontiff, how are you? You have so much in common In the things you do And here comes Jesse Jackson He talks of common ground Does that common ground include me? Or it is just a sound A sound that shakes Oh, Jesse, you must watch the sounds you make.

Waldheim, it will be remembered, was a secretary-general of the United Nations who passed World War II in a Nazi uniform. The Pope earned Reed’s scorn for shaking Waldheim’s hand. But Reed seemed most offended by Jesse Jackson, whose crimes against the Jews were mainly associational and epithetical—his disconcerting relationship with the Nation of Islam, his characterization of New York as "Hymietown." But his was an act of betrayal, and betrayal stings:

"If I ran for President And once was a member of the Klan Wouldn’t you call me on it The way I call you on Farrakhan?"

"Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim," like "Neighborhood Bully," is not a great song. But it is brave, and original: Reed finally exposed to the world his tribal heart. In a music culture that celebrates gauzy universality, and scorns ethnic particularism (except when given voice by a Chuck D or a James Brown), "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim" was a revolutionary act.

And it was a kind of rebuke to the norms of American Judaism, as well. Be polite, we’re told. Write a letter to the editor. Sign a petition. Give to the UJA, the ADL, Hadassah.

But Bob Dylan and Lou Reed are instructing us differently. We can sneer as well, and threaten, and mock, and call things by their names.

Like most everyone—certainly like most everyone visiting this website—I looked to rock and roll as a form of personal liberation. But I came to see that, thanks to two of rock’s greatest practitioners, it could be a form of Jewish liberation as well.

---

*Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and a co-founder of JewsRock.org.*
### Pink Floyd would reunite for peace; Courtney Love still falling apart
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/pink-floyd-would-reunite-for-peace-courtney-love-still-falli/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:45.000Z
*by Kara Baskin*

[Ynet](http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3107266,00.html?ref=jewsrock.org) reports that Pink Floyd would consider reuniting for an Israeli-Palestinian peace concert. Drummer Nick Mason expressed enthusiasm for such an idea, saying that he regretted that the band had never been able to tour Israel in the past. Mason says the band would regroup for any "important cause." Pink Floyd most recently reunited for Live 8 after a 20-year gap.

Courtney Love, on the other hand, needs to be reunited with a chaperone or a sedative as soon as possible. [Page Six](http://www.nypost.com/gossip/pagesix%5Fu.htm?ref=jewsrock.org) gleefully chronicles her 41st birthday exploits in Miami last weekend, which include dancing on tables at hotspot Prive; inexplicably crawling around on all fours at Casa Tua; and demanding that her table be changed a mere five times at Mansion. She capped off the weekend by being photographed, up-skirt and sans underwear, by a voyeuristic tourist.
### The unique and inimitable Mollycoddles band
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-unique-and-inimitable-mollycoddles-band/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:46.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

Israel’s first rockabilly band, the Mollycoddles, have set up their [website](http://www.rockabilly.co.il/mollycoddles/?ref=jewsrock.org) to look like the dashboard of an old-time jalopy. They promise their fans “happy pastime, good humor and immediate weight loss,” and they sing through thick Hebrew accents. It’s generally pretty cute, although the level of authenticity becomes a little weird on their Confederate-flag-festooned mock [drivers’ licenses](http://www.rockabilly.co.il/mollycoddles/?ref=jewsrock.org). It makes me want to write a Cultural Studies thesis interrogating the expression of American political issues in international rock and roll—but then again, really, what doesn’t?

Equally fascinating is [www.hillybilly.ru](http://www.hillbilly.ru/static%5Fhtml/index%5Feng.html?lang=english&ref=jewsrock.org), the website of the Russian (though not Jewish) band the Neva River Rockets. Check out their [list](http://www.hillbilly.ru/static%5Fhtml/yakety%5Fyak/linx%5Feng.html?ref=jewsrock.org#2) of rockabilly bands worldwide.
### Yidcore even owns the special extended DVD version of Beaches
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/yidcore-even-owns-the-special-extended-dvd-version-of-beache/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:46.000Z
*by Arye Dworken*

If Jewish metal wasn't enough for you, we bring you the finest...okay, the not-so-finest in Jewish punk. [Yidcore](http://www.yidcore.com/?ref=jewsrock.org), a group of four Australian upstarts, who like the Makkabees cover Jewish songs, have just released two new CD's entitled Fiddlin' on the Roof and Eighth Day Slice which feature, among other songs, a hyped-up, frantic version of Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings." If there was something missing from your life...well, that was probably it. Lest you question Yidcore's devotion to Ms. Midler and her art, you can hunt down their cover of "From a Distance" as well.  
Their newly launched website, [Yidcore.com](http://www.yidcore.com/?ref=jewsrock.org), is a self-proclaimed "virtual Anatekva" with a heavy Fiddler on the Roof theme complete with pictures of the band dressed as the respective characters of the cast. After looking at the photos, it's clear that [Harvey Fierstein](http://www.fiddleronbroadway.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) need not worry about his career.  
If you're wondering after nearly six albums whether Yidcore's shtick has gotten tired yet, consider that their version of "Wind Beneath My Wings has spent three consecutive weeks in the Top 10 on Australia's largest radio station, [Triple J](http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/?ref=jewsrock.org). Oh, those kooky Aussies with their koalas and stuff!
### Stage Names of Jewish Rockers
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/stage-names-of-jewish-rockers/
Last updated: 2005-07-20T00:00:00.000Z
*By Izzy Grinspan*

Perry Bernstein: Perry Farrell (Jane’s Addiction/Porno for Pyros)

Harold Belsky: Hal Blaine (session drummer for the Beach Boys)

David Blatt: Jay Black (Jay and the Americans)

Richard Blum: Handsome Dick Manitoba (Dictators)

Michael Bolotin: Michael Bolton

Leonard Borisoff: Len Barry

Marty Buchwald: Marty Balin (Jefferson Airplane/Starship)

Ellen Cohen: Mama Cass Elliot

Lee Drucker: Lee Rocker (Stray Cats)

Stanley Eisen: Paul Stanley (KISS)

Don Fagenson: Don Was (Was/Not Was)

Marc Feld: Marc Bolan (T-Rex)

John French-Segall: Jay Jay French (Twisted Sister)

Ross Friedman: Ross the Boss (Dictators)

Harvey Goldstein: Harvey Brooks (session musician, played on Bitches Brew)

Kenny Gorelick: Kenny G

Susan Gottleib: Susan Phranc

Peter Greenbaum: Peter Baum (Fleetwood Mac)

Chris Gross: Chris Barron (Spin Doctors)

Love Michelle Harrison: Courtney Love

Belo Horizonte: Igor Cavalera (Sepultra)

Jeffrey Hyman: Joey Ramone (Ramones)

Herbert Khaury: Tiny Tim

Concetta Kirshner: Princess Superstar

Carole Klein: Carole King

Annette Kleinbard: Carol Connors (the Teddy Bears)

Phoebe Laub: Phoebe Snow

Lee Oskar Levitin: Lee Oskar (War)

Steven Barry Lipkin: Steve Barri (songwriter)

Michael Lookofsky: Michael Brown (the Left Banke)

Manfred Lubowitz: Manfred Mann

Lester Meyers: Richard Hell (Richard Hell and the Voidoids)

Steve Mizrahi: Sylvain Sylvain

Alecia Moore: Pink

Michael Pasternak: Emperor Rosko

Barry Pincus: Barry Manilow

Lou Rabinowitz: Lou Reed

David Bryan Rashbaum: David Bryan (Bon Jovi)

Robert Rifkin: Bobby Z (Prince)

Scott Rosenfeld: Scott Ian (Anthrax)

Richard Salkowitz: Magic Dick (J. Geils Band)

Neil Seduka: Neil Sedaka

Buddy Blue Seigal: Buddy Blue Seigal (Beat Farmers)

Elliott Steinberg: Elliott Easton (the Cars)

Kevin Wasserman: Noodles (Offspring)

Gary Lee Weinrib: Geddy Lee (Rush)

Chaim Witz: Gene Simmons (KISS)

Randy Wolfe: Randy California (Spirit)

Leslie Wonderman: Taylor Dayne

Robert Zimmerman: Bob Dylan

---

*Izzy Grinspan is a digital editor at Harper’s Bazaar and previously edited at The Cut.*
### I bet you didn't realize how badly you've missed INXS.
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/i-bet-you-didnt-realize-how-badly-youve-missed-inxs/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:46.000Z
*by Arye Dworken*

Let us all take a moment of silence for Michael Hutchence, the deceased singer of INXS. Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's replace him!  
Starting Monday, July 11th at 9PM, CBS will join the ranks of reputable programming and present to us Rock Star: INXS, a reality show that seeks out a new frontman for the once-popular 80's new-wave band INXS. An honor or a punishment? We're still not sure.  
In any event, [Heeb Magazine](http://www.heebmagazine.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) reports that one of the contestants is Daphna Dove, the daughter of Germany's famed opera singer [Elisa Gabbai](http://www.schulla.com/covergalerie/DATEN/E/ELISA%20GABBAI/Elisa%20Gabbai.htm?ref=jewsrock.org) and some random guy who helped discover the Scorpions. Daphna, we salute your dad for "Wind of Change." [The Rock Star contestant](http://rockstar.msn.com/rockers/daphna?ref=jewsrock.org), who is a legal secretary in Los Angeles, has been gaining a serious following in her local music scene and perhaps believes in too much [eye shadow](http://realitytv.about.com/od/rockstarinxs/ss/RockStarLadies%5F2.htm?ref=jewsrock.org). Seems like such a shame to throw away a nice job at a law firm for a life spent covering "Never Tear Us Apart."
### Ju metal
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/ju-metal/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:47.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

It should be apparent by now that some of us (OK, one of us) is slightly obsessed with Jewish metal. It just makes so much sense that Jews would take to heavy metal, given the hair and the ritual and the intensity. Listen, if you will, to [the Makkabees](http://www.makkabees.com/listen.htm?ref=jewsrock.org), described as “if Rammstein and the Darkness had a baby” by some uncredited genius on their [website.](http://www.makkabees.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) Or check out [Metal Jew](http://kkahnharris.typepad.com/weblog/2005/07/smart%5Fchristian.html?ref=jewsrock.org), a blog by a “semi-ambivalent Jew, ambivalent Metaller.” (He can call himself ambivalent all he wants, but he's still taken our obsession to a new level). Metal Jew links to a CD by the Swedish band [Meshuggah](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0008GGOBA/keithkahnharr-21?ref=jewsrock.org), reminding us of their existence and raising the question: How come it took a group of Scandinavian non-Jews to realize the enormous metal potential of everyone’s favorite Yiddish word?

If this isn’t enough Jewish metal for you, check out Steve Almond’s [essay](http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=words.view&wordid=89B3A0FA-B2E6-4EB8-B94850B0574C301A) in our Shul of Rock. And then we promise we’ll find some other genre to obsess about.
### Diamond Dave's surprisingly coherent website
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/diamond-daves-surprisingly-coherent-website/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:47.000Z
*by Arye Dworken*

David Lee Roth, the definitively greatest frontman of all time has just launched a most rockalicious website. [DavidLeeRoth.com](http://www.davidleeroth.com/?ref=jewsrock.org), toted as the "Official Website of the Kung Fu Sage" offers a typically hilarious biography ("I've been places with my face you wouldn't go to with a pistol"), a tour section featuring upcoming dates and recent set lists (performances that feature over ten Van Halen songs. Take that, Hagar!), and a video section with clips of Diamond Dave performing "Jump" with the Boston Pops Symphony Orchestra--quite possibly one of the more surreal moments in rock history. And the cradle will be...orchestrated?
### Rock, Radio, Riot
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/rock-radio-riot/
Last updated: 2005-07-11T00:00:00.000Z
*By Marc Fisher*

Alan Freed wasn’t the first white guy to play race records on the radio. That honor belongs to a gent named Hunter Hancock, who knew not a thing about R&B when he started spinning the work of black artists in Los Angeles in 1948\. For years, "Ol’ H.H." was the subject of fevered whispering among southern Californians —is he white? Is he black? But Hancock was a genial, gentle sort on the air—so much so that his race almost didn’t matter.

Photo courtesy www.alanfreed.com

Alan Freed was nobody’s friendly radio cousin. By March 21, 1952, the night Freed turned into a real cultural threat, the deejay owned the night in Cleveland. He was the vanguard for the rebel deejays who would breach the color line, the radio renegades who lived the dream Norman Mailer described in his famous essay, "The White Negro," or what Jack Kerouac ached for in "On the Road" as he walked through a black part of town, "wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night."

Freed, the son of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant father and a Welsh Baptist mother, had spent most of his radio career as a classical music announcer. He had a typical program of sweet songs and light classics on WJW. Then, in the spring of 1951, Leo Mintz, owner of the Record Rendezvous, a music shop on the edge of Cleveland’s black ghetto, asked Freed to host a show Mintz was going to sponsor on WJW to feature the rhythm and blues numbers that were selling startlingly well at his store.

Freed was reluctant at first—the classics really were his passion. But Mintz was a good drinking buddy, both men enjoyed a few beers, and Mintz hooked the deejay on the new music’s energy. Freed agreed. He needed the work. Freed started off in July 1951 playing blues and up-tempo swing, mixing in some tunes with a heavier beat and racier lyrics. The evening show turned into the "Moondog House," a title taken from "Moondog Symphony," a tune by a blind New York City street performer that Freed adopted as his theme.

He started molding his patter to the new music, hooting "Howl it out, baby!" over the introductions, ringing a cowbell and keeping the beat by banging on a phone book on the studio table. Unlike Hancock, Freed sounded stereotypically black—he had a naturally gravelly voice and he started extending his vowels and dropping the final G’s from the ends of words. But if he mimicked the lingo of the black artists whose discs he was spinning, he was careful not to talk about them or about race in any way. Indeed, he never called the music he played rhythm and blues, instead using the term rock and roll—an old blues metaphor for sexual intercourse—as a euphemism.

Freed was no rocker, and what he knew of black culture could fit on a 45-rpm record label. But he and Mintz, two Jewish guys who were comfortable hanging in the ghetto, had a keen sense of how to slip through the membrane that separated the races. They knew that in the face of the new black music, the color line would not hold. (Just as Freed’s show went on the air, the owner of Memphis Recording Service, Sam Phillips, was pressing his talent search, telling friends, "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars." Not far away, Elvis Presley was listening to black music on WDIA, a white-owned station that was playing race records.)

Freed’s show quickly became a cult phenomenon, a magnet first for Cleveland’s young blacks, but soon enough for whites as well. WJW didn’t know quite what to make of its increasingly popular evening program, and Freed decided to take his act to Cleveland’s largest arena to show his bosses just how big this Moondog thing was becoming. Freed lined up some of the black acts he’d been playing on the radio and announced that he would be crowning a new King of the Moondoggers at a Coronation Ball.

Though Cleveland Arena held only 10,000 people, Freed sold more than 7,000 tickets in advance, then thousands more at the door. The throng, mostly black but with enough whites to attract the disapproval of the establishment, grew angry at the impossibility of getting inside. People pushed at the doors, police pulled back from their positions and the fans went wild—fights, knives, kids storming the stage. It took far too long to disperse the crowd. The concert was stopped, the evening a disaster.

Except, of course, that it was no such thing. Freed milked his audience for support, announcing on the air that the Coronation Ball debacle had left him in danger of losing his job. He needed his audience to let management know that they were "with the Moondog." Letters, calls, and telegrams bombarded the WJW studios, of course, and far from sacking Freed, management extended his hours.

In 1954, Freed moved to New York, stardom, and big money—$75,000 a year to spin discs on WINS. He renamed his show "Alan Freed’s Rock and Roll Party" and applied for a copyright for the term "rock and roll."

Once again, Freed took his show on the road. He would run onstage at Brooklyn’s Paramount theater, spin around to show off his glaringly plaid sports jacket, shout, "Go man go!" and introduce Fats Domino, Joe Turner, and other black bands to a crowd that was half black and half white.

Freed would never win the ratings numbers that Top 40 stations drew with far less controversial fare, but by 1957, he was syndicating his show to a handful of stations. The music he played, and the message those choices sent, would shape not only radio’s future but also that of the young people who were just emerging as a cultural force. While Top 40 stations tried to straddle two worlds by playing white artists’ cover versions of the most popular black tunes, Freed and deejays such as Hound Dog Lorenz in Chicago and Wolfman Jack (Bob Smith) from his mysterious platform somewhere on the other side of the Mexican border delivered the authentic stuff—the raw blues, the howls in the night.

But Freed fought hard to separate his show from the public’s increasing association of rock with evil and delinquency. Hollywood hired the deejay to star in a movie based on Bill Haley’s "Rock Around the Clock," and Freed spiced the script with sermonettes on how rock kept kids off the streets and occupied them with harmless fun. But when the flick hit theaters, the newspapers filled with reports of mini-wildings by kids hopped up by the beat, the freedom, and the disapproval of their elders.

Despite his PR efforts, Freed’s pleas on behalf of the innocence of the music clashed with his persona on the air. He was the first deejay who sounded like the music—he melded with the soul, the beat, the energy of the relatively anonymous R&B artists whose records he played. It was Freed’s name, not the artists’, that the public associated with rock and roll. Freed—and jocks who emulated him—made certain of that. Freed’s name was always posted in the biggest letters on the Paramount marquee; the dozen or so acts who appeared at his Rock and Roll Parties seemed mere cogs in his publicity machine.

So when Freed’s concerts turned sour—notably a 1958 show in Boston that ended with white boys surging onto the stage, Chuck Berry fleeing, fights in the arena and violence on the streets—it was the deejay who became fixed in the minds of many adults as an instigator of riotous behavior.

Freed’s on-air antics didn’t go as far as his successor in the evening shift at WINS, Murray "The K" Kaufman, who combined pseudo-black patter with his own code to call himself "Mee-euz-aray the Kee-euz-ay." Listeners to his "Swinging Soiree" could pop over to the local record shop to pick up a pamphlet that spelled out how to talk like The K (another Jewish deejay who breached the nation’s racial seams). But Freed was the sound of safe danger through the 50s—until the establishment made its last stand against rock and roll and rebellious youth in a congressional hearing room.

Payola—gifts and payments to deejays made in exchange for playing records—wasn’t illegal. Payola wasn’t new—in the heyday of sheet music, song-pluggers handed out cash to get barroom pianists to play their tunes. Payola didn’t pierce radio’s color line. What payola did was heighten the influence of deejays and expose songs and artists who might otherwise have disappeared into stations’ overflowing record bins. Even a classic such as Chuck Berry’s "Maybellene" needed payola grease to get it started: Leonard Chess of Chess Records offered Freed a songwriting credit on the tune and Freed played the song for two hours straight on his WINS show. "Maybellene" shot up to #1 on the charts and Freed raked in a share of the profits.

The payola scandal focused on payoffs and playlists, but the purging of rock radio was really a last attempt by the older generation to hold on what they knew, to their ideas of how parents and children should relate to one another, to their concept of race in America and their sense of respect and propriety. The House committee that went after payola in 1960 wanted the biggest fish of all, Dick Clark, whose "American Bandstand" TV show was the new music’s brightest showcase. But Clark got out in front of the committee, admitting all and shielding himself in the generosity of ABC, which promised a slew of policy corrections to protect their star. Freed was the next biggest catch, and he had no shield. He was arrested in connection with his receipt of more than $30,000 from five record companies. In 1962, he pleaded guilty to commercial bribery charges and received a suspended sentence. Unlike Clark, Freed refused to sign an affidavit saying that he had never taken money for playing records. And unlike Clark, Freed, who also worked for ABC, found himself without support. He was fired almost immediately after refusing to sign the affidavit, even though he insisted he had never played a record in exchange for money.

Rather, he said he took money after choosing on his own to play a tune. "If I’ve helped somebody, I’ll accept a nice gift, but I wouldn’t take a dime to plug a record," he said. It was a distinction no one wanted to hear. And in fact, Freed bragged to friends that he had received so much from record companies that he should name rooms in his house in their honor. Within two weeks of his refusal to sign, his house was seized by the Internal Revenue Service.

Many other deejays who fell during the payola probe managed to climb back up the ladder. "I came back and my audience was loyal and before long, I was on top again," said Hal Jackson, a black deejay in New York who for a time was reduced to cleaning offices after his payola arrest. "But Alan Freed was really destroyed. I visited him night after night and there was nothing left of him. He had made the careers of so many black performers, and the white establishment was really on him. They called him 'nigger lover’ and he just kept putting the Shirelles and Dion and all the others on the air. They destroyed that man, totally."

Freed drifted to stations in Los Angeles and Miami, but fell deeper into alcoholism and died at 43 in 1965, ruined.

---

*Marc Fisher is a veteran journalist and author who spent four decades at The Washington Post.*
### And on the Seventh Day, He did not rest because He could not miss Snoop Dogg
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/and-on-the-seventh-day-he-did-not-rest-because-he-could-not/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:47.000Z
*by Arye Dworken*

According the official website, [Live8live.com](http://www.live8live.com/?ref=jewsrock.org), Live 8 was the day that rocked the world. Taking place this Saturday last, the concert to end world poverty attracted 3 billion viewers, all who disappointed their respective fathers when they did not show up to shul that morning. Bob Geldof, who is rumored to be Jewish, organized the event with the help of Bono, lead singer of U2, and some unassuming corporate sponsors. The concerts, held in major cities like London, Paris, Berlin and, uh, Philadelphia, featured sets by U2, Coldplay, a reunited Pink Floyd, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Snoop Dogg, Brian Wilson, Jay-Z, and Roxy Music. It appears that Canada was the only seriously shafted location with performances from Motley Crue, Bryan Adams, and the Barenaked Ladies. Although, they should be thankful that they didn't get Good Charlotte on top of that (sorry, Tokyo). London's [Evening Standard](http://http//www.thisislondon.com/showbiz/articles/19692803?ref=jewsrock.org) reports some juicy backstage gossip at the London show. It turns out that Geldof named his three daughter Fifi, Peaches, and Pixie: a perfect example why parents should not take drugs whilst naming their children.
### Torah phish food
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/torah-phish-food/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:47.000Z
*by Kara Baskin*

[Jewcy](http://www.jewsweek.com/bin/en.jsp?enDispWho=Article%5El1763&enPage=BlankPage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enVersion=0&enZone=Stories&&ref=jewsrock.org) reports that Hassidic reggae artist Matisyahu (ne Matthew Miller) will tour with Phish's Trey Anastasio this summer. A sample of Matisyahu's lyrics: "Torah food for my brain let it rain til I drown, Thunder! Let the rain come down!" Catch them in a city near you: Boston, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, or Indianapolis.
### As if Swept Away weren't humiliating enough
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/as-if-swept-away-werent-humiliating-enough/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:48.000Z
*by Kara Baskin*

Jeannette Walls's [Scoop](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8133774/?ref=jewsrock.org) puts forth the disturbing but totally unsurprising news that Madonna has designed a special yarmulke for husband Guy Richie. He sports the yarmulke at Kabbalah meetings, and she plans to market one for the masses through the Kabbalah Centre. Ashton Kutcher has since gone into hiding.
### Riffed Off
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/riffed-off/
Last updated: 2005-07-02T00:00:00.000Z
*By Dave McKenna*

Photo courtesy Bernice Pearl.

Bernice Pearl thinks "Stairway to Heaven" is the "greatest rock and roll makeout song ever." She just wishes her son, Randy California, got some credit for crafting the melody that's soundtracked a gazillion smooches.

"Led Zeppelin lifted that from Randy," says Pearl from her home in Ventura, Ca.

"Stairway"? Stolen? Heaven forbid!

Pearl's not without some conflicts of interest on this matter, it must be pointed out. Her primary occupation these days comes in shoring up the legacy of her offspring, Randy California, the 1960s' guitar hero and founding member of Spirit who drowned in 1997.

And, well, she wouldn't be the first Jewish mother to suffer delusions of a son's grandeur.

But Pearl's not the only one convinced that Zeppelin's most famous riff was flat-out filched from "Taurus," a deep cut California wrote for Spirit's debut album.

"I heard Randy rehearse 'Taurus' a long time before it came out, and I didn't consider it to be one of Spirit's significant pieces at the time," says Barry "Dr. Demento" Hansen, who befriended California as a child and went on to become Spirit's first manager. "It was just another Spirit song until \['Stairway'\] came out. Led Zeppelin clearly heard Spirit's record."

California, nee Wolf, was just 16 in 1967, when he composed "Taurus" to honor a girlfriend born under that astrological sign.

The opening bars of the instrumental track are far more jarring to the average rock listener now than they were when California first put them to record. All because of what sure seems like a can't-be-coincidental similarity between California's guitar work and the transcendent kickoff of "Stairway." Keep in mind, Zeppelin released its opus in the fall of 1971—or more than three years after "Taurus" hit the bins.

Even without this bit of alleged musical thievery or his heroic death—he drowned while saving his son from the Pacific surf off a Hawaiian beach—California's life story is the stuff of screenplays. The product of a broken marriage, California spent his formative years hanging out with his guitar at the Ash Grove, a serious L.A. music club run by his uncle. The youngster exploited family connections to meet every master of the six-string—John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, and Lightning Hopkins among them—who gigged at the club.

"I have a clear memory of having to shoe Randy out of the dressing room whenever Lightning Hopkins was in town," says Hansen, who was the primary soundman at the Ash Grove in the early-1960s. "When he was very young, Randy wanted to learn from everybody who came to the club. But part of my job was to make sure Lightning would have time to get his gin before he went onstage."

When Randy was 15, his mother married jazz drummer Ed "Cass" Cassidy, who moved his new family across country to Long Island in 1966 for professional reasons. A momentous brush with greatness came during a day trip into New York that June, when he stopped by Manny's Music, a fixture on the row of guitar shops on 48th Street.

"Randy was in Manny's when he met a guitar player who introduced himself as Jimmy James," recalls Pearl. "This guy liked Randy and asked him to come down that night to play with him at a club with his band."

Randy accepted the offer, joining this Jimmy James fellow's band, called The Blue Flames, at the legendary Cafe Wha in Greenwich Village. James' quartet, which had a nightly gig at the Cafe, already employed one Randy, a Texan, on bass. To distinguish between his subordinates, the charismatic bandleader dubbed the young ax slinger from the West Coast "Randy California."

It was at Cafe Wha in the coming months that Jimmy James was discovered by Chas Chandler, the bass player for the Animals. Chandler coaxed his prot‚g‚ to leave NY for Europe to start a solo career as Jimi Hendrix (his real surname). At Hendrix's urging, Chandler rang up Pearl and asked if she'd allow her adolescent son to rock across the water.

"I told \[Chandler\]I'm not sending my kid off to some Greek Island," Pearl says.

Cassidy returned the family to L.A. at the end of the summer of 1966\. That's when Randy and some friends from the neighborhood (including Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes) formed a band and began a regular Monday night engagement back at the Ash Grove, playing mainly blues. Randy's stepfather, nearly 30 years his elder, drummed for what would soon be a quintet.

The combo was originally called Spirits Rebellious—a name California took from a Kahlil Gibran novel—then shortened merely to Spirit. Randy quickly ditched "Wolf" in favor of the stage name given to him in New York by the burgeoning myth now being billed as Hendrix. He brought more than a name back from the Big Apple, however: California wowed Southern California audiences with all the guitar tricks he'd learned from gigging at the Cafe Wha with Hendrix.

"Randy was the first guy on the West Coast to use feedback to sustain notes," recalls Hansen. "He started doing that, and jaws started dropping all over L.A."

Hansen was at that time the leaseholder on a group house that doubled as Spirit's rehearsal space. By default, he became the band's original manager and producer. In June 1967 he brought them into a local studio to record what would be Spirit's first demo. A tape of those sessions got to Lou Adler, a powerhouse manager and fledgling industry mogul who had a hand in launching the recording careers of Carole King and the Mamas and the Papas.

When Adler wanted to bring Spirit into his stable at Ode Records, Hansen politely stepped aside.

The blues the band favored at the Ash Grove gave way to a jazzy brand of psychedelia by the time Spirit released its eponymous debut.

Pearl says her son, who briefly went to Hebrew school, rarely dwelled on his Jewish roots: "Randy was interested in all cultures," she says. "He just happens to have a Jewish mother and father."

Yet he nevertheless threw a bone to his religious heritage by titling a song "Jewish," for Spirit's second LP, the 1969 release, "The Family That Plays Together." Pearl says that when Spirit recorded the tune, the band's gentile lead singer, Jay Ferguson, mangled the Yiddish phrases that open it. A Washington Post review of Spirit's January 1969 performance at the Alexandria (Va.) Roller Rink called "Jewish" a "stop-and-go tune with the obvious stamp of Jewish liturgical music."

Spirit's commercial high-points came with the singles "I Got a Line on You"(1969) and "Nature's Way" (1971), neither of which broke theTop 10\. But the band never overcame dubious management decisions—legend holds that Spirit declined an invitation to be a part of the Woodstock festival on the advice of Adler—and was done in by its failure to craft hit singles. By the time Zeppelin released "Stairway," Spirit was all but defunct.

California wasn't yet 20 years old when Spirit recorded its most critically hailed album, 1971's "The 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus." Spirit split after its release.

In the years following the breakup, Ferguson and Andes founded Jo Jo Gunne, a decidedly non-psychedelic hard rock combo. California tried to exploit his guitar hero reputation to kickstart a solo career, but found that promoters would only give him work if he let them use his old band's name. None of the faux Spirits gained any traction, and California's own spirit soon seemed broken. Plagued by poor mental health and bouts with substance abuse—cocaine and LSD became a big part of California's diet, say former bandmates—he began behaving erratically.

A low point came in London in the spring of 1973, after a van holding all the equipment he'd need for a planned tour of Europe was stolen. California, already regarded as damaged goods by those around him, jumped into the Thames River off the Chelsea Bridge. He survived the plunge with only minor injuries, but the leap furthered his reputation as a loose nut. That rep was etched in stone by the time California literally threw celebrity guest Neil Young off the stage during a Spirit reunion gig in 1976.

Having the biggest rock band on the planet use your riff as the foundation of the greatest rock and roll makeout song of all time seems enough to send any musician, particularly an unemployed guitarist, over the edge. But if the strong scent of "Taurus"that permeates "Stairway" was what put such a bustle in California's hedge row or in any way inspired the jump into the Thames, he never let on.

In 1996, writing in the liner notes of a CD reissue of Spirit's debut disc, California referenced that he was aware of the musical mimicry of his song by Led Zep. He also reminded fans that Zeppelin served as an opening act for Spirit during a U.S. tour in December 1968.

But, Pearl says, that was the extent of his fussing over the lick infringement.

"After `Stairway to Heaven' came out, Randy knew they took what he had written -- everybody talked about that," says Pearl. "But when people would ask Randy about it, he used to always say, 'Let it go.' There should have been at least one telephone call from Led Zeppelin, some sort of `Thank you.' Something. But it never came."

Nobody from the Led Zeppelin camp has ever commented publicly on the likenesses between their iconic tune and Spirit's relatively anonymous work.

But the libretto of the offending Led Zep tune contains what could be taken as a nod to California, as Robert Plant croons, "...And his spirit is crying for leaving." Forget leaving; by rights, all these years and millions of "Stairway" airplays later, California's spirit should be crying for royalties.

But, California, wherever his own spirit now dwells, should get pleasure knowing that kids to this day walk into Manny's Music and any other place six-strings are sold, pick a Stratocaster off the wall and take their first baby steps as guitarists by plucking a riff found on both Spirit's debut and Led Zeppelin IV. That enduring ritual inspired the "No Stairway!" sign that hangs in the music shop in the feature film, "Wayne's World."

If there's a rock and roll heaven, that warning should read "No Taurus!"

---

*Dave McKenna is a staff writer at Defector, and previously wrote for Deadspin and Washington City Paper.*
### Dave Mustaine, Jewish?
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/dave-mustaine-jewish/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:48.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

[Israel National Radio's](http://www.israelnationalradio.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) Ben Bresky reveals another link between heavy metal and the Holy Land: Dave Mustaine, founder of Megadeth, is Jewish on his mother's side. Backstage at the Metalist festival, Mustaine explained his Jewish rock status to Bresky:

"Although my Mom was Jewish, I didn't have any Jewish upbringing. I know a little bit about it. I'm a Christian. I've learned a lot about the history of the country. When I came here for my vacation, I got to see a lot of the country that, you know, goys just don't see."

He might not call himself a Jew, but we think his mastery of the word "goys" has to count for something. Welcome to the fold, Mustaine!
### Satchmo-lestation
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/satchmo-lestation/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:59.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

The reasons to be  
embarrassed that Kenny G is Jewish aren’t quite what you think they  
are. Forget the sentimental nature of his sax playing, which does  
a great job of making old people happy at weddings. Ignore the  
geeky waterfall of curls, a look that was actually very cute on my  
bunkmate Debbie Cohen back at Camp Timber Tops. No, what makes  
Kenny G bad for the Jews isn’t his obvious lack of cool—it’s his lack  
of shame. Of course, plenty of other musicians have fudged a  
little on their way to selling records, but none except Kenny G behaved  
so cravenly that veteran jazz guitarist Pat Metheny threatened to kick  
his ass.  
  
 That threat  
was prompted by G’s version of "What a Wonderful World." Yes,  
that "What a Wonderful World"—the one made popular by Louis  
Armstrong. First released in 1967, the song reached number one in  
the United Kingdom the following year. It resurfaced as a U.S. hit in the 80s when it made a memorable appearance on the soundtrack to *Good Morning, Vietnam*.   
  
  
 "What a Wonderful World" is a euphoric little  
number, a leisurely stroll through some very simple reasons to be  
happy. The lyrics, by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss, are so basic  
that they’re nearly clichés: "trees of green" and "skies of blue," the  
way "how do you do" means "I love you"—even the rhymes are  
simplistic. But when Satchmo sings them, in his unhurried,  
gravelly way, you know he means every word.  
  
 Kenny G apparently thought so too, which is why he appropriated the entire vocal track for his 1999 album *Classics in the Key of G*.   
On that record, his eleventh for Arista, the man born Kenny Gorelick  
treacled his way through such standards as "The Look of Love" and "Girl  
from Ipanema." The latter featured Bebel Gilberto, so "What a  
Wonderful World" wasn’t the only track for which Kenny G needed outside  
help—but Gilberto was consulted on the use of her voice. Armstrong had  
no choice, since he’d been dead for years. The version of "Wonderful  
World" on *Key of G* is basically the sound of a genius forced into a posthumous duet with a bozo.  
  
  
 Perhaps somebody should have explained to Kenny G  
that Satchmo got it right the first time, or that it’d be tasteless to  
splice a giant of the genre into the same tune as a hack. Nobody did.  
So the job of spluttering outrage fell to Pat Methany. And that guy can  
splutter.  
  
 Few feuds  
have ever been quite as mismatched as Metheny vs. G. Pat Metheny  
is a well-respected guitarist, the winner of 15 Grammies. He’s  
played with Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, and David Bowie. For  
years, jazz musicians had been grumbling about Kenny G: His music, they  
complained, was cloying and predictable, his melodies obvious and  
banal. Moreover, his total lack of improvisation caused some to  
wonder if what he did even counted as jazz. Going up against  
Metheny, he didn’t stand a chance.  
  
  
 The beat-down started, as so many of these things  
do, on a Polish television show for children. Explaining to the  
kids why some people don’t like jazz, Metheny cited Kenny G, adding, "I  
mean, there’s nothing more stupid than that. Let’s face it, that’s the  
dumbest music there could ever possibly be in the history of human  
beings."  
  
 He was just  
getting warmed up. After the video clip began circulating around the  
Internet, a fan wrote in to Metheny’s website asking him to  
elaborate. The veteran guitarist responded by posting a furious,  
foul-mouthed essay.   
  
  
 Among other things, Methany accused G of "\[defiling\]  
the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that  
has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy,  
out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of  
the great Louis’s tracks" and "\[shitting\] all over the graves" of  
hardworking jazz musicians. He concluded by stating that Kenny G  
had brought our culture to a new low, then he threatened to wrap his  
guitar around Gorelick’s curly-locked head if he ever happened to run  
into him.   
  
 Kenny  
G didn’t even try to respond, despite the further provocation of crazed  
Metheny fans posting obscene rants on his official website. And, as  
there are no recorded incidences of Methany assaulting anyone with his  
Fender, it’s safe to assume that he never made good on his  
threats. The verbal chiding he gave Gorelick, however, will go  
down in the annals of jazz as the most famous nonmusical riff of all  
time.   
  
 At least  
the story ends on a somewhat happy note: Kenny G donated all proceeds  
from his "Wonderful" to a foundation supplying arts funding for at-risk  
kids. Which is nice, of course. But it merely suggests that the  
man had enough sense to forgo the profits of a calamity of his own  
making.

Izzy Grinspan has been published in the Village Voice, the London Times, and the Philadelphia Weekly. She is in no way affiliated with Izzy Stradlin.
### Mansion in the Village
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/mansion-in-the-village/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:49.000Z
*by Kara Baskin*

The intrepid super-sleuths at the [New York Post](http://www.nypost.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) are reporting that Jewsrock.org favorite [Max Weinberg](http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=photos.viewtype&typename=Max%20Weinberg%27s%20Bar%20Mitzvah) has shed his chic West Village weekend hideaway for a respectable $2.45 million.

[New York Magazine](http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/realestate/columns/realestate/10885/?ref=jewsrock.org) takes readers inside the House of Max, noting that the three-story Bedford Street digs contain a jacuzzi, three fireplaces, and an adjacent parlor apartment but points out that "a drum set was not present."
### Adam Levine on Hill and Hilton
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/adam-levine-on-hill-and-hilton/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:09:00.000Z
**What's the most embarrassing album you own?**

Aw, I’m really not ashamed of anything I own.

**What song do you wish you’d written?**

I don’t think there’s any one song. Well, I wish I’d written "I Wish" by Stevie Wonder. I wish I’d written "I Wish."

**What’s the first album you bought?**

Run DMC’s "Raising Hell."

**And the most recent?**

Guns 'n Roses’ Greatest Hits. Slash is still the best guitarist in the entire world.

**What was the best concert you’ve ever seen live?**

Well, the most significant was Lauryn Hill.

It  
was just the most amazing and the biggest-sounding. She’s just the  
coolest performer and has so much power in her voice, and how she  
carries herself, the pain in her music—it just blew me away.

**Do you have any musically inclined relatives?**

My uncle wrote "San Antonio" for Tanya Tucker, and that’s how I sort of got introduced to the music business.

**And you grew up in LA. Do you still hang out in the same places you used to, now that you’re famous?**

I’ve lived here my whole life. It just feels like an extension of high school. But I get more attention now.

**When you were accepting the Grammy, what was going through your mind? How to avoid Kanye West?**

Kanye’s great, man. But no. I was just genuinely shocked.

**What would you be doing if you weren’t playing in a band?**

This  
is all I’ve ever wanted to do. I’m not going to put too much pressure  
on myself to deliver, though. I’m not worrying too much about anything,  
I’ve already achieved more than I’ve ever imagined. So I don’t know  
what I’d do with myself.

**So tell the truth. Are you going to buy Paris Hilton’s new album?**

No. Well—no.
### Paula Abdul vying to be the Bono of nail salon reform
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/paula-abdul-vying-to-be-the-bono-of-nail-salon-reform/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:49.000Z
*by Izzy Grinspan*

In the history of celebrity causes, it's not exactly AIDS in Africa, but Paula Abdul is gamely stepping up to the plate to promote nail salon safety regulation. Abdul testified in front of the California Senate on Monday, supporting a bill that would require nail salons to be safer and cleaner. Poor Paula had a nail removed last year after an encounter with dirty manicure equipment.  
[Yahoo News](http://entertainment.tv.yahoo.com/entnews/ap/20050628/111996696002.html?ref=jewsrock.org)
### Al Franken on the Grateful Dead
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/al-franken-on-the-grateful-dead/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:09:00.000Z
**What’s the first album you bought? When? Why?**

Simon & Garfunkel’s *Bookends*. It was also the first Jewish album I ever bought. The first gentile album I ever bought was *Abbey Road*, and the second gentile album was Creedence Clearwater Revival. I listened to *Bookends*  
over and over \[starts singing the title song\]. It’s very  
Jewish—it actually has voices of old people in a nursing  
home. It’s the only rock album with a Jewish nursing home in it.

**What was the best concert you ever saw? What made it so great?** 

The best rock concert I ever saw would have to be one of many Grateful Dead concerts. I went to some forty or fifty.

<!--img:238-->

**If you could join any band, what would it be?**

It  
would be the Dead, even without Jerry. The best would be the late  
70s era, though. I like everything they were playing then:  
"Weather Report," "Wake of the Flood."

**What’s the most embarrassing album you own?**

The  
Judds. Naomi and the other Judd. It’s not that embarrassing,  
but it’s still pretty bad. Also, you know, "House At Pooh Corner,"  
Loggins & Messina, all that melodic stuff.

**Name the song you loved so much you played it to death.**

There are Dead songs I’ve played too much. I did that to "Box of Rain."

**What song do your parents wish you’d never heard?**

"Why Don’t We Do It in the Road"— it led to a very embarrassing period. We’ll leave it at that.

**What slow dance song do you most remember from your bar mitzvah? Why?**

I  
wasn’t bar mitzvah’d, and I don’t remember going to any bar mitzvah  
parties. When I was a kid, bar mitzvahs were just bar  
mitzvahs. We didn’t have big parties. It wasn’t like when my  
kids’ friends were getting bar mitzvah’d and they’d play these songs  
like "That’s What Friends Are For" and all the girls would  
sway. That I remember from my daughter’s era.

**What’s the most recent album you’ve purchased?**

I  
usually purchase albums to replace the ones I’ve lost. Lately I’ve  
bought Dar Williams, but also, like, my eighth copy of *Workingman’s Dead* or \*Nassau\*\*Coliseum, May 10, 1980\*. My son programmed my iPod, so I’ve also been listening to that.

**What’s the most Jewish your music collection gets?**

It  
doesn’t get very Jewish. We play klezmer music on the show every  
day, on the Al Franken Show, but in my collection, the most Jewish it  
gets is Simon & Garfunkel or Bob Dylan. Who else was Jewish?

**Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, KISS…**

I hate KISS.
### Randy California's Favorite Kugel
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/randy-californias-favorite-kugel/
Last updated: 2005-06-23T00:00:00.000Z
Guitar hero Randy California's mother Bernice Pearl used to make him this kugel two or three times a year. The secret? Lots of melted butter.

Ingredients: 8 ounces wide egg noodles 2 eggs 1 cup sour cream butter ("lots" says Pearl) cheddar cheese to taste

Boil the pasta. Mix together the sour cream with the butter and cheddar cheese (you can also use brie, but Randy preferred cheddar). In an 8 x 10 baking dish, alternate layers of egg noodle strips with the cheese and sour cream mixture. Use the eggs, raw, to hold together the noodle layers. Top with a layer of the sour cream mixture and lots of grated cheddar.

Pre-heat the oven to 325 degrees. Bake the kugel for 45 minutes or until the top is brown.
### Because you just don't hear Judeo-Arab Andalusian music enough anymore
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/because-you-just-dont-hear-judeo-arab-andalusian-music-enoug/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:49.000Z
*by Kara Baskin*

DJ Cheb i Sabbah--dubbed the "original deejay" in this new profile by the [Chicago Tribune](http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0506260435jun26,1,1672750.story?ctrack=1&cset=true&ref=jewsrock.org)\--is doing his part to mix Jews, Arabs, and everyone in between ... on the dance floor, anyway. The Berber Jew grew up in Algeria listening to "live music, Judeo-Arab Andalusian music," and the global influence apparently stuck. When it comes to his beats, Sabbah doesn't discriminate: he's been known to incorporate belly dancers, soul, Sufi prayers, and Jimi Hendrix into his sets. His newest release, [La Kahena](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/sim-explorer/explore-items/-/B00080Z75K/0/101/1/none/purchase/ref%3Dpd%5Fsxp%5Fr0/102-7655838-6604141?ref=jewsrock.org), is named for a 7th century Berber Jewish warrior queen. He appears on Thursday at Chicago's [HotHouse](http://www.hothouse.net/?ref=jewsrock.org).
### Beck Represents
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/beck-represents/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:09:00.000Z
*by Barbara Rushkoff*

\*In the mid-nineties, zine author  
Barbara Rushkoff was a DIY dynamo: a self-published person of the  
book. Her zine Plotz lasted for sixteen issues of rants, raves  
and Yiddishisms and lives on today at [Plotzworld.com](http://www.plotzworld.com/?ref=jewsrock.org).   
Plotz scored some major coups, but the biggest might have been an  
interview with Mr. Milk and Honey himself, Beck Hansen. Below,  
Rushkoff’s 1997 interview with Beck.\*

Beck Represents in Plotz

Ultimately I think I guilted Beck’s "people" in to this  
interview. You see, I was all set up to talk to him months  
before, only he blew me off (don’t hate me for being truthful!).   
When I arrived at what was to be my second change, I was told within  
the first few seconds that I was there that it wasn’t going to happen  
again. Hmm, I thought, as I kvetched openly. Then all of a  
sudden I was ushered into the hallway at Roseland for my 10 minutes  
with Beck (props to Ben C for that!). I was nervous and excited  
(kvelling in effect). I thought about whipping out my camera and  
photographing Beck’s traveling trunk where a pair of rhinestone cowboy  
boots lay perched atop (that’s a photo right there) and many western  
style shirts were inside (along with orange shoes). I didn’t want  
to overstep my privilege though cause it took me too long to get this  
close! I do have to say that Beck was really nice, very genuine  
and most definitely mench-like. (Which is pretty much the biggest  
complement I give to anyone).

Plotz: Do you even know what this is for – do you know what Plotz is?

Beck: Yeah, it’s a Jew thing.

Plotz: Right. Can you tell me the Jew make-up of you?

Beck: It’s all on my mother’s side. My mother’s mother was  
all-Jew. Eastern European Jews. It runs through the female  
side of the famile.

Plotz: Then it counts. You look Scandinavian to me.

Beck: Yeah, I’m a Scandinavian Jew.

Plotz: I’ll take that. Please tell me you were Bar Mitzvah’d.

Beck: No. I wanted to be but we were so poor when I was a  
kid. I remember for years my mother griping about that. I  
went to Hebrew School for a while though. I got some of the  
Jew-knowledge, I just didn’t get the ceremony. I remember my  
friends getting Bar Mitzvah’d though.

Plotz: So I can’t ask the fashion question then.

Beck: Well, if I was Bar Mitzvah’d I would’ve worn a blue blazer, gray  
slacks and Florsheims and a phat tie. It’s the uniform.

Plotz: When I read about you and you being Jewish, it always  
seems that the person writing the article is shocked that you’re a  
Jew. What’s up with that?

Beck: They can’t believe  
it. I don’t know because the tribe is large. I think  
there’s more people that have Jew in them than don’t.

Plotz: Do you have a favorite Jewish holiday?

Beck: Passover, because it’s the first time I ever got drunk. I  
have fond memories. We had pretty rowdy Passovers because my mom  
would invite all her non-Jewish friends over and they brought a party  
atmosphere with them. There’s serious parts at Passover but  
there’s celebratory parts too – hiding the Matzoh. I used one of  
the prayers from Passover in a song I did on a Christmas jam I  
did. It was a Hannukah interpretation of The Little Drummer Boy.

Plotz: Back to drinking. Do you know of any Jews who drink? Hard liquor?

Beck: I drink and so do all of my Jewish friends. Yes. We  
do it all. Most of the people I know who are Jews have evolved to  
embracing this now. I’m talking West Coast Jews here. Maybe  
it’s different on the East Coast.

Plotz: So there are Jews on the West Coast?

Beck: There’s so many but the West Coast isn’t about tradition at all.

Plotz: Can you get a good knish there?

Beck: Yeah, there’s an area called Fairfax district where it’s a pretty  
heavy Jew scene. Lots of Jew food there. East L.A. used to  
be a massive Jewish community – they’ve got Brooklyn Avenue  
there. Now it’s Latino, but there’s a lot of Jewish heritage  
there.

Plotz: What Jew would you like to duet with?

Beck: That’s a good one – I would like to sing something very  
traditional with Isaac Bashevis Singer. Something very  
poignant. Maybe a medley.

Plotz: Last question.   
(Pointing to mutton chops). You’re so close to payess.   
Would you give me props and wear payess to the Grammys?

Beck:  
I just shave yesterday because I had a full-on Jew beard going.   
The sideburns are out of control. I could easily show up to the  
Grammys like that – everywhere I go I try to represent. I’ve  
played a lot of those X-mas radio shows and there was nobody  
there. I mean the Wallflowers played there and he wasn’t giving  
up for Hanukkah. We came there and we represented. We’ve  
got to take back the holiday – musically.

Plotz: Beautiful.
### All the Ramones you'll ever need
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/all-the-ramones-youll-ever-need/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:49.000Z
[Pitchfork](http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/news/05-06/22.shtml?ref=jewsrock.org#ramones/) reports that Rhino is releasing "the definitive Ramones box set." Weird Tales of the Ramones, due out on August 16, contains four CDs of Ramones songs. By our calculations, that's over 100 Ramones songs, which means it should take at least half an hour to listen to the whole thing.
### Mock and roll
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/mock-and-roll/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:50.000Z
Liam Gallagher has had his fair share of embarrassing moments, but this is definitely our favorite. According to his brother Noel, Liam adored the film Spinal Tap up until recently – when he learned that the band was actually a bunch of actors. Of course, the mockumentary is a testament to both hard rock and Jewish rock: Harry Shearer played bassist Derek Smalls, and Christopher Guest (yes, he’s a Yid) played conflicted lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel  
[Stereogum via The Modern Age](http://www.stereogum.com/?ref=jewsrock.org)
### Raising Hell
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/raising-hell/
Last updated: 2005-06-14T00:00:00.000Z
*By Eli Attie*

Photo courtesy Roberta Bayley

Let's begin with a disclaimer: Richard Hell is only half-Jewish. His mother is, in fact, a bona fide WASP. Under the laws of return, the guy's staying right where he is. And Hell, born Richard Meyers, surely didn't change his name for religious reasons.

But while Yid-rockers such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon infused popular music with the brighter side of the Jewish experience—wisdom and curiosity, mysticism and scholarly complexity—Richard Hell, perhaps more than any rock innovator, brought to the rock canon the darker side of the Jewish psyche. The otherness and the rootlessness. The constant fear of extinction and irrelevance. A level of guilt and self-loathing that makes Woody Allen look like Norman Vincent Peale.

Richard who?

You may not have heard of him; he never had anything close to a hit record. What's more, he virtually abandoned music two decades ago. But Richard Hell is arguably the founding father of 1970's punk rock, the man who took the nihilism of William Burroughs, the suicidal recklessness of Jack Kerouac, the grit and grime of New York's junkie street culture, and set it all to a bunch of snarling, half-tuned guitars.

Consider the facts:

Hell's search for a weekly gig for his first band, art-punk pioneers Television, led them to an empty biker bar called CBGB's on New York's Lower East Side. They convinced the bar's owner to feature live music, birthing the entire punk scene from which Blondie, the Ramones, Patti Smith, and the Talking Heads would soon emerge.

Hell's refusal to wash or comb his hair for weeks on end led, albeit inadvertently, to the advent of the spiked haircut, and he pioneered the ripped t-shirts that soon became de rigeur among rock's undesirables.

Hell's music and fashion non-aesthetic was the singular inspiration for Malcolm McLaren, then the New York Dolls' manager, to return to London and assemble the Sex Pistols. "It was like Marco Polo," McLaren has recounted. "I brought back the image of this distressed, strange thing called Richard Hell. And this phrase"—Hell's signature tune—"the Blank Generation."

Hell had moved to New York after dropping out of a Delaware boarding school in the early 70's—a decidedly un-Jewish beginning. Yet Hell's was no slacker path; he was consumed with the tortured symbolist poetry of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud (whose nihilistic opus, "A Season in Hell," gave this nice half-Jewish boy his stage name), and had ambitions of becoming a poet himself. After seeing the fledgling New York Dolls and the excitement they inspired, Hell realized—like Dylan a decade before him—that rock could be an outlet for his twisted treatises, and was certainly better than putting out, as he put it, "little mimeograph magazines that five people would ever see." With only rudimentary bass guitar skills, and a warbling, yelping singing voice that sounded like Lou Reed and Hank Williams fighting over the last syringe, Hell managed to cast a long shadow from rock's gutter.

Like the eternal exiles and wanderers of his half-religion—in history, yet not quite of it—Hell rarely stood still long enough to enjoy his own influence. The band Television was Hell's idea, yet he left over personal tensions before they recorded a single note. Then, out of the ashes of the New York Dolls, Hell and Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders co-founded the Heartbreakers. Hell, clearly more content to live in his own private shtetl, skipped out on this band, too—before they set foot in a recording studio, and before they toured England with the Sex Pistols and the Clash on the famed Anarchy Tour, which sparked a full-scale punk revolution in the Land of Hopelessness and Glory.

It was as a solo performer, with his backing band the Voidoids, that Hell finally made his musical mark. Together with drummer Marc Bell (later Marky Ramone) and brilliant lead guitarist Robert Quine (later a celebrated Lou Reed and Matthew Sweet sideman), Hell fashioned an edgy, angular, manic brand of punk that seemed incapable of settling down—like a street pimp in search of a homeland. "I was sayin' let me out of here before I was even born," he sings in the anti-anthem "Blank Generation," which became the model for the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant." With songs both propulsive and profound, and a band as invasive as it was inventive, Hell earned such admirers as Johnny Rotten, Nick Lowe, and rock's ultimate Jewish non-Jew, Elvis Costello, who even performed with him on-stage.

Unfortunately, Hell rarely captured the depth and intensity of his work on vinyl. As he once said of his own music, it's great—but nothing he recorded shows it, so you'll have to take his word for it. To make matters worse, Hell descended into the typical punk diet of drug addiction, and would only play live when he needed to pay his bills—forcing some of the Voidoids to look for steadier employment. After his first album, the poorly-produced and under-realized "Blank Generation," Costello's manager Jake Riviera expressed interest in handling his career—but according to Hell himself, he was in such sorry shape that Riviera passed. A few years and one album later, Hell had quit music more or less for good. Happily for the Meyers family, he soon cleaned up, returned to writing, and bizarrely enough, had a brief marriage to 80's schlock-pop diva Patty Smyth, now married to John McEnroe—a story twist Hell himself could not have concocted.

By all accounts, Hell does not consider himself Jewish, and would probably not appreciate his inclusion in these ranks. But it is that outsider ethos that makes his work so fundamentally Jewish—the insistence on non-conformity, on non-belonging, on indulging his root neuroses to the point of being a stranger in his own bands. Like the Jewish sitcom writers of the 1950's, who imparted a Jewish sensibility through non-Jewish characters; like the Jewish intellectuals who have influenced both liberal and conservative politicians, yet stayed resolutely on the political sidelines, Hell threw down punk's gauntlet and quickly hid behind the nearest trash can. Maybe that's the true innovator's curse; maybe it means you're unwelcome at your own party, or just incapable of enjoying it. But for a half-Jew, it ain't half bad at all.

Eli Attie is a producer and writer for "The West Wing."

The CD retrospective Spurts: The Richard Hell Story comes out this month from Rhino Records. Richard Hell's latest novel, Godlike, was also published this month by Akashic Books.

---

*Eli Attie is a television writer and producer (The Diplomat, Zero Day) whose credits also include The West Wing, House, and Billions.*
### And yet more Jewish metal news
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/and-yet-more-jewish-metal-news/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:50.000Z
The [JPost](http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1119406729056&ref=jewsrock.org) reports that Dio are bringing their "lasers, explosions and...giant dragon" to Israel this October. Seriously, folks, it's like the Messiah came: all the metalheads are rolling back to the Holy Land.
### For Megadeth fans in Tel Aviv, the system has failed
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/for-megadeth-fans-in-tel-aviv-the-system-has-failed/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:51.000Z
This year’s Israeli Metalist festival ended on a sour note when stage railings collapsed during Megadeth’s set last night at 2 AM. Because the Challah Famers were closing the show, police chose to end the concert early rather than repair the railings. Disappointed metal fans pointed out to [Ynet](http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3102894,00.html?ref=jewsrock.org) that they’d waited all night to see Megadeth, sitting through all 12 previous bands. Cops countered that they technically weren’t “ending early,” since the show, perhaps not surprisingly, had already run over the time limit.
### Jewish metal news, part II
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/jewish-metal-news-part-ii/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:51.000Z
Here at Jewsrock.org, we [love](http://jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=sections.view&page=faq&ref=jewsrock.org) Anthrax. Admittedly, it's as much about Scott Ian's sense of humor as it is his ouvre, but regardless: love. Which is why we feel like proud parents announcing that the brand-new Anthrax [website](http://www.anthrax.com/nfws/?ref=jewsrock.org) is up and running. You can customize the look of the site using their tattoo skins, you can hear cool explosion noises when you run your mouse over the navigation bar, and best of all, you can get updates from Ian himself about the band's experiences touring Eastern Europe this summer. If this isn't enough Anthrax for you, we suggest joining the Fan Club, which has finally awakened from its ten-year slumber.
### Nudie and the Technicolor Jacket
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/nudie-and-the-technicolor-jacket/
Last updated: 2005-06-05T00:00:00.000Z
*By Eddie Dean*

To any who would deny the unholy allure of the Nudie suit, consider the case of Little Jimmy Dickens. His name is not often invoked when talk turns to Nudie’s most famous creations, such as the gold-leaf tux he designed for Elvis back in ’57\. Even with all its fiery revenge-of-Prometheus brilliance, the Presley tux pales next to Nudie’s finest work, the bespangled, Glory-Be-To-God-For-Dappled-Things costumes that adorned country stars of the postwar era.

Gram Parsons in his Nudie suit. Photo courtesy Jim McCrary, www.jimmccrary.com

One of these stars was Little Jimmy Dickens, who specialized in noxious novelty songs like "May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose." In the Southern sideshow that was 1950s Nashville, the four-foot-eleven Dickens played up his freak status to the hilt, cavorting in his Nudie cowboy suit like an extra from the all-midget Western musical "Terror of Tiny Town," when in fact he hailed from the hollows of West Virginia. And here’s the clincher—the Nudie suit not only transformed Dickens from backwoods runt to Opryland hero, it was an undeniable factor in his astonishing ability to get laid by a bevy of Music City beauties.

In short, Nudie turned Little Jimmy into a Tennessee stud, and that is beyond the ken of a mere tailor. It is the work of a true visionary of the cloth. What Nudie wove from the fabric of twentieth-century America went beyond even the wildest fantasies of Polish artist Bruno Schulz daydreaming in his father’s clothing shop. Nudie was a magician, a conjuror of collective fantasy that culminated in the ultimate hat trick—a conversion of the counterculture to the Holy Order of the Rhinestone Cowboys.

As an American rags-to-rhinestones saga, Nudie Cohn’s rates right up there. The son of a boot maker, he was born Nutya Kotlyrenko in Kiev, Ukraine, and was christened "Nudie" by one of those Ellis Island clerks conversant in the mysterious ways of names forging destiny. He started at the bottom, as a shoeshine boy on Brooklyn streetcorners—and in the late 1910s went to Hollywood, where he did grunt work as a film extra. By the 30s, he was back in New York, where he found his calling as a tailor’s apprentice (namely sewing pasties and G-strings for strip-tease queens). But the West beckoned—it emanated an elusive Oz-like splendor that the East Coast couldn’t match—so he and his wife, Bobbie, headed back to California, where they opened a tailor shop out of their garage in Los Angeles.

Fate walked in one day, going by the name of Tex Williams, the Western Swing singing star, the man who made "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)" a million-seller. Williams needed to outfit his ten-man band. Tex loaned Nudie money for a new sewing machine and gave him his first break. Roy Rogers later claimed he was the one who nudged Nudie into the wild turquoise yonder of flash and glitter: "I got to playin’ these big, Madison Square Garden auditoriums. When they introduced you, you’d come out, and you’d look like a little doll, you’re so far away. So I thought, 'I gotta figure out some way where the people can at least see me.’ So I started with Nudie, talked him into makin’ me those real flashy things. So, when I come through the gates and the spots hit us, we lit up like a Christmas tree."

Nudie’s philosophy was simple: "My impression of an entertainer is that he should wear a flashy outfit to be fair to the public."

Of course, what both men are really talking about is sex appeal. Before Nudie and his fellow Western-wear designers like Nathan Turk, hillbilly fashion was still mired in the past; a tattered, musty wardrobe of Depression-era duds: drab buckskins and shabby Stetsons and faded overalls. Country singers looked too much like what they actually were—skinny, scoliotic Southerners and gawky Midwestern farm boys. Nudie dressed them up like strutting roosters, adding a peacock profusion of color and the sort of ceremonial, primal machismo that you find in mariachi bands and matadors and Audubon’s Birds of North America paintings. It was still cowboy all the way, but a cowboy gone native and somehow uptown at once, equal parts Gary Cooper and Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, with surreal, pantheistic dashes of Navajo brave, Mardi Gras chief, and Aztec warrior.

By the late 1940s, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors shop on Victory and Vineland was a one-stop-shopping mecca for any singing cowboy worth his imitation spurs. The affable Nudie made fast friends with his celebrity clientele, who felt at home being fitted for a suit by a tailor who wore the same gaudy designs they did. At the peak of his fame, Hank Williams became a loyal customer and confidante, inspiring some of Nudie’s all-time classics, like the sky-blue, rhinestoned "Lovesick Blues" Special with embroidered musical notes cascading down the front. Another early piece de resistance was a custom job for honky-tonk crooner Lefty Frizzell, the first Nudie shirt that featured rhinestone-studded initials. With the twin blessing of Hank and Lefty, Nudie became a star in his own right, and suddenly everybody in Nashville wanted a Nudie suit. Like some stumpy Stetson-crowned Merlin spraying pixie dust, Nudie was a savvy image-maker, bestowing costumes with gimmicky motifs—wagon wheels for Porter Wagoner and husky dogs for Ferlin Husky—that gave country its signature style just as it was making the transition from the sole provenance of Southern hillbillies to the music of mainstream America.

Arrayed in their glittering Nudie suits and boots and ten-gallon hats, the country stars roamed the backroads, alighting from their tour buses like household gods, greeting their worshipping fans as if they were family. The Nudie suit was their shining armor of celebrity, a force field that sent off sparks of divine aura while still allowing for the intimacy of handshakes and small-talk. A jug-eared squirt like Hank Snow, swathed in a Nudie suit of deepest turquoise, became much more than a refugee from a Nova Scotia fishing village: he was the Singing Ranger, resplendent in gabardine from Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors. Terms like "classy" or "tasteful"—this sort of polite-society decorum didn’t mean squat in the postwar Wild West of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. As Warren Oates once put it, "I feel most uncomfortable in a Western role, because my image of a Western man is John Wayne, and I’m just a little shit. When I think of the Western role, I think that the man has to be bigger than life, bigger than the screen." Even John Wayne needed help being John Wayne: he was a regular customer at Nudie’s shop.

So was a charismatic reverend named Leonard Eilers, who was known as the Preaching Cowboy. Between the efforts of Eilers and an evangelizing Dale Evans, Nudie and his wife became active in the Hollywood Presbyterian Church, and in 1963, he converted to Christianity. His family was shocked—his brother Cactus even threatened to disown him—but Nudie never officially returned to his faith. On the other hand, he also never forgot his roots: to commemorate his past, he wore a Star of David and a Chai around his neck along with a cross. Oddly enough, he also managed to inspire the Cohn family electrician, Harry Gibson, to become a Jew. While Nudie stopped going to shul, Gibson became a regular attendee, and to this day, he stops by the Cohn residence to visit Nudie’s widow Bobbie on Saturdays after services.

That would have been the end of the story, with the Nudie suit fading into the sunset as another dated fashion casualty, if it weren’t for Gram Parsons. The Georgia longhair was a longtime Nudie devotee and on a roll after helping to invent country-rock on the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Flush with a record-company advance for his new band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons strolled into the Rodeo Tailor shop in '68 ready to out-Nudie Nudie himself. He ordered up some designs for his bandmates—golden pterodactyls and neon peacocks. But he reserved the most outlandish motifs for his own custom suit: It boasted marijuana leaves and Benzedrine pills splashed across a field of white, with naked women stitched right across the front lapels and red roses around the crotch; on the back shone the Holy Cross spewing sparks like a Sunset Strip marquee that had blown a fuse.

The Burritos wore the suits with a stoned slouch, infusing just the right touch of camp irony on the cover of their landmark debut, The Gilded Palace of Sin. That’s how Nudie became hip with the hippies and the hipsters alike. Everyone from ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith to Steve McQueen to Sly Stone was seen sporting Nudie suits, and Sly even took to yodeling on There’s a Riot Goin’ On’s "Spaced Cowboy," a song title that neatly sums up the Nudie aesthetic.

That’s how Nudie Cohn, former maker of G-strings, became the first 66-year-old Jewish tailor to make it on the cover of Rolling Stone—wearing a Nudie suit, of course. And, for the next decade, the Nudie suit entered its second phase as a sort of badge of Decadent Insider Chic: ZZ Top and Elton John and Cher and Mick Jagger and faded folk-rock rebel Phil Ochs, who ordered a remake of the Elvis gold-lame suit, all sported them. Nudie embraced the new generation of freaks and scene-makers as warmly as he did singing-cowboy brothers of yore. Unflappable as ever, Nudie tooled around Hollywood in his custom El Dorado convertible, with silver-dollar-studded dashboard, pistol door-handles, and steer horns on the hood.

Two decades after Cohn’s death from stomach cancer, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors is no more. His widow, Bobbie, closed its doors and retired in ’94\. But the Nudie suit lives on, as disciples like Marty Stuart keep the faith. Even so, Stuart’s best intentions can’t hide the fact that he looks like a redneck pud in his beloved Nudie wardrobe because he’s too damn self-conscious—and nobody has the nerve to tell Stuart that a mullet and a Nudie suit don’t mix. The spirit is there, but the flesh isn’t willing. It’s like those well-meaning rockabilly revival acts that get everything right except the blasphemous abandon of the music’s original wild seeds, who were reared in a culture of Southern Repression that is long gone.

My own favorite image of a Nudie suit is from the glory days but far from the glitter of Music City. It is a snapshot of Ernest Tubb at a country-music park in the Pennsylvania sticks. His Stetson shielding his gaunt, haggard mug from the noonday glare, the honky-tonk vampire of a thousand-and-one buckets-of-blood nightclubs is protected from the sun’s death rays by a powder-blue, flower-speckled Nudie suit hugging his scarecrow frame, worn-in as a second skin. He is signing an autograph for a female fan—a good-looking woman in her Sunday best, herself framed by a pearl necklace and pointy church-lady high heels, almost touching Tubb’s surreal Nudie boots. It was the early 60s, when Tubb was living out of his tour bus and looking worse for wear. The photo is a beautiful example of what the Nudie suit was in its essence: work clothes for the rising sons of the salt of the earth, ablaze with the heavenly raiment of the Great Beyond as it "stains the white radiance of Eternity."

That last bit is by Percy Shelley, and he would have looked fine in a Nudie suit.

Eddie Dean is a writer in Rockville, Md. His work appears in Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2000 anthology.

Nudie Girls Jamie and Mary Lynn carry on Nudie's legacy. Check out their website at www.nudiesrodeotailor.com.

And lastly, check out Jewsrock.org's own Nudie Pictures gallery.

---

*Eddie Dean is a Washington, D.C.–based journalist and music historian.*
### Time out of mind
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/time-out-of-mind/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:51.000Z
It was on this day back in 1981 that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker announced the dissolution of [Steely Dan](http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=challah.view&page=S), perhaps the only band in history to be named after a steam-powered dildo. Both admitted at the time that music was no longer their primary passion, and the L.A. decadence that they captured so well on their 1980 album, [Gaucho](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004YX39/qid=1119449434/sr=2-1/ref=pd%5Fbbs%5Fb%5F2%5F1/104-3827196-2136702?ref=jewsrock.org), ultimately did them in.

The duo returned, sardonic wit firmly intact, to win four Grammys for [Two Against Nature](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004GOXS/qid%3D1119449471/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/104-3827196-2136702?ref=jewsrock.org) in 2001.  
<br
### Wind of change: Scorpions visit Israel
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/wind-of-change-scorpions-visit-israel/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:52.000Z
German hard-rockers the Scorpions will play Israel for the first time on July 7, reports the [Jerusalem Post](http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1119320276899&apage=1&ref=jewsrock.org). Best known for the classic rock staple “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and the Cold War ballad “Wind of Change,” the band is commemorating its Israeli debut with a surprising single: “Jerusalem of Gold,” performed with Israeli pop star Liel Kolet. The teenaged singer invited the Scorpions to play in her country after meeting the band in Berlin at a benefit for tsunami victims. According to her [manager](http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3065299,00.html?ref=jewsrock.org), “Kolet found meeting them even more exciting than meeting Clinton and Bono” – encounters that we imagine rocked, but not necessarily at hurricane-like levels.
### Starbucks filters out Springsteen
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/starbucks-filters-out-springsteen/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:52.000Z
Though they've championed the work of classic rock icons like Elvis Costello, Ray Charles, and Joni Mitchell, Starbucks has retreated from a deal to sell [Devils and Dust](http://www.brucespringsteen.net/devilsanddust.html?ref=jewsrock.org), Bruce Springsteen's newest release. [Page Six](http://www.pagesix.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) reports today that the ubiquitous chain refuses to stock the CD due to "a song graphically detailing an encounter with a hooker."

Starbucks had planned to offer the album until executives heard "Reno," whose lyrics include a vivid--though poetic--description of anal sex. They also objected to the mention of the hooker's fee ($250, for those of you who are curious). Which raises an interesting philosophical question: What is more vulgar--$250 for a prostitute, or $4 for a cup of coffee?
### Jon Stewart on Bruce Springsteen
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/jon-stewart-on-bruce-springsteen/
Last updated: 2005-05-27T00:00:00.000Z
What’s the first album you bought? When? Why?

JON: Olivia Newton John. She was pretty.

What was the best concert you ever saw? What made it so great?

JON: Springsteen at Vet Stadium. I also enjoyed cars, girls and New Jersey.

What is your cell phone ring set to?

JON: Vibrate.

Fill in the blank: What you don’t know about me is that I play the\_\_\_\_\_\_.

JON: Fool.

Have you tried Kabbalah?

JON: No. Is it delicious?
### Zorn again
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/zorn-again/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:52.000Z
Radical Jewish culture has a new epicenter. Using funds from his Tzadik label, [John Zorn](http://www.jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=challah.view&page=Z) has just opened The Stone, a non-profit performance space in New York’s Alphabet City. Zorn is serious about this stuff: the club doesn’t even sell t-shirts or refreshments. $10 gets you a night of experimental music, and you can buy your own soda after.

The L Magazine worries that the Stone isn't getting enough media attention; Brooklyn Vegan disagrees. Either way, tonight's show features Jim O'Rourke, the indie darling best known for his work with Tortoise and Wilco, so surely the club won't remain ignored for long.
### I might be wrong
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/i-might-be-wrong/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:52.000Z
[Pitchfork](http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/news/05-06/20.shtml?ref=jewsrock.org) reports that the new Strokes album will feature Nick Valensi on Mellotron, speculating that Valensi is trying to be the band’s Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead’s Mellotron-happy guitarist). This in turn leads us to wonder: Is Greenwood an MOT? Consider the facts: He spells his name with no “h,” Jewish-style, because he’s a Jonathan and not a John. One of the [songs](http://josephtate.com/radiohead/archives/000393.html?ref=jewsrock.org) he wrote for the film [Bodysong](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0349154/?fr=c2l0ZT1kZnxteD0yMHxsbT01MDB8dHQ9MXxmYj11fHBuPTB8cT1Cb2R5c29uZ3xodG1sPTF8bm09MQ%5F%5F;fc=1;ft=20&ref=jewsrock.org) is called “Nudnik Headache,” and another is “Tehelle,” Hebrew for pale blue. And according to [Justradiohead.com](http://www.justradiohead.com/profile.html?ref=jewsrock.org), Greenwood ‘s wife is Israeli. A quick search revealed nothing conclusive about Jonny (or his brother Colin), but the Yiddish Invasion will continue to investigate this compelling mystery.
### He likes us.  He really likes us!
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/he-likes-us-he-really-likes-us/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:53.000Z
Check out this short [New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/arts/music/19pare.html?ref=jewsrock.org) article on the music Bruce Springsteen plays before concerts. [Bob Dylan](http://jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=challah.view&page=D&ref=jewsrock.org)? [Sleater-Kinney](http://jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=challah.view&page=S&ref=jewsrock.org)? [Woody](http://jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=challah.view&page=G&ref=jewsrock.org) "I'm not Jewish, but my mother-in-law makes us Shabbos every Friday night" [Guthrie](http://jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=challah.view&page=G&ref=jewsrock.org)? Does anyone else notice a theme here? As usual, the Boss is about as close to being Jewish as a Christian can get without taking a dunk in the mikvah.
### Jeff Garlin on the Partridges
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/jeff-garlin-on-the-partridges/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:45:30.000Z
*By Jeff Garlin*

Jeff Garlin with Larry David.

What’s the first album you bought?

"I Think I Love You" by the Partridge Family.

The Partridge Family? Really?

Well, that’s what all my friends were listening to in the first grade. OK, also Loggins and Messina, "Your Momma Don’t Dance."

What's the most embarrassing album you own?

I don’t really own anything embarrassing. It’s not like I secretly dig Barry Manilow or anything!

Name the song you loved so much you played it to death.

"That’s The Way of the World," by Earth, Wind and Fire.

Did you have a favorite slow dance at your bar mitzvah?

HA HA. "Colour My World" by Chicago. There’s a "u" in colour, by the way.

What’s the most Jewish your music collection gets?

I wouldn’t know! I don’t even own any klezmer music. But I do have some comedy albums that are chock-full o’ Jews.

What is your cell phone ring is set to?

Vibrate.

Kiss or Bolton?

Kiss or Michael Bolton? Kiss or Michael Bolton? Um, Kiss.

If you could sum up your relationship with Larry David in one song, what would it be?

"Stuck In A Moment With You," by U2.

---

*Jeff Garlin is a comedian, actor, and stand-up known for Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Goldbergs.*
### Unnecessary exclamation marks: bad for the Jews.
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/unnecessary-exclamation-marks-bad-for-the-jews/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:53.000Z
The Beastie Boys aren't the only Jewish musicians who have recently been accused of ripping off other artists. According to the [Jewish Blogmiester](http://jewishmuzic.blogspot.com/2005/06/ripping-off-on-jewish-music-scene.html?ref=jewsrock.org), Jewish music powerhouse [Yehuda!](http://www.yehuda.org/?ref=jewsrock.org) (exclamation point definitely not ours) may have stolen his song "Umacha" from Chris De Burgh. Who? Don't you know your '80's art-rockers-cum-balladeers? De Burgh wrote "Lady in Red," still a Bar and Bat Mitzvah slow-dance special. As for Yehuda!, if you're trying to place him, just know that he's the guy who made "Dovid Melech" a hit.

[Blog in DM](http://blogindm.blogspot.com/2005%5F06%5F01%5Fblogindm%5Farchive.html?ref=jewsrock.org#111929153870567480) has the original post, plus a fairly interesting discussion about the difference between borrowing and stealing in folk music. And yes, we know this item is a mite more obscure than the [Beastie Boys story](http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050613/ap%5Fen%5Fbu/scotus%5Fbeastie%5Fboys;%5Fylt=Apzapioinh5BbAAVQEncNu9xFb8C;%5Fylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl?ref=jewsrock.org). We just think good old-fashioned plagiarism is a hundred times more interesting than the Beasties' alleged failure to follow proper sampling licensing procedure.
### The commercialization, it is a-changin'
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-commercialization-it-is-a-changin/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:54.000Z
[The Yada blog](http://www.theyadablog.com/2005%5F06%5F01%5Fyadayadayadablog%5Farchive.php?ref=jewsrock.org#111894321064712334)reports that Bob Dylan is "shilling for Amazon.com." Since we're still traumatized by those Victoria Secret ads, we found ourselves picturing a mustachioed Dylan crooning in a dark palazzo in Venice while a scantily clad woman prowled around a bunch of bookshelves. We were, in a word, wrong. According to [MSN News](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8242198/?ref=jewsrock.org), Dylan will appear on Amazon's homepage, headlining the company's 10th anniversary concert alongside Norah Jones. The show will also feature readings and Lord of the Rings footage, causing us to realize that Dylan sort of looks like he's from Middle Earth these days.
### The Jackson connection: Shmuley B.
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-jackson-connection-shmuley-b/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:54.000Z
A few years ago, Michael Jackson and everyone's favorite celeburebbe Shmuley Boteach sat down with a tape recorder to plan a book. As Boteach explains on his [website](http://www.shmuley.com/articles.php?id=193&ref=jewsrock.org), Michael "desired to serve as a spokesman for the unmet needs of children." You can see how a quote like that might have remained hidden until recently. Now that MJ has been found innocent of molestation, though, the good rabbi is contemplating writing a book based on the 30 hours of taped conversation. Jewschool might have put it best with their headline: "Jackson free...but not from Schmuley."

[Jewschool via Yada blog](http://www.jewschool.com/2005/06/jackson-free-but-not-from-shmuley.php?ref=jewsrock.org)
### His Sharona
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/his-sharona/
Last updated: 2005-05-09T00:00:00.000Z
*By John Kelly*

Photo courtesy of Capitol Records.

Doug Fieger is a mensch. It doesn’t matter if I believe that or you believe that. All that matters is that Sharona Alperin’s parents believed it back in 1978 when they met the leader of a Los Angeles band called the Knack.

If they hadn’t believed there was something inherently admirable about Fieger—who was then 26 and had been kicking around in rock bands for a decade, first in Detroit, then in London, finally in LA—it’s doubtful they would have let their then-16-year-old daughter hang out with him.

No Sharona, no "My Sharona."

No "My Sharona," no "Get the Knack," the band’s 1979 debut album and as perfect an aural encapsulation of male teenage lust as has ever been committed to magnetic tape. The fact that this male lust was directed at an actual teenager didn’t bother Sharona Alperin’s parents and so it shouldn’t bother you.

But in 1979 it did bother a bunch of people and so did Fieger, who struck many as a smarmy misogynist, and so did the Knack, who came across to some as a calculated confection who were somehow "bad" for rock and roll, as if rock and roll was an endangered owl rather than an art form created to simultaneously get into a girl’s pants and celebrate having gotten into a girl’s pants.

I sometimes think too much is made of "My Sharona." It has become the inky paintbrush that has tarred the Knack, one of my favorite bands, with the most dreaded of pop monikers: "one-hit wonders." But it’s hard to make too much of that song, because it’s a great song.

The back story: One day in 1978 Fieger was introduced by his then-girlfriend, the Israel-born Judy Halpert, to a teenaged employee at Los Angeles clothing store. Fieger decided then and there that he must possess Sharona Alperin, and in time-honored horny rock guy fashion invited her to come see the band that he had recently formed.

"The original band," said Fieger recently, "were all part of the 52 Jews in rock" (an expression Fieger said he picked up from Tom Petty drummer Stan Lynch, who once confided that he fantasized about creating a deck of rock-o-Judaic playing cards with Bob Dylan as the joker).

Fieger grew up in Oak Park, Michigan, a predominantly Jewish suburb of Detroit. Fieger’s parents (his labor-lawyer father was Jewish, his union-organizer mother had converted) weren’t particularly religious, being, in fact, atheists. In one of those odd occurrences that would seem implausible in a novel, Fieger’s older brother is Geoffrey Fieger, a political gadfly best known as Jack Kevorkian’s lawyer. Their sister, Beth, is a television writer.

Lead guitarist Berton Averre was Fieger’s mirror image, with a Jewish mother and a father who had converted. Bass player Prescott Niles’s original name was Prescott Fine??? And drummer Bruce Gary’s father had changed the family name from Ginsburg.

In other words, four nice Jewish boys, which may have been the reason, Alperin told me recently, her parents didn’t mind her hanging out with them

Sharona became Fieger’s muse. But this museness was complicated by the fact that Fieger was still going out with Judy Halpert. It was in the apartment that the couple shared that Fieger and Averre actually wrote "My Sharona," somewhat stealthily, one presumes.

Alperin remembers driving over to the Knack’s rehearsal studio during her lunch break one day to hear them practice. "I was in there for 20 minutes and it was like 'Should we play it for her? Okay let's play it for her.’ Then cut to the next scene in the car and I’m going 'Did I just hear this pretty cool song written about me? Was my name in the last song?’"

Yes, her name was. "It’s an Israeli name," Sharona said, "even though I’ve never been to Israel."

The rest of the world heard the song about a year later, after the Knack had stormed through LA’s club scene, jammed on stage with the likes of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, picked Capitol Records after a dizzying bidding war, and chosen Mike Chapman (the Sweet, Blondie) to produce their album, which went on to sell 6 million copies, buoyed by a song whose stuttering chorus was inescapable that summer.

To understand why "My Sharona," the No. 1 single the week of Aug. 25, 1979, landed with such a splash, one has only to consider the second through fifth top-rated singles of that week: "Good Times" by Chic, "Main Event/ Fight" by Barbra Streisand, "After the Love Has Gone" by Earth, Wind & Fire and "Bad Girls" by Donna Summer.

"My Sharona" rocked at a time when most songs on the radio didn’t. It exploded from transistor radios on beaches and clock radios in suburban teenage bedrooms.

Even if you didn’t listen to the words it was hard to ignore the insistent beat--a signature time signature that allows you to name that tune in 2 seconds--and Berton Averre’s killer sublime guitar solo, a perfectly-modulated riff that Fieger said was meant to evoke afterglow. Whether you think "My Sharona" is somehow deviant depends on how you react to lyrics like "I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind."

Sex--the promise of it, the denial of it--is what "Get the Knack" is all about. While it includes some undeniably "pretty" songs ("Your Number or Your Name," for example), the bulk of the album chronicles what it’s like to be a randy teenage boy, in thrall to the local foxes. The only thing missing is a song devoted to every high school boy’s default pastime, masturbation, although self-abuse seems implicit in the album-closing "Frustrated," which includes such blue-ball lyrics as "she’ll be pulling the string/ but she’ll tie it in a knot before she gives you anything."

Some critics hated more than just the nasty lyrics, charging that the Knack was somehow trying to hijack the iconography of the original four-piece power pop band. The photo on the front of "Get the Knack," they said, looked like "Meet the Beatles," the back looked like the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan" and Capitol had revived the rainbow-colored paper label that adorned the Fab Four’s U.S. releases.

Why this should have so enraged the critic-class is hard to understand 25 years on, but the Knack’s cause wasn’t helped by their refusal to do interviews, even when offered the cover of Rolling Stone. (Drummer Gary, long estranged from Fieger, says this is just one on the many ways Fieger burned bridges. But it’s hard to imagine what the Knack would have said had they talked to the press: That they didn’t really get it up for the touch of the younger kind, or that they did?)

In retrospect, Fieger couldn’t have been too surprised by the eventual backlash, a critical dubbing that, in those days of the SALT II treaty, spawned a "Knuke the Knack" campaign. The problems the band would encounter were foreshadowed when he and Averre had shopped around the band’s two-song demo tape, which consisted of "That’s What the Little Girls Do" (lyric: "Does she tell you lies then apologize, does she make you crawl?") and "Good Girls Don’t" ("She’s your adolescent dream, schoolboy stuff, a sticky sweet romance, and she makes you want to scream, wishing you could get inside her pants").

These guys just laughed at us," said Fieger of the A&R men who would later scramble to sign the band (and other "skinny-tie" acts). "They said 'This is novelty music.’ And to them it was, because it was about teenage lust. It wasn’t about saving the whales or some other such thing that to me didn’t really have a place in what my love of rock and roll was."

The Knack stuck it out for two more albums, each of which contained some stellar power pop songs and a few embarrassments. (The third album, "Round Trip," includes the song "We Are Waiting," which features the title chanted in Hebrew as the tune fades out. "Just a little tip of the hat to our roots," said Fieger.)

The original line-up (minus Gary, who works as a sideman and plays often with Jack Bruce) has reunited to record three more albums, the most recent 2001’s "Normal As the Next Guy."

Fieger says he occasionally goes to temple on the high holy days.

"But do I consider myself a Jew?" he asks. "Yeah, absolutely. It is my culture…. I’m not a big guy on organized religion. I think that the universe is too big to limit yourself to one train of thought. I like to be able to get off at different stations and pick up a train to somewhere else."

He and Sharona Alperin did become boyfriend and girlfriend. That’s her on the picture sleeve of the "My Sharona" single, wearing a membranous white sleeveless T-shirt in a photo that must have been taken on a very, very cold day, if you get my drift. She toured with the band, experiencing the Knackmania of limos, jets, fine hotels and pharmaceutical overindulgence. "The fortunate thing about the Knack," she says, "was even though it was short lived, unfortunately, they did it so first class."

After four years, the couple split up. "It was just time for me to become my Sharona," is how she puts it.

Alperin is now in her early 40s, with two kids and a successful career as an LA real estate agent specializing in finding homes for celebrities. ("A lot of them relate to me, having that pop culture icon thing you know," she said to me on her cell phone as she drove through LA traffic).

She often makes restaurant reservations under the name "Sharon," since otherwise strangers can’t help warbling "M- m- m- m- myyy Sharona" then saying, "You mean, like the song?"

I confess I was too embarrassed to ask Sharona if any of it embarrassed her: the naked lust, the nipples, the sticky sweet romance. But I think I know what she would have said: Are you kidding? I looked great in that picture. I was famous. I had a No. 1 song written about me.

I was your adolescent dream.

John F. Kelly is a columnist at The Washington Post. He played three records every day when he got home from Rockville High School in the fall of 1979: Elvis Costello’s This Year's Model, Queen's News of the World, and the Knack's Get the Knack.

---

*John Kelly is a retired Metro columnist for The Washington Post, where he wrote “John Kelly’s Washington.”*
### Nothing says "Old Testament" like a Mountain Goat.
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/nothing-says-old-testament-like-a-mountain-goat/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:54.000Z
This month's issue of the McSweeney's non-fiction mag [The Believer](http://www.believermag.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) comes with a truly excellent complication CD -- they seem to have called all our favorite bands and asked them to cover all of our other favorite bands. The Decembrists perform a song by their platonic soul mate Joanna Newsom. Cynthia G. Mason somehow makes Richard Buckner's "Surprise, AZ" sadder. San Serac does a version of Ida's "Late Blues" that we swear we remember coming from our clock radio one midnight in the eighties. But the best moment on the entire CD is the Mountain Goats' cover of the Silver Jews' "Pet Politics." OK, so maybe that's not a surprise -- after all, Mountain Goat John Darnielle and Silver Jew David Berman are two of indie rock's most literary lyricists, and they have similarly flat, dry delivery. But while Berman is a [published poet](http://www.opencity.org/berman.html?ref=jewsrock.org), Darnielle writes songs like they're short stories, and his treatment brings cohesion to Berman's lyrics about central Ohio, the Garden of Eden, and tattoos of floor plans. Go find it somewhere, because it does immense justice to the winners of this website's award for Proudest (Thought Also Most Obvious) Hebraic Band Name.
### Bad for the pseudo-Jews
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/bad-for-the-pseudo-jews/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:55.000Z
Rush and Molloy of the New York Daily News report not one but two exposes of kabbalah: "20/20" is airing a piece tomorrow, and [Radar Magazine](http://www.radaronline.com/web-only/the-kabbalah-chronicles/2005/06/inside-hollywoods-hottest-cult.php?ref=jewsrock.org) has the first in a four-part series up now. The not-wildly-surprising news? Apparently the Berg family, founders of the Kabbalah Centre, are one corrupt pair. [R&M](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/319405p-273152c.html?ref=jewsrock.org) do our religion a favor by describing Karen and Philip Berg as people "who have tried to tear Kabbalah away from its Jewish roots," but it's still pretty embarrassing to see any version of Judaism discredited all over the media, especially since the Bergs' primary sin seems to be, well, greed. Couldn't Madonna have just become Reform?

[Rush and Molloy via Gawker](http://www.gawker.com/news/culture/today-show/index.php?ref=jewsrock.org#gossip-roundup-more-smudges-on-katie-courics-pretty-face-108177)
### Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty...
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/put-your-makeup-on-fix-your-hair-up-pretty/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:55.000Z
Atlantic City used to be a sort of Valhalla of musicians from the '50s and '60s, where the local oldies station would come to life in order to rock (or at least "rock") the casinos. You got the impression that most concertgoers were Jewish grandparents who'd been just waiting for their return to the beach since they got back from Boca in March. When the aging Sex Pistols played the Trump Marina in 2003, the city's music scene lurched forward some twenty years, but it was still firmly stuck in the past. Now, though, Atlantic City is making a bid for the present. This July, the [House of Blues](http://hob.com/venues/clubvenues/atlanticcity//?ref=jewsrock.org) opens in the Showboat Casino. Challah Famers the Counting Crows play on July 7, joining a [lineup](http://hob.com/tickets/searchresults.asp?venid=1882&ref=jewsrock.org) that includes Eminem, Gov't Mule and a tribute to Sublime. Counting Crows? Sublime? OK, so we're not talking about Frankie Valli exactly, but it definitely appears that America's former playground is still milking the nostalgia factor. And we find that strangely reassuring.
### Heavy Shtetl
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/heavy-shtetl/
Last updated: 2005-04-30T00:00:00.000Z
*By Steve Almond*

Britny Fox promotional postcard, 1991.

I spent a thousand nights as a rock critic in El Paso, Texas, which was where I lived for three years at the tail end of the eighties and where I grew old enough to recognize that heavy metal was, essentially, tribal in nature and that it had everything to do with desire and physical release and ecstatic worship of the Godhead, which is to say, with kaballah.

I say this with almost no solid evidence, as befits the mystical assertion. I am, after all, a typical American Jew, properly secularized, properly humanized, long ago sprung from the superstitions and rabbinical esoterica of the shtetl. I grew up in a progressive California city, with a couple of parents who dabbled in hippiedom.

I knew that my Jewish classmates went to temple. They took part in youth group ski trips and sponsored tree plantings in Israel. But our family took religion in strange, frankly contrarian manners. Let me offer the DIY bar mitvah as a prime example. This was a concept my father pioneered, one which did not include an actual rabbi, or an actual temple, though it did include a post-speech hot tub. My father—blessed be his meshugas—took it upon himself to teach us the necessary Hebrew prayers. We went at these phonetically, the result being a version of the mother tongue that would be hard to call intelligible. My grandfather Irving’s exact words: "It sounded like you were speaking Spanish, kiddo." Fair enough.

What I’m suggesting is that we missed out on the communal aspect of Judaism, the many coming together as one, and that this was part of a deeper familial neurosis that kept us at the fringe of things. We were shy people, frightened of connection, frightened of intense emotion; we used snobbery as a dodge.

As to music, my father sang opera; my mother was a concert-quality pianist. I took piano lessons from an elderly Russian woman, Mrs. Sosoyev, for several years. I don’t remember many of the actual lessons, only that Mrs. Sosoyev would, on certain days, accompany me to her bathroom and (somewhat frighteningly) hold my small, grubby hands under the hot water spigot. I was not much of a pupil. I lacked the patience, the necessary self-belief, and showed a tendency to bang the keys of my mother’s piano in frustration.

So I became, instead, a devout listener. I had grown up on a steady diet of Beatles and Stones, dabbled in prog rock (Styx was my vice; I spent one unfortunate summer memorizing the entire Paradise Theater album) and eventually threw in my lot with the various lonely boys of New Wave. The point of rock music, as far as I was concerned, was to express a sense of stylish alienation, a kind of glum glam personified by crooners such as Morrissey and Gordon Gano. Remember: Boys don’t cry.

You will have to imagine, then, what it was like for me to attend my first heavy metal concert. I was fresh from college, the new meat rock critic at the El Paso Times. This was an October night, down to an autumnal 85, and I was one of 15,000 people packed into the University of Texas at El Paso auditorium for an evening with Metallica. It was like nothing I’d ever expereinced: the sheer volume of the music, the strobe lights, the deafening and endless bombast. I was in the second row, front and center, stabbing song titles and glib adjectives onto a reporter’s pad while, all around me, 10,000 kids, skinny boys mostly, flailed and howled.

I didn’t really get what was happening at first. Which is to say: I thought of myself as slumming. Observing El Paso’s metalheads as they thrashed against their own bleak prospects, as they closed their eyes and hoped for a way out through the music—all this was a matter of professional duty.

But I was more like those kids than I would have ever admitted to myself, as insecure about my manhood, as desperate for affirmation, as hungry for touch. It didn’t matter that I wore skinny thrift-store ties and wingtips, or carried around business cards with my name and title printed on them. It didn’t even matter that I had a girlfriend who read Nietzsche. What mattered was my insides, which were in a continuous state of riotous want. I wanted sex and violence, simple enough, but more than this, deeper than this, I wanted a brotherhood of belief.

And there were certain nights when this desire became manifest. I’m thinking, in particular, of a triple bill (Ratt, with Britny Fox and Kix) at the El Paso County Coliseum, which is where they held the rodeo, such that the place still smelled of rodeo: burnt popcorn and hay and horse shit. There were no floor seats at this show. It was just us dudes standing around; I was alone, per usual. My girlfriend did not accompany me to metal shows. I found myself chatting up a couple of vatos between sets and then a joint was being passed around and I did my civic duty, took a hit, then another, and Ratt hit the stage and the crowd surged forward. They’d rigged the drums so that every time the drummer took a whack the stage lights changed configuration. I was fairly certain I had been beamed inside a pinball machine.

Then I gave myself over the spectacle entirely, dropped my notebook and released my body to the music. I can remember the bodies banging around me, which became my own body banging, and I remember gazing at Stephen Pearcy, the lead singer of Ratt, screeching from atop a stack of amps. He seemed me, in that moment, something more than a man, something closer to a vision.

What I was seeing—I recognize this now—was the Godhead as described in the Zohar: a manifestation of the Almighty revealed to those below as a body of bright emanations. This is the cosmology put forward by the Kaballah: you can’t see God Himself. He’s ineffable. But you can, in the midst of certain ecstatic states, catch sight of his emanations.

It’s true that I was stoned, and true, also, that the mind of the 23-year-old stoner is prone to such aggrandized visions. But I was also an athiestic cynic who regarded God as little more than a powerful fantasy. I was as shocked as anyone to feel the warm prickle of a celestial presence.

Not that I felt this every time out, mind you. It couldn’t be summoned by my own desire, or a particularly kickass set, or even pot. I would simply, during particular shows, lose myself in the riot of lights and notes and suddenly the lead singer, or the guitarist (whoever was leaping in the spotlight) would devolve into a loosely knit body of emanations, what a kabbalist would identify as the limbs of the primordial man, Adam Kadmon. It happened with David Coverdale of Whitesnake and Jeff Keith of Tesla and Kip Winger. I didn’t even like Winger.

Actually, though, I doubt a kabbalist would have much patience with my visions. Notwithstanding the romantic blather of Madonna and her ilk, the Kabbalah is a mostly bloodless pursuit, an abstract set of textual interpretations that has more in common with a cryptogram than the soothing, spiritual tropes of Buddhism.

It is only this one aspect of Kaballah—the revelation of the Godhead—that seems related to my metal days. My great idea, the one living inside me, was to lay eyes on the divine, some trace of the divine.

For the devoted metalhead this happened all the time. They could slip into their rooms and crank the headphones, or pore over the letters of their favorite lyrics, and feel God. But I needed the shows, the presence of other believers, a large body of them. It was their faith I was connecting to, or absorbing, their mystical reverence. And here, I think, is where my particular upbringing comes into play.

What I had wanted as a child—but turned away from—was some sense of belonging, an affiliation that linked me to the rest of the universe. I had grown up in a family of men, so my sense of belonging was inexorably linked to certain ideals, the kind of masculine omnipotence that (for better or worse) found its expression in guys like Kip Winger.

It didn’t matter that these shows were an illusion, crafted with catwalks and costumes and dry ice machines and lights. What mattered was the vision forged, which was of sufficient majesty to quiet the chaos within me. This is our basic human impulse. We wish for an end to the chaos of doubt. At least, that was my wish, on those certain nights, in those packed and sweaty arenas, with the lightning and din above me and 10,000 brothers surging around me. This was me, at last, finding my tribe. This was me gazing, with them, upon the great father sent, at last, to soothe us.

---

*Steve Almond is a bestselling author and writing teacher; his recent books include Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow.*
### This Yiddish Life
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/this-yiddish-life/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:55.000Z
Tune in to [This American Life](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/?ref=jewsrock.org) this upcoming weekend for Jewsrock.org founder David Segal’s story about a Hasidic Brooklynite who traded in his fur hat for a trucker hat. Curly Oxide of the band Vic Thrill was born Chaim of Williamsburg. When a local hipster invited him to join his band, Chaim made the jump from Williamsburg's Orthodox community to the artists' community just next door.
### San Fran court upholds Beastie Boys' license to ill.
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/san-fran-court-upholds-beastie-boys-license-to-ill/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:56.000Z
And now from the neverending file of Jewsrock-related lawsuits: Remember the Beastie Boy's track "Pass the Mic" from 1992's Check Your Head? That flute sample is from "Choir," a solo flute composition by a jazz and classical flutist named James Newton. Six seconds of Newton's music is looped 40 times through "Pass the Mic,' and while the Beastie Boys did license the loop from the record company, they didn't get permission from Newton to use his composition. Newton [filed suit](http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0005/msg00146.html?ref=jewsrock.org) in 2000, claiming that the Beastie Boys should have known that they needed to contact him along with his record company. He lost, but filed an appeal, which was just shot down: according to [Yahoo News](http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050613/ap%5Fen%5Fbu/scotus%5Fbeastie%5Fboys;%5Fylt=Apzapioinh5BbAAVQEncNu9xFb8C;%5Fylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl?ref=jewsrock.org), the 9th Court of Appeals in San Francisco has declined to hear the case. Meanwhile, the Beasties are still involved in a legal mess with the Sugar Hill Gang, who sued them [last December](http://www.mp3.com/updates.php?artist%5Fid=8&article%5Fid=28888&ref=jewsrock.org)for using samples from "Rapper's Delight" on To the 5 Boroughs.
### The new true Jew?
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-new-true-jew/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:56.000Z
"Read the personal story about how God used Mel Gibson's The Passion to show 50 Shekel the arm of His salvation." Uh oh. It's bad enough that [50 Shekel](http://www.50shekel.com/?ref=jewsrock.org)\-- the Hebraic rapper best known for his parodity "In da Shul" -- has converted, but did he have to bring Mel into it? Meanwhile, while 50 is basking in the amazing discovery that Jesus was born Jewish ("HOLY SHABBBOS!!!!" \[sic\]) , the world of Jewblogs is mired in heated debate. Did 50 Shekel convert because of all the haters? [Bangitout.com](http://bangitout.com/music24.html?ref=jewsrock.org) suggests that meanspiritedness might have driven the rapper into the arms of Yeshua; [Jewschool](http://www.jewschool.com/?ref=jewsrock.org)responds with a post that's part-defense, part-apology. We're just glad the Jewish tradition of fervent internet discussion is alive and well.
### Handsome Dick's Handsome Chopped Liver
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/handsome-dicks-handsome-chopped-liver/
Last updated: 2005-04-21T00:00:00.000Z
Handsome Dick Manitoba, lead singer of the proto-punk band the Dictators, made this chopped liver for a seder at the home of rock writer Lisa Robinson. Be sure to slice the onions fine for a truly creamy dish.

Ingredients: 1.5 lb chicken liver .5 lb beef liver 1 mid-sized onion 2 or 3 hard-boiled eggs green and black olives 1 large yellow bell pepper lots of schmaltz spoonful of mayonnaise (optional) salt & pepper to taste

Using a meat grinder, grind the chicken and beef liver. Mix them together in a vat with some schmaltz or a drop of olive oil until texture is uniform. Chop onion very fine and fry in schmaltz until the pieces are soft and translucent. Chop hard boiled eggs into equally small bits. Mix fried onions and eggs in with liver. If so inclined, add a dollop of mayo, then salt and pepper to taste. Mash the entire contents of the vat into a smooth paste.

To serve: Slice the yellow bell pepper into strips. Garnish the chopped liver with alternating green and black olives around the rim and a Star of David made out of yellow pepper strips in the center.
### Songs of love and hate
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/songs-of-love-and-hate/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:56.000Z
On the cover of Danny Cohen's new album, [We're All Gunna Die](http://www.anti.com/catalog.php?id=46&ref=jewsrock.org), a bearded fellow plucks the strings of an acoustic guitar in a Jewish cemetery. The album's name is listed as an epitaph on the tombstone behind him, which also bears a Star of David. Cohen was discovered by Tom Waits; [Blogcritics](http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/06/07/014812.php?ref=jewsrock.org) compares him to "Dylan at his most uncomfortably nasal." Whatever other giant shoulders he might be standing upon, Danny Cohen reminds us most of another Cohen: Leonard. Danny's voice has more gravel in it, but like Leonard, he recognizes the connection between Jewish melancholy and singer-songwriter sadness.
### Six degrees of Jewish rockstars.
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/six-degrees-of-jewish-rockstars/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:56.000Z
OK, we know M.I.A. isn't remotely Jewish -- she compares herself to the PLO, for crying out loud. But, like Jewish hipsters everywhere, we're pretty into her, and we knew there had to be some sort of Jewish connection. We were right. Leslie Fiest, former Broken Social Scene vocalist and current solo sensation, popped up in the New York Times this past weekend with a [list](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/arts/music/05play.html??ref=jewsrock.org) of her favorite new CDs. She heartily endorsed M.I.A., pointing out that she met Maya Arulpragasam when Maya was living with [Justine Frischmann](http://jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=challah.view&page=E&ref=jewsrock.org). If that doesn't count, we don't know what does. Oh right -- and Feist was touring with her own roommate, a certain Jewess named Peaches, at the time. We have no proof that Feist herself is Jewish, but now we're looking. Meanwhile, we've invented a game: Six Degrees of Jewish rockstars.
### Reality redux
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/reality-redux/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:57.000Z
Right now, if you go to the [website](http://www.nbc.com/nbc//Hit%5FMe%5FBaby/index.shtml?ref=jewsrock.org) for NBC's new show Hit Me Baby One More Time, you'll hear the jaunty beat of the Knack's "My Sharona," possibly the only song about a hot Jewish girl performed by a band consisting entirely of [Jewish guys](http://jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=challah.view&page=K&ref=jewsrock.org). It's a Yidstravaganza and we're totally rooting for them on Thursday, when they compete against Tommy "867-5309" Tutone, Vanilla Ice, and a few other former stars for a chance at a comeback.

Hit Me Baby One More Time is a marriage of The Surreal Life and American Idol: famous bands you forgot existed play their biggest hit plus something from the current charts. Last week, e.g., Arrested Development (who SO deserved their victory) did "Tennessee" and Los Loney Boys' "Heaven." Our Jewboys will be playing "My Sharona" along with Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl," which we think will suit them nicely. Only one question: Didn't they already get their chance at a comeback in 1993, when Winona Ryder danced around to "My Sharona" in the convenience store in Reality Bites?
### Funny, He Didn't Look Jewish
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/funny-he-didnt-look-jewish/
Last updated: 2005-04-12T00:00:00.000Z
*By Wil Haygood*

In 1954, as a nightclub star on the brink of Hollywood stardom, Sammy Davis, Jr. became a Jew. The announcement—the ricocheting word of mouth—startled his friends. He had never mentioned Judaism before. His own background had been one without religion. His mother was a lapsed Catholic, his father a lapsed Baptist. His adoption of Judaism could not really be called a conversion, because he had nothing to convert from. If pressed, he might well have answered "entertainment" as his religion. The decision had been made like many other decisions made in the life of Sammy—spur of the moment, a bout of light introspection, the mind working with a vaudevillian’s quickness and agility, no turning back from an arrived-at decision.

Where did this sudden onset of Judaism come from? Sammy had always been a fervent searcher. And where his mind was not intellectual, his heart was always vulnerable. The conundrum left him forever open to new gadgets, new ideas, new kinds of love. And whatever winds blew those new ideas into the soft recesses of his heart proved, more often than not, to be strong enough to push the ideas even further into his mind, where they fastened, and where he mistakenly thought they had originated with the weight of intelligence. So he came to Judaism quickly and romantically—as if electrical currents were guiding him. …

" He came to me," recalls Jerry Lewis—born Jerry Levitch, and himself Jewish—"and said, 'I’m going to turn Jewish.’ I said, 'You don’t have enough problems already?’"

If we are to believe Sammy’s autobiography, "Yes I Can," the act of conversion had whipped itself around in his mind for all of two weeks. It involved the happenstance of coming across a book, "A History of the Jews," and having a few conversations with rabbis. (During a hospital stay, Eddie Cantor had slipped him a Star of David, which he was now wearing around his neck.) There was no hunger, however, greater than Sammy’s hunger for fame, for Hollywood. He watched movies, trailed the famous, snapped their pictures, hugged them, and hugged them some more. Fame was meat. He was its tiger. If, as the film historian Neal Gabler has proclaimed, the Jews invented Hollywood, then, in 1954, Sammy proclaimed himself—with the acquisition of an almost overnight spirituality—an appendage to that invention. Once seized by a notion, he could be relentless.

He found Max Nussbaum, a rabbi in Los Angeles and a refugee from Europe. In Germany, Rabbi Nussbaum’s reputation kept growing. He had a gift. He was told he should be in that place known as Hollywood. His wife sensed his powers. "When he was young in Berlin, he was like a meteor coming on under Hitler," Nussbaum’s wife would come to recall. "Everybody heard about Max Nussbaum in Berlin because he was such a novelty." The Jews of Berlin came to revere Nussbaum. He told wonderful Hasidic tales, spinning them out. He was, according to his wife—and others—"beautiful"; his mind was energetic. "When I met him," his wife recalled, "I didn’t particularly like him, because he was much too glamorous for my taste. I made fun of him. I said, 'You belong in Hollywood.’ That was 1937."

Nussbaum reached Hollywood in 1942, an escapee from the waves of persecution sweeping the continent. He headed Temple Israel. Five of the seven founders of the Hollywood-based temple were power brokers in the movie business. Nussbaum corralled actors and actresses for fund-raising benefits. Following one—where Bill "Bojangles" Robinson had been the featured guest—he squired everyone to the famous Brown Derby restaurant. The group was told that Robinson, a Negro, would not be served. Nussbaum and company turned and left.

When Sammy found Nussbaum, he was full of childlike questions. He grilled the rabbi as if he were a director moving huge camera equipment across impossible terrain and he needed Nussbaum to help navigate it all—this very minute. The rabbi was suspicious and saw fit to warn Sammy: "Let me caution you not to expect to find Judaism in books."

Sammy opened his one eye wider. The comment perplexed him. He would find Judaism, then, in the clutter of his emotional heart.

There were, however, depths and undertows and crosscurrents that Sammy could not imagine that would intercut with his decision to convert.

The Jew and the Negro had a sometimes complex and always emotional history in America. Both groups, indeed, stood upon common ground: that of an oppressed minority. Bondage and suffering had shoved them together. Pain was understood by both. Several years before Sammy’s conversion, a young writer and essayist by the name of James Baldwin, writing in Commentary magazine, said, "Though the notion of the suffering is based on the image of the wandering, exiled Jew, the context changes imperceptibly, to become a fairly obvious reminder of the trials of the Negro, while the sins recounted are the sins of the American republic. At this point, the Negro identifies himself almost wholly with the Jew. The more devout Negro considers that he is a Jew, in bondage to a hard taskmaster and waiting for a Moses to lead him out of Egypt." Baldwin goes on: "It is part of the price the Negro pays for his position in this society that, as Richard Wright points out, he is almost always acting."

Judaism was cultural, a long thread in a family dynamic. Many who underwent conversions did it for reasons of marriage. But not Sammy. Sammy the actor—the impersonator!—would take the lore of Jewishness because he was Sammy. It was like a wonderful role. He needed the approval of no casting director. He could just do it—open his heart a little, read, entertain other Jews, sit at Rabbi Nussbaum’s knee. Sammy, in the presence of intellectual vigor, sometimes simply wilted. Nussbaum, in the presence of Hollywood, sometimes became vulnerable. (The walls of Nussbaum’s office were lined with photographs of Hollywood stars.) Nussbaum’s warnings to Sammy aside, it was not his mission to try to dissuade him. They were two entertainers, and they were both in the business of pleasing, of soothing when necessary. Their eyes could easily tolerate the klieg lights.

Sammy did not care how Negroes would react to his conversion. He tried his best to operate above the emotional guitar strings of the Negro. Negroes were finicky—just like the Negro press. And Negroes were hardest on Negroes. He would merely endure their bemusement. …

He became a Jew. He was a Jew. A Negro in Jew’s clothing. It was tender, and it was strange. To Tony Curtis the conversion was also "a bit gratuitous."

Actually, it was just Sammy being Sammy—shrewd, opportunistic, heart-touched, and childlike. There had been no religion in his life, and there had been no foundation, and so there was plenty of room for invention. And where there was the possibility of invention, surprise could occur.

But he hardly escaped the guffaws. "When Sammy embraced Judaism I was doing the Milton Berle show," says Peggy King, a singer who would go on to have an important relationship with Sammy. "Milton said, 'What are we going to do—Sammy became a Jew?’" King and others who were gathered around wondered what Berle expected them to say. The comic, recalls King, answered his own question. "Then he said, 'I know, we’ll give them \[the Negroes\] George Jessel.’"

Jessel, a forgotten figure now, was a longtime comedian considered too Jewish his own good and a bit of an embarrassment to his people. "You never heard such waves of laughter," King says. "We were rolling on the floor."

Wil Haygood is a writer in the Style section of The Washington Post. This essay is excerpted from his award-winning biography, In Black And White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr.

Excerpted from the book IN BLACK AND WHITE by Wil Haygood Copyright (c) 2003 by Wil Haygood Published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Buy the book at www.amazon.com.

---

*Wil Haygood is an author and Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University; his books include The Butler and Colorization.*
### Great minds
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/great-minds/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:57.000Z
Jmerica points out that the title of our Phil Spector story is very similar to [theirs](http://www.jmerica.com/?ref=jewsrock.org), and that it's a coincidence. So true. This is probably just the result of 3,000 years of inbreeding -- that, and, oh, [superior brainpower](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html??ref=jewsrock.org).

(Disclaimer: The Yiddish Invasion does not actually believe that Ashkenazi Jews have superior brainpower. There are far too many [counterexamples](http://jewsrock.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=words.viewtype&typename=Bad%20for%20the%20Jews&ref=jewsrock.org))
### Madonna: Still controversial after all these years
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/madonna-still-controversial-after-all-these-years/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:57.000Z
This is definitely a new one in Madonna's multi-decade reign as diva: coming between the Israeli foreign minister and the country’s ambassador in DC.

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom wants to replace Israel’s ambassador, Danny Ayalon, following Ayalon’s complaint that Shalom’s wife insisted that he fire his assistant. This is where Madonna comes in: the assistant’s offense was a blatant failure to set up a meeting between Shalom’s wife and the Material Mom during her recent visit to Israel. Judy Shalom Nir Mozes has also been accused of other obnoxious behavior, including calling embassy workers "retarded." For his part, Shalom says simply that he’s lost faith in the ambassador.

[Shalom to dismiss U.S. envoy (Ynet)](http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3085928,00.html?ref=jewsrock.org)  
[Madonna came between them (Ynet)](http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3085248,00.html?ref=jewsrock.org)
### The mother of all Jewfros
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-mother-of-all-jewfros/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:58.000Z
We're not exactly thrilled that Phil Spector is a member of the tribe, but it's hard not to feel some sort of exhilaration looking at the tumbleweed sprouting out of his scalp on recent [trial pictures](http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050523/482/la10305232138?ref=jewsrock.org). It's so huge and splendid and awe-inspiring, it almost makes us forget why he's on trial. Almost.

As much as we love it, though, we do think he could have found a hairdo that didn't quite so vividly imply "[homicidal maniac](http://www.thesimpsons.com/bios/bios%5Ftownspeople%5Fsideshowbob.htm?ref=jewsrock.org)."
### Dropping the bomb scripture at your Bar Mitzvah
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/dropping-the-bomb-scripture-at-your-bar-mitzvah/
Last updated: 2005-04-03T00:00:00.000Z
Friday night we'll be drinkin' Manishewitz Goin' out to terrorize Goyim Stompin' shagitz, screwin' shiksas As long as we're home by Saturday mornin'.

'Cause hey, we're the Brews Sportin' anti-swastika tattoos Oi Oi, we're the boys Orthodox, Hasidic, O.G. Ois

Orthopedic Dr. Martins Good for Waffle making Kickin' through the shin Reputation, gained through intimidation Pacifism no longer tradition

'Cause hey, we're the Brews Sportin' anti-swastika tattoos Oi Oi we're the Brews The fairfax ghetto boys skinhead Hebrews

We got the might, Psycho meshugenas We can't lose a fight, As we are the chosen ones. Chutzpah driven, We battle then we feast. We celebrate, we'll separate Our milk plates from our meat.

Hey, we're the Brews Sportin' anti-swastika tattoos Oi Oi we're the boys Orthodox, Hasidic, O.G. Ois --The Brews NOFX Punk in Drublic 1994

Hit ya, I’m gon’ get ya And drop the bomb scripture at your bar mitzvah --from Holla Busta Rhymes Genesis 2001

No pennies from heaven, no pennies in my hand Think your drinkin’ wine, Dad, it’s blood of the lamb That’s no way to treat your son now is it, Abraham After he busted his ass for you You’ve never known no hunger, never took a risk Through you know you should, you know you’d never raise a fist If the boss asked you to jump you know You’d find the nearest cliff That man talks down to you And you talk down to me too now Master and Slave in equal parts split down the middle drinkin’ doubles at the bar Master and Slave, God bless you both I got two for the price of one.

Master and Slave in equal parts split down the middle, drinkin’ doubles at the bar Master and Slave, God bless you both I got two for the price of one Such a deal for your only son

When will this tension be all over For fallen sons and fathers too I’m down to my last dime No faith in mankind C’mon let’s swing into the groove...

Like Jack Horner wrapped up in a corner But I never saw a slice of no pie Ooh, too busy standin’ in line Just waitin’ for bread But the father he walks the water He ain’t never tossed a nickel to his son Ain’t I your prodigal boy? Ain’t I your pride and joy?

Friends and Romans, I’m your brother I’m scratchin’ to hang on The pursuit of happiness is just a carpetbaggers con When a can of pork and beans could change my attitude You won’t give it up but I coulda been you While the masters and slaves scratch For pieces of the dream For purple mountain majesties Whatever the hell that means They give up on each other And that’s the way they get ahead But I can still see the stars Through these red, white, and blue prison bars

Master and Slave in equal parts split down the middle, drinkin’ doubles at the bar Master and Slave, God bless you both I got two for the price of one

Master and Slave in equal parts split down the middle, drinkin’ doubles at the bar Master and Slave, God bless you both I got two for the price of one Such a deal for your only son

Master and slave Master and slave Ooh, Master and slave

\--Master and Slave Cherry Poppin' Daddies Zoot Suit Riot 2001

The door it opened slowly, my father he came in, I was nine years old. And he stood so tall above me, his blue eyes they were shining and his voice was very cold. He said, "I’ve had a vision and you know I’m strong and holy, I must do what I’ve been told." So he started up the mountain, I was running, he was walking, and his axe was made of gold.

Well, the trees they got much smaller, the lake a lady’s mirror, we stopped to drink some wine. Then he threw the bottle over. Broke a minute later and he put his hand on mine. Thought I saw an eagle but it might have been a vulture, I never could decide. Then my father built an altar, he looked once behind his shoulder, he knew I would not hide.

You who build these altars now to sacrifice these children, you must not do it anymore. A scheme is not a vision and you never have been tempted by a demon or a god. You who stand above them now, your hatchets blunt and bloody, you were not there before, when I lay upon a mountain and my father’s hand was trembling with the beauty of the word.

And if you call me brother now, forgive me if I inquire, Just according to whose plan? When it all comes down to dust I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can. When it all comes down to dust I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can. And mercy on our uniform, man of peace or man of war, the peacock spreads his fan.

\--The Story of Isaac Leonard Cohen Songs from a Room 1969

It’s the age of reason for the anarchist It’s a change of venue for the lobbyist It’s a dream of justice buried in the grist

It’s a secret briefing based on need to know It’s a condescending rationale from command control Feel the sense of wonder at the overthrow

It’s a rite of passage through a hurricane Through a rolling thunder through a screaming rain Hear the shriek of Abel hear the cry of Cain

And Abraham will take his son Five billion years from now the cruelty will be done

Make a destination Of the greater truth Make 'em hang their heads and eat their words When you find the proof This is all you’re given It’s your only move

It’s a rite of passage for the everyman To a higher ground To a brighter light To a promised land You can feel the power Of the master’s hand

It’s a rite of passage

\--Rite of Passage Bob Seeger It's a Mystery 1995

Oh, God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son" Abe said, "Man, you must be puttin’ me on" God said, "No"—Abe say, "What?" God say, "You can do what you want, Abe, but The next time you see me comin’, you better run" Well, Abe said, "Where d’you want this killin’ done?" God said, "Out on Highway 61"

Well, Georgia Sam, he had a bloody nose Welfare department, they wouldn’t give him no clothes He asked poor Howard, "Where can I go?" Howard said, "There’s only one place I know" Sam said, "Tell me quick, man, I got to run" Oh, Howard just pointed with his gun And said, "That way, down Highway 61"

Well, Mack the Finger said to Louie the King, "I got 40 red-white-and-blue shoestrings And a thousand telephones that don’t ring Do you know where I can get rid of these things?" And Louie the King said, "Let me think for a moment, son" Then he said, "Yes, I think it can be easily done Just take everything down to Highway 61"

Now, the fifth daughter on the twelfth night Told the first father that things weren’t right "My complexion," she says, "is much too white" He said, "Come here and step into the light" He said, "Hmm, you’re right, let me tell the second mother this has been done" But the second mother was with the seventh son And they were both out on Highway 61

Now, the roving gambler he was very bored Trying to create a next world war He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor He said, "I never engaged in this kind of thing before But yes, I think it can be very easily done We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun And have it on Highway 61"

\--Highway 61 Revisted Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited 1965

"Okay... This is a song that uhh... There's a lot of Christmas songs out there and uhh... Not too many Chanukah songs. So uhh... I wrote a song for all those nice little Jewish kids who don't get to hear any Chanukah songs. Here we go..."

Put on your yarmulke Here comes Chanukah So much funukah To celebrate Chanukah Chanukah is the festival of lights Instead of one day of presents, we have eight crazy nights

When you feel like the only kid in town without a Christmas tree Here's a list of people who are Jewish just like you and me David Lee Roth lights the menorah So do James Caan, Kirk Douglas, and the late Dinah Shore-ah

Guess who eats together at the Carnegie Deli Bowzer from Sha Na Na and Arthur Fonzarelli Paul Newman's half Jewish, Goldie Hawn's half too Put them together, what a fine lookin' Jew

You don't need "Deck The Halls" or "Jingle Bell Rock" 'Cause you can spin a dreidel with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock—both Jewish

Put on your yarmulke It's time for Chanukah The owner of the Seattle Supersonicahs Celebrates Chanukah

O.J. Simpson, not a Jew But guess who is? Hall of famer Rod Carew—he converted We got Ann Landers and her sister Dear Abby Harrison Ford's a quarter Jewish—not too shabby

Some people think that Ebenezer Scrooge is Well he's not, but guess who is All three Stooges So many Jews are in showbiz Tom Cruise isn't, but I heard his agent is

Tell your friend Veronica It's time to celebrate Chanukah I hope I get a harmonica Oh this lovely, lovely Chanukah So drink your gin and tonicah And smoke your marijuanikah If you really, really wannakah Have a happy, happy, happy, happy Chanukah Happy Chanukah

\--The Chanukah Song Adam Sandler What the Hell Happened to Me? 1996

While traveling through the Lone Star State I lost my lunch before I ate, It happened in a pull-ahead café. Yahoo! I felt my bones begin to crunch I saw my name on the businessman’s lunch And the neck who owned the place stepped up to say: "Hey buddy, are you blind, Say, partner, can’t you read the sign?"

We reserve the right to refuse service to you, Take your business back to Walgreen’s, Have you tried your local zoo? You smell just like a communist, You come on through just like a Jew, We reserve the right to refuse service to you.

Well, I walked on in to my House of God Congregation on the nod, Just chosen folks are doing their weekly thing. Hear, O Israel, yes indeed, My book was backwards, couldn’t read, But I got a good rise when I heard that Rabbi sing, "Baruch atah Adonoi, What the hell are you doing back there, boy?"

We reserve the right to refuse services to you, Your friends are all on welfare — You call yourself a Jew? You need your ticket and your tie To zip your prayers on through, We reserve the right to refuse services unto you.

Life from Laos and Cambodia No more tears tonight they showed ya The latest old war movies on TV. You know it’s bound to escalate So go and turn on channel eight, Watch channel seven border channel three. Well, I won’t mind your tanks and jets and jeeps And speaking on behalf of all my fellow creeps:

We reserve the right to refuse service to you, Right, face, forward, move And get the children, too. Let Saigons be bygones, Don’t you blow this world in two. We reserve the right to refuse service to you.

Well, it’s just my luck that God’s a Texan One big sonbitchin’ Anglo-Saxon, Some crazy tall Norwegian bore Just to help my body shipped air-freight From Texas to the Pearly Gate Just ring the bell and leave me at the door. I’ll be somewhere over Jordan swinging low, I’ll hear them tape-recorded angels in lifelike stereo

Singing, "We reserve the right to refuse service to you, Take your business back to Walgreen’s, Have you tried your local zoo? Our quota’s filled for this year On singing Texas Jews, We reserve the right to refuse service to you."

\--We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to You Kinky Friedman Sold American 1973

Well, a redneck nerd in a bowling shirt was a-guzzlin’ Lone Star beer Talking religion and-uh politics for all the world to hear. "They oughta send you back to Russia, boy, or New York City one You just want to doodle a Christian girl and you killed God’s only son."

I said, "Has it occurred to you, you nerd, that that’s not very nice, We Jews believe it was Santa Claus that killed Jesus Christ." "You know, you don’t look Jewish," he said, "near as I could figger I had you lamped for a slightly anemic, well-dressed country nigger."

No, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore, They don’t turn the other cheek the way they done before. He started in to shoutin’ and a-spittin’ on the floor, "Lord, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore."

He says, "I ain’t a racist but Aristotle Onassis is one Greek we don’t need And them niggers, Jews and Sigma Nus, all they ever do is breed. And wops 'n micks 'n slopes 'n spics 'n spooks are on my list And there’s one little hebe from the heart of Texas — is there anyone I missed? "

Well, I hits him with everything I had right square between the eyes. I says, "I’m gonna gitcha, you son of a bitch ya, for spoutin’ that pack of lies. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s an ethnocentric racist; Now you take back that thing you said 'bout Aristotle Onassis."

No, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore, We don’t turn the other cheek the way we done before. You could hear that honky holler as he hit that hardwood floor "Lord, they sho’ ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore!" All right!

No, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore, We don’t turn the other cheek the way they done before. You hear that honky holler as he hit that hardwood floor Lord, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore.

Everybody! They ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore, They ain’t makin’ carpenters who know what nails are for. Well, the whole damn place was singin’ as I strolled right out the door "Lord, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore!"

No, we ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore, We don’t turn the other cheek the way they done before. Well, the whole damn place was singin’ as I strolled right out the door "Lord, they ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore!"

\--They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore Kinky Friedman Kinky Friedman 1974

Riddle me this brother can you handle it Your style to my style you can't hold a candle to it

Equinox symmetry and the balance is right Smokin' and drinkin' on a Tuesday night It's not how you play the game it's how you win it I cheat and steal and sin and I'm a cynic For those about to rock we salute you The dirty thoughts for dirty minds we contribute to I once was lost but now I'm found The music washes over and you're one with the sound Who shall inherit the earth the meek shall I think I'm starting to peak now Al From S.S. Decontrol and the man upstairs I hope that he cares If I had a penny for my thoughts I'd be a millionaire We're just 3 M.C.'s and we're on the go SHADRACH MESHACH ABEDNEGO

Only 24 hours in a day Only 12 notes a man can play Music for all and not just one people And now we're gonna bust with the Putney Swope sequel More Adidas sneakers that a plumber got pliers Got more suites that Jacoby & Meyers If not for my vices my bugged out desires My year would be good just like Goodyear's tires So I'm out pickin' pockets at the Atlantic Antic And nobody wants to hear you cause your rhymes are so frantic I mix business with pleasure way too much I mean wine and women and song and such I don't get blue I gotta mean red streak You don't pay the band your friends and that's weak Get even like Steven like pulling a Rambo SHADRACH MESHACH ABEDNEGO

Steal from the rich and I'm out robbing banks Give to the poor and I always give thanks Got more stories that J.D. Salinger I hold the title and you are the challenger I've got money like Charles Dickens Got the girlies in the Couple like the Colonel's got the chickens Always go out dapper like Harry S. Truman I'm madder than Mad's Alfred E. Neuman *Never gonna let them say that I don't love you* My noggin is hoggin all kinds of thoughts Adam Yoggin is Yauch and he's rockin of course Smoke the holy chalice got my own religion Rally round the stage and check the funky dope musicians Jerry Lee Swaggert or Jerry Lee Falwell You love Mario Andretti cause he always drives his car well Vicious circle of reality since the day you were born And we love the hot butter on what the popcorn Sippin on wine and mackin Rockin on the stage with all the hands clappin Ride the wave of fate it don't ride me *Being very proud to be an M.C.* And the man upstairs I hope that he cares If I had a penny for my thoughts I'd be a millionaire Amps and crossovers under my rear hood The bass is bumpin from the back of my Fleetwood Brougham D'Elegance They tell us what to do hell no SHADRACH MESHACH ABEDNEGO

\--Shadrach The Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique 1989

Your rhyme technique, it is antique To all my heads qu'est-ce-que tu fabriques? Que cosa fai? Come sta e? Ho fato molte telefonate Oops gotcha clutch like Plazza Sneak between the sheets so hide like matzoh Holler back challah bread... next We are the crew who put the crew in Cruex I can see that Def Jam doesn't recognize me I'm Mike D the one who put the satin in your panties

\--from 3 the Hard Way The Beastie Boys To the 5 Boroughs 2004

I'm a funky-ass Jew and I'm on my way And yes I got to say fuck the KKK And oh yeah hey, how about today? If you want to set it off then let me hear you say

\--from Right Right Now Now The Beastie Boys To the 5 Boroughs 2004

Yo, it's Hanukkah time right about now We be dreidlin' We 'bout to set it Baby go get your dreidel on

Get your dreidel on

All of my homies in Santa Monica celebrate Hanukkah And my peeps in the streets are shvitzing for every one of those 8 nights of lights And a menorah of Muthafuckin' fantasy of fun, all rolled into one

See the thing is, I'm not really Jewish But Mike said, Kil, won't you come down So I hopped up to do this Through this time of 8 days We all come together and celebrate We grub lots of matzas and latkas, a.k.a. potato pancakes

Get your dreidel on

3, 2, 1 Hanukkah, Hanukkah, Hanukkah Oh, what a lotta fun Here I go again, once again No I don't mean to offend I grub all my gefilte fish, mmm, as quick as I can Then I light a candle and, ouch! Whoops, I just burned my hand Don't really matter though, 'cause I gotta go And down some Manischewitz wine Yeah now I'm feelin’ just fine

Yo, Mikey in the temple, all up on the beamer, eatin’ Halvah, halvah You know I'll be cleaner than a shiny silver platter of chocolate chip macaroons My afro leavin’ Mike shadows as I step in the room

You heard Hanukkah was comin’ and it's comin’ correct Lightin’ candles, open presents, giving family respect To the creator of the earth and of the fruit of the vine Manischewitz flowin’ large, like it ain't got the time, yo

'Cause we be eatin Halvah, halvah With salt and butta'

That's right Hanukkah 2001, y'all We be dreidlin' We're outta here Shalom fo sheezy my neezy

\--Get Your Dreidle On Incubus Non-album release 2001

Like a Jew in ancient Spain

And for Christ’s name did pay with pain Modern day inquisition What is the link between these crafts? Doctors and thieves, they both wear masks Overpaid meat magicians

Life is killing me

\--from Life is Killing Me Type O Negative Life is Killing Me 2003
### Achtung, Baby
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/achtung-baby/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:58.000Z
What is that on Bono's arm in recent [photos](http://www.elevation-tour.com/gallery/?display=2005%20-%20Vertigo%20Tour%2F2005-05-09%20-%20Chicago%2FPhoto%20110.jpg&ref=jewsrock.org) of the Elevation tour? Is he actually wearing a Star of David, and if so, why on earth would he do something like that? Since it's joined by a crescent and a cross, we can only surmise that the noted do-gooder is simply wearing his pan-theistic pride literally on his sleeve. But it's not like Bono doesn't know any Jews -- couldn't someone have explained to him that a Mogen David armband is a major faux pas?
### Cashing In
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/cashing-in/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:59.000Z
Oh, how we wish Johnny Cash had been Jewish. He was certainly close—check out that last name, so redolent of old-country money-lending, or the all-black wardrobe, perfect for a Hasid.

Apparently, Rick Rubin knows just how we feel. Rubin produced Johnny Cash’s "American Recordings" series, which made the old cowboy into a hipster hero; now, he plans to do the same for MOT Neil Diamond. "He deserves it more than anyone," Rubin told [Rolling Stone](http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/%5F/id/7223740/neildiamond?rssfeed=musicnews&rnd=1112123808995&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1040&ref=jewsrock.org), adding that he planned to pare down Diamond’s style, returning to the singer-songwriter feel of his recordings from the sixties. Rubin worked with Cash on a cover of Neil Diamond’s "Solitary Man" – here’s hoping Diamond plays something from the Cash catalog as well.
### The international language of music
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/the-international-language-of-music/
Last updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:59.000Z
IPods have never been exactly low-maintenance – consider the short-lived batteries, the fragile interior workings, the heavy replacement price. For Israelis, they’re especially difficult, thanks to an operating system that doesn’t support Hebrew. Israeli software developer Edo Mendelson has gotten around that problem by creating HebPod, distributed for free at [www.hebpod.com](http://www.hebpod.com/?ref=jewsrock.org). However, Israeli iPod vendors have refused to repair gadgets that have been updated with HebPod, leading some 375 Israeli users to sign a [petition](http://www.petitiononline.com/HebiPod/petition.html?ref=jewsrock.org) promising to boycott Apple products until Steve Job’s minions have responded to their pleas. Strangely, iTunes does support Hebrew, so it’s possible to upload Israeli music into an iPod: you can hear it, but you can’t select it on the main screen. Which lends a whole new meaning to the concept of shuffle.

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### Don't Fear the Rockdots
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/dont-fear-the-rockdots/
Last updated: 2005-03-25T00:00:00.000Z
*By Spencer Ackerman*

Blue Öyster Cult gave a lot to rock. The music was a blend of eerie metal, sci-fi, evil and the occasional jazz chord. They wrote songs with names like "She’s As Beautiful as a Foot" and "Hot Rails to Hell," and they meant it. They took their six-string machismo seriously enough to list "stun guitar" as an instrument on albums. By the mid-1970s, BÖC was one of the best selling bands of the era.

But to grasp all the band gave rock you can’t just focus on their attitude or their songs. You need to take note of two little dots perched over the "O" in "Öyster." Feast your eyes, ladies and gentlemen, for Blue Öyster Cult brought the umlaut to metal. From that moment on, rock had a mocking shorthand for the high-octane power of the bar chord—and for what the lifestyle's detractors would call its proto-fascist impulses.

Was the umlaut a big deal? Dude, ever heard of Motörhead? Or Mötley Crüe? Or Hüsker Dü? How about Queensrÿche? Umlauts all around. Spinal Tap, the ultimate metal act, had the temerity, and comic genius, to slap an umlaut over the "n" in its name. As Spinal Tap's Nigel St. Hubbins sagely observed, the umlaut is a glimpse into the soul of a band: "It's like a pair of eyes. You're looking at the umlaut, and it's looking at you."

Never mind that rockdots, as they’re known, typically make no grammatical sense. ("The umlaut over the "y" has haunted us for years," said Queensrÿche’s Geoff Tate. "We spent eleven years trying to explain how to pronounce it.") Considering the umlaut’s Teutonic associations, the weird part, of course, is that the brain trust of BÖC was dominated by Jews: Queens-bred lead singer Eric Bloom and manager Sandy Pearlman, the legendary producer and Crawdaddy critic. Other tribesman might have been uncomfortable with the twin dots of Germanic fury perched atop their name. Bloom never had a problem with it

"We certainly started something," he says, in a phone interview.

The marriage of umlaut and rock began innocently enough. When the band signed to Columbia in 1970, they had some name trouble: After scrapping their early Soft White Underbelly tag, Pearlman understandably had second thoughts about the newly-adopted handle, the Stalk-Forrest Group. For little seeming reason, he threw out an idea: Blue Öyster Cult. For even less seeming reason, keyboardist (and gentile) Allen Lanier decided that the name was missing a certain oomph that only a Teutonic diacritical device would provide.

BÖC didn’t end the Germanic shtick with the umlaut and eventually this landed the band in trouble. In 1974, to promote Secret Treaties, the group designed an ad to match the cover art's aviation motif. Blue Öyster Cult were dressed in World War II-era bomber jackets and shown psyching themselves up for an air raid mission, presumably over Berlin on behalf of Uncle Sam. The band, its management and Columbia all thought the design was clever, but Gerry Rothberg, the owner of Circus magazine, surprised all involved by refusing to run it. A bewildered Pearlman quickly learned that Rothberg had flipped out, thinking BÖC were "depicting some sort of pro-German thing," as Bloom recalls.

Rothberg wasn’t exactly imaging things. The plane on the cover of Treaties is an ME 262, a German jet deployed during World War Two by the Third Reich. And the album had a song called "ME 262," which was a first-person narration by a Nazi fighter pilot as he readies himself to attack an English fleet. The lyrics are bizarrely sympathetic to the pilot. ("Must these Englishmen live that I might die?" the pilot asks, over and over.) The Cult were clearly partaking in a hoary rock and roll tradition: striving for shock value. They just were doing it in a particularly imbecilic way. In Germany, which has strict anti-hate laws, Treaties was actually banned.

Circus was a premier outlet for rock news, so Bloom, Pearlman and co-producer Murray Krugman immediately took Rothberg to lunch to make nice. Here’s where BÖC’s Jewish roots helped out.

"We said, 'Look, we're wearing American uniforms,'" Bloom says. "And he gave us a whole diatribe about the six million and how we have to do more \[to commemorate the Holocaust\] and never again and et cetera. We agreed with him and said, 'Listen, you have to understand, that's not where we're coming from—look at the ad: we're wearing American uniforms! We're attacking Germany in the ad!' So he said somebody had whispered in his ear that we were all some sort of neo-Nazis. We told him he's out of his mind—here's Krugman, Pearlman and Bloom sitting here with him, saying he's out of his mind! So he promised to lighten up."

Crisis averted, Secret Treaties became a critical favorite and put BOC on the map—clearing the decks for "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" two years later, which brought the band its first of several gold records.

Punk rock arrived and as far as some critics were concerned that was the end of the Cult. Gushing over the arrival of "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols" in 1977, then-Washington Post writer Kenneth Turan sneered at "thudding thumpers like the decadent, mass-marketed Kiss and Blue Öyster Cult."

But BÖC doesn’t fit very easily in a list of brain-dead dino-rockers. No less a tastemaker than Lester Bangs called the Cult "the thinking man's heavy metal band." And even if punk's apostles in the music press derided the group, its creative vanguard knew better. Pearlman produced the Clash's 1978 album Give 'Em Enough Rope. "They loved the sound of '(Don't Fear) The Reaper' and they loved 'Godzilla,'" Pearlman once explained. "They were just fascinated by the sound of those records."

Very few umlauted bands had ties to highbrow punks, either. But odd as it sounds, BÖC was tight with none other than Patti Smith. Pearlman was friendly in the late 60s with the then-unknown poet, who would pal around with BÔC (then still calling itself Soft White Underbelly) at the famed New York hangout Steve Paul's Scene. "There was talk of us being her backing band, but we got our deal first," Bloom recalls. And even though Smith's primal howl would soon be timelessly paired with Lenny Kaye's nails-on-chalkboard guitar, she was a frequent collaborator with BÖC, penning lyrics for tracks like "The Revenge of Vera Gemini" from Agents of Fortune. Ties between Smith and BÔC ran deeper than just mutual respect as songwriters: She fell in love with Lanier, and for about six years in the 1970s the couple shared an Eighth Street apartment.

The Cult's streak of hits petered out in the mid 80s as the group parted ways with Pearlman and went through numerous lineup changes. (Their big brush with the charts came with "Burning For You" off 1981's Fire of Unknown Origin.) But BÖC—anchored by Bloom, Lanier and guitarist Buck Dharma—never broke up, and the band still caters to a core fan base through new records, touring for 90 to 100 shows every year. In March BÖC soldiered through nine consecutive West Coast dates from San Diego up to Tacoma.

Not that the band's contemporary impact is limited to a niche audience. BÖC songs have been covered by bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Metallica, Belle & Sebastian, Elliot Smith and R.E.M., who did a version of "Reaper." The music—and the umlaut—live on.

---

*Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning national-security journalist, author of Reign of Terror, and writes the Forever Wars newsletter.*
### David Brooks on 50 Cent
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/david-brooks-on-50-cent/
Last updated: 2005-03-16T00:00:00.000Z
Photo courtesy David Brooks.

What’s the first album you bought? When? Why?

My first record was a Jackson 5 song called "Mama’s Pearl" and a Bee Gees song the name of which I’ve now forgotten. I know it was in their rock period, before they’d lost their testicles. My first album was American Pie by Don McLean. I liked it because I understood what that song was about—every word of it. No. I had no clue. Someone once asked Don McLean what that song meant, and he said "It means I’ll never have to work again in my life."

What was the best concert you ever saw? What made it so great?

I just went to a Springsteen concert that was quite good. My history of concerts is that I bought a Lynyrd Skynyrd ticket and a week later a couple guys in the band got killed. Not long after, I bought Led Zeppelin tickets and John Bonham died. So I figured I was killing everybody and went five years not buying tickets.

I was an early adopter to the Ramones—them and Kiss. In about 1979, I saw the Ramones four times. They did the same exact concert each time.

Was it about twenty minutes long?

Pretty much. And they played all the songs straight through, with no breaks. My first concert, though, was a Kiss concert. Bob Seger opened. I guess none of these people are Jewish, other than Kiss.

Actually, Joey Ramone was Jewish. His real name was Jeffrey Hyman.

Wow, I’m such a repressed Jew. I wasn’t even aware.

If you could join any band, what would it be?

The E Street Band. But I should say something more creative, like the Carpenters or Captain and Tennille. It could be Captain and Tennille and the Jew. The Captain had his captain hat—I could have a kippah.

What's the most embarrassing album you own?

Candy Shop by 50 Cent. My kids are deeply embarrassed about that.

Name the song you loved so much you played it to death.

Born to Run—well, lots of Springsteen songs. I went through a period when I liked "Love is a Battlefield." Pat Benatar, right? I was also deeply into "Bette Davis Eyes" by someone whose name I can’t remember.

What’s the most recent album you’ve purchased?

Well, now I just use my iPod. George Strait is the most recent person I’ve downloaded. I’m doing more country as I get older and more boring.

What’s the most Jewish your music collection gets?

Somebody once gave me a CD of Jewish music, but I don’t really listen to anything exclusively Jewish. I listen to more Christian music—Catholic ritual music.

So I guess that’s the least Jewish your music collection gets, really.

Least Jewish is Wagner. Though I guess the Carpenters are pretty un-Jewish.

Have you tried Kabbalah?

No. Some very attracted woman invited me, but I couldn’t do it. It’s just not me. But I bet Jeff Goldberg has tried it.
### Any Major Dude
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/any-major-dude/
Last updated: 2005-03-07T00:00:00.000Z
*By Rabbi Justin David*

Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you, my friend, Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again, When the demon is at your door, In the morning it won’t be there no more, Any major dude will tell you.

The summer after my grandfather died, I found myself listening to this Steely Dan song over and over, pondering its lyrics like an obscure Talmudic quotation. The sense of obsession and the reference to the Talmud is not meant to be ironic. I had just completed my first year of rabbinical school, and I was in the midst of an internship as a hospital chaplain at the UCLA Medical Center, where I was assigned to the neurology unit. For months, I had been battling my own hypochondria, convinced of the malignancy of successive "cancers" that had invaded various parts of my body, all dismissed and "cured" by a single visit to the doctor. Now, I was in the position of giving pastoral comfort to patients with rare tumors of the brain, pituitary gland and nasal passages, all the while convinced that I was also afflicted with the same conditions. In the middle of this self-obsessed period in which I provided a salve for the mortality of others but remained terrified of my own, my grandfather died.

Strangely enough, when my grandmother called with the news, my first reaction was one of acceptance. I witnessed death at the hospital every day; death was what happened to people, and now, it happened to my grandfather. But that thought flew out of my consciousness as quickly as it entered. Almost spontaneously, I cried with my grandmother into the phone. Upon hanging up, I cashed in some miles and flew back to New York for shiva, cloaked in sadness and the dread of greeting my mourning family. When I returned to Los Angeles, I attended the daily minyan at the shul down the street, carrying the anger predicted by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, which I directed toward old men for their strange social habits and standoffish behavior.

Back at the hospital, I took on extra weekend shifts to make up the time I had lost during shiva. I tried to spend those hours visiting patients and writing up charts, but truthfully, my motivation flagged. I made an honest show of visiting the new admissions and making notes. But I also spent copious time "reflecting" in the quiet of the pastoral care office and taking long walks on lunch breaks. On one of those breaks, I walked into one of my choice refuges, a record store where a customer can choose any CD and listen to it on headphones. I listened through parts of Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic album, and took it home.

To my surprise, I found myself hitting the "rewind" button (it was a cassette) on the song "Any Major Dude" repeatedly. It was a surprise because the first cut on the album is "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," whose fame should easily dwarf any other track. But "Any Major Dude" grabbed me. The song engages its listener as if extending a wise, unassuming and friendly hand. "Any Major Dude" has a jounciness to it, and its acoustic guitar and keyboards give a hint of comforting rawness in a homey, Carole King sort of way.

But what the song did, in a way that no one does as well as Steely Dan, was express a stark and confounding reality through attractive music. In the world of "Any Major Dude," things fall apart, and "demons" lurk "at your door." Violence, disease, decay, heartbreak constitute the world of this song, conveying a sense of inevitable loss. And yet the song offers its own reassuring promise, as the "minor world that breaks apart" will "fall together again." The demon, ominously present at night, will be there "no more" in the morning. In a tone that is coolly redemptive, the lyrics promise a new wholeness that is as inevitable as the loss that precedes it. This is universal, yet casual, wisdom that "any major dude will tell you."

Actually, from a Jewish point of view, it’s not quite so clear what "any major dude" will say about anything, much less about suffering and how it passes. One reason why I was so intrigued by this song was its allusion, intentional or not, to a pivotal moment in Sefer Beresheet, the Book of Genesis. The context is the story of Cain and Abel, and Cain is despondent, because God "regards" Abel’s sacrifice of choice cattle and flocks, whereas God "does not regard" Cain’s sacrifice of grain. Taking note of Cain’s hangdog countenance, God offers Cain a gem of advice, "If you act well, all be uplift. And if not, sin will crouch at your door like a demon; its urge will be toward you, yet you may master it." If the English appears awkward and clumsy, it is because the Hebrew is enigmatic. According to traditional interpretation, the message is clear: human beings can control sin, and thus the outcome of our lives, with the power of our will.

On the other hand, traditional Jewish commentary seems to favor a view that, no matter what we do, we can’t fully stave off the "demon." According to the rabbis of the Midrash, God’s advice to Cain implies that one should seek refuge in study, where one is safe from "sin." As an interpretation, it seems as if the rabbis are hedging, as keeping oneself safe from "sin" is not the same as insulating one from the calamity of disease or accident. The rabbis of the Talmud pose this question explicitly, asking, "Why does a righteous person suffer affliction, while a wicked person prospers?"

Shneur Zalman of Lyady, the great Hasidic master of the eighteenth century who was the founder of Habad Hasidism, interpreted God’s advice to Cain more expansively. The "demon" may always be present, but we can greet him differently. He says, "If you have lived an upright life, you will be able to bear any misfortune or affliction." While compassionate deeds can’t ward off catastrophes, they can help us deal with them.

We confront the same problem on the High Holidays, when we chant the famous prayer U’ne tane tokef. Its haunting refrain is, "On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed." In between chanting the refrain, we meditate on the words, "Who shall live, and who shall die, who by fire, who by water, who will become impoverished and who will prosper." And then, as a relief from confronting the precarious nature of our lives, the prayer enjoins us, "Repentance, Prayer and Charity mitigate the severity of the decree."

I am continually amazed that so many people know this prayer and chant it with such conviction. Personally, I find it confounding to the point of anger. Does it mean, as God says to Cain, that if we perform such noble deeds as repentance, prayer and charity, we too can drive away the "demon" of calamity and disease? If I tried to say that from the bima, I would be skewered for insulting people’s intelligence. Can it mean, a la Reb Shneur Zalman of Lyady, that a life of righteous action provides us with the wisdom and spiritual strength to weather suffering? Personally, that is an interpretation that appeals to me. But what about the Steely Dan perspective? Perhaps U’ne Tane Tokef instructs us to focus our energies on the ways in which we can cultivate wisdom and even joy, through such worthy acts as drawing close to each other, developing a spiritual life, and doing acts of tikkun olam. The "demon" is present by night, it will pass by morning, and in the interim, we have meaningful choices to make about the course of our lives.

At the time when I first listened to this song, over and over, through Westwood, across Sunset Boulevard, and through the hills of Bel Air and the streets of West LA, I couldn’t tell you why I was drawn to it. But now, I know that I heard a reflection of the loss and pain I experienced, as well as the hope for which I yearned. For months, the fear of loss had pursued me in the form of imagined disease. And yet I knew that I needed to understand this sense of loss, or at least make peace with it, which explains why I put myself in a hospital with some of the sickest people in the nation. With the death of my grandfather, the feared and imagined losses of a healthy, newly married, 25-year-old man became real. And with this real loss, and its accompanying tears and anger, surprisingly, came an acceptance of catastrophe as something we live with. I was bereft, but whole, and this song acted as the mirror in which I could contemplate this newfound wholeness.

The demon had come to my door, but I knew that at some point, he would be there no more. And if he returned, I would know who he was, and therefore be less afraid. I felt hopeful that I had glimpsed a way of being that admitted sadness and fear, but tempered enduring despair. I was comforted because it felt real, part of a timeless experience that others had articulated with grandeur and wisdom. From my own experience, I came to believe that the relief from despair is there for all of us. But don’t rely on my testimony. Any major dude will tell you.

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*Rabbi Justin David is a dean at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, and formerly led Congregation B’nai Israel in Northampton.*
### And the Dreidel Will Rock
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/and-the-dreidel-will-rock/
Last updated: 2005-02-26T00:00:00.000Z
*By David Segal*

Since the dawn of distortion, men have fronted metal bands for simple reasons, like sex, drugs, and the joy of wrecking hotel rooms. David Lee Roth has had of his share of groupies, consumed his share of drugs, and trashed a whole Holiday Inn’s worth of suites. But, throughout his career as lead singer of Van Halen, and now as a solo artist, he’s had another ambition, one a bit more esoteric and a lot less sordid.

He’s on a mission from God. The God of Moses, to be specific. The God—let’s just spell this out here—of the Jews.

"There’s not a lot of Jewish action figures," says Roth. "Heroes for little Jewish kids are very few and far between, when it comes to belligerent enthusiasm, a confrontational red-meat approach. I’m a highly literate slut. I dig only intellectual smut."

Roth is sitting in his tour bus behind Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club, where he’s just finished a swaggering two-hour concert filled with karate kicks, crotch grabs, and Van Halen classics. He’s just now getting his breath back, drinking a Budweiser and sporting lace-up leather pants and an unbuttoned, showbiz-blue shirt studded with tiny jewels. The mane of blond hair is more silvery now, but at 47, he’s as lean as he was in the days when Van Halen was an MTV darling and you couldn’t sweep the radio for 10 minutes without running into "Jump."

As he explained in his 1998 autobiography, Crazy From the Heat, Roth relished every decadent minute of band life, but much of his style and energy came from fury over anti-Semitism and an urge to crush Jewish stereotypes. That might surprise longtime Van Halen fans, who missed the Talmudic side of Roth’s tequila Tarzan persona. But, as Roth explained on the bus, he’s never stopped celebrating the idea of Jewish identity.

"Be different," he urges. "Keep it separate. Every neighborhood’s got something to contribute, so let’s not mash it all together, let’s not shop at Beige R Us. No, I want a bagel in the morning and Chinese food at lunch, and I’d like a Russian to teach me chess, and I want a Mexican to make me tacos. And there should be a black guy on bass."

Roth pauses for a cackle. He cackles a lot—raspily, and for longer than most people cackle. It turns his eyes into maniacal slits.

"Viva la difference, as they say in Israel," he says, lifting his Bud toward the ceiling and cackling again.

There’s some madness in that laugh, and at various moments in this 15-minute interview, it’s easier to figure out when the punch lines have arrived than the logical links between the setup and the joke.

"Like it says in the Bible, turn the other cheek, kid," he effuses at one point. "Welcome to Weber Grill territory. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

What? It doesn’t really matter, because Roth can sound oracular as often as he can sound loopy, and he perpetually exudes a joy that says, The party already started, dude. His show these days is mostly Van Halen hits, including "Everybody Wants Some," "Panama," "Hot for Teacher," and "Dance the Night Away." Lead-guitar duties fall to the frizzy-haired Brian Young, whose qualifications include a stint in a Van Halen tribute band.

Onstage, Roth is a few parts Bruce Lee, a little bit of Neil Diamond, and a whole lot of porn star. He kick-spins like a cornered martial artist, leaps occasionally off the drum riser, and suggestively wedges his microphone down his pants. He keeps a bottle of Jack Daniel’s nearby, which he sips in dramatic gestures designed to look like heavy swigs. Most of the booze actually ends up sprinkled on fans near the lip of the stage.

"You do more for brunettes than anyone since Snow White," Roth leers midway through the show, pointing at a woman a few rows back. She’s invited to come forward, close her eyes and place her hand on Roth’s fly, and she obliges. Roth clasps her hand in place, grinds his hips a little, and mentions "little Elvis." Later he grabs a Japanese fighting stick and spins it like the blade of a Cuisinart. The crowd, which includes both fortyish Van Halen stalwarts and 23-year-old classic rock fans, hoot throughout the evening like drunks at spring break.

"My whole show is based on something between the guy in Led Zeppelin and chief of the village at Club Med," Roth says later on the bus. "Somewhere between 'and she’s buying a stairway to heaven...’ and 'don’t forget, two-for-one happy hour, five till February. Welcome to Diamond Dave’s tiki bunker!’ Ha ha ha ha ha ha! It’s Spider-Man meets Groucho Marx. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

Roth appreciates the gaudiness of the show, its dated crudeness, its nostalgia for teased locks and tight trousers. It’s a caricature now, of course, but it’s not a Jewish caricature, which saves him from cliché. Maybe it’s not a lesson that the greybeards in the faith want to teach in Hebrew school, but, if his career proves anything, it’s that a bar mitzvah boy can do lewd and loud as well as anyone else.

"Jewish kids take a paperback to the beach instead of a football," he says, half-approvingly. Roth might take a paperback, but he’d also persuade a dozen blondes in bikinis to join him and then shoot a raunchy music video when he wasn’t reading. If he still had the spendthrift budget of his Van Halen days, he says he’d have a Portuguese teacher on one bus, a kung fu teacher on another bus, and a chess tutor stashed somewhere else.

"I don’t want to get off the bus the same guy who got on ten weeks ago," he says, momentarily serious. "Let’s take this somewhere. Let’s take ourselves somewhere. Why would I do this again and again? To repeat? No. To improve. The same thing only better. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

And how long will Roth be on this bus?

"Until Hanukah," he says, laughing. "Eight encores, baby!"

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*David Segal is a reporter for The New York Times and a co-founder of JewsRock.org.*
### A One for the Money, a Two for the Money
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/a-one-for-the-money-a-two-for-the-money/
Last updated: 2005-02-17T00:00:00.000Z
*By Eli Attie*

Photo courtesy Michael Wylie.

It’s quite possible that Kiss, rock and roll’s P.T. Barnum equivalent, is not merely the most Jewish band in rock history but a metaphor for all of Jewish existence. Let’s take the essential traits in order:

Survivalism. Denied and disrespected at every turn, written off at about 16 different stages of their seemingly interminable career, Kiss has simply refused to die—clinging tightly to their stadium antics and greasepaint-splattered identity—even as their brand of hard rock and cartoonish camp has cycled in and out of style.

Assimilation. Once dismissed by critics as a ninth-string Led Zeppelin and Humble Pie knock-off (in fact, still dismissed by critics as a ninth-string Led Zeppelin and Humble Pie knock-off), Kiss quietly (or rather, not-so-quietly) perfected the fist-pumping, pimple-popping anthems they were accused of copying, ultimately defining the genre as much as any of their power-chord progenitors.

Ritualistic tradition. The ancient Rabbis believed in the lyrical weeping of the Shofar. The guys in Kiss swear by 18-pound codpieces and customized mirrored guitars that spew smoke and flames all the way to the rafters. Kinda similar, if you think about it.

Business acumen. OK, forgive the cheap Jewish stereotype. This much is beyond dispute: For more than three decades now, Kiss has put commerce far ahead of song-craft, cranking out lunchboxes and comic books and bobble-headed Kiss dolls with the reckless abandon of a shmata merchant’s going-out-of-business sale. Sure, the band has more gold records—24!—than any other U.S. band. They also hold more than 2,000 product licenses, for everything from credit cards to condoms to Kiss caskets (for the truly eternal fan). And as long as the checks clear, you can bet that this bunch ain’t whining about artistic integrity.

The Kiss story is, in fact, the classic Jewish immigrant’s tale. Co-founder and bass player Gene Simmons was born Chaim Witz in 1949, immigrating from Israel to Brooklyn at the age of nine, eventually changing his name so people wouldn’t think he was Jewish. (Simmons has recounted that, on seeing his very first picture of Santa Claus on a tobacco billboard, he wondered "Why’s that Rabbi smoking Kent cigarettes?") Like so many of his guitar-wielding counterparts, Simmons was mesmerized by the Beatles’ first appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," especially impressed with the effect they had on the fairer gender. After playing in a succession of mediocre bar bands, Simmons met singer and guitar player Stanley Eisen, who would soon be rechristened (for lack of a better word) Paul Stanley. By all accounts, the band they assembled was less about the music and more about finding a quick path to an Ed Sullivanized version of the American dream: money, magazine covers, groupies, and some seven-inch leather platform heels for good measure.

Now, no one has ever accused Simmons or Stanley of being brilliant songwriters or virtuoso musicians. But their concept for Kiss was nothing short of visionary, and it had all the precision and deliberation of a Napoleonic conquest. By the early 1970s, one might say that rock was nearing the end of its age of flamboyant theatricality. After Townsend and Hendrix’s guitar demolitions, after Alice Cooper’s carnival-style stage histrionics, after the New York Dolls’ campy pre-punk androgyny, there was precious little territory rock hadn’t explored, which is why rock was starting to become more authentic, more organic—with many bands eschewing the costumes and the exaggerated stage poses altogether.

Kiss’ solution was to go sharply against that grain—to cover all that theatrical ground again, and to do it all at once. Nearly every moment in their stage show was the culmination of some other band’s entire career: spitting blood one minute, breathing fire the next; smashing equipment, then launching into mind-numbing ten-minute drum solos; flying all over the stage while dodging enough smoke bombs and explosions for a full-scale Iraqi invasion—everything short of assassinating the audience, and don’t think that wasn’t discussed. Kiss elevated rock stagecraft from quasi-fantasy, which it had always been, to actual fantasy. They created cartoon-like characters that defined each band member’s image and songs, shielding their fans from anything even vaguely approaching reality or authenticity. Kiss was about relentless crowd-pleasing—and please the crowds they did, racking up a six-figure fan-club membership and becoming one of the hugest bands, and brands, since the Fab Four themselves.

But what about the music? That’s where this band’s induction has to come into question. It’s hard to find a single note in the Kiss canon that’s either original or ground-breaking. In fact, their sweat-and-spandex macho rock, replete with dueling guitar harmonies, grinding metal riffs, and an almost comic level of lyrical misogyny ("My whip is always beside me… you’ll learn to love me and my sweet pain," is a typically embarrassing snippet), came to be seen as influential only because Kiss were the most successful practitioners of the form. Yet through sheer tenacity and discipline, they delivered more than their share of arena-rock anthems back in their 70s heyday: from "Detroit Rock City," to "Shout It Out Loud," to the once-inescapable FM rock staple "Rock and Roll All Nite." And quite a few of these songs have a surprisingly enduring appeal.

But inevitably, for a band that pushed style over content, the Kiss juggernaut began to lose force. By the late 70’s, Kiss were beyond ubiquitous—they were thoroughly overexposed, like a piece of raw film. Amid all the TV specials and spin-off albums and cross-marketing deals, it was hard to see them as a rock band any longer. As many of their fans grew older, Simmons’ self-proclaimed "hairy gorilla music" started to seem, well, a little bit silly. And with the advent of punk and new wave, it became harder to justify Kiss’ overblown excess, which made Caligula look like a Trappist Monk in a bath towel.

Yet the band has soldiered on, through personnel changes and pop-cultural shifts, even the eventual removal and re-application of their once-sacred face paint—until they finally emerged, by the late 1990s, as enduring icons, as a rock institution, known as much for their non-stop pursuit of money and fame as for their fistful of hit records. Repackaged and reunited biweekly, it seems; paraded around the world for an endless series of farewell tours, Kiss can never over-exploit themselves, because exploitation was the point from the very beginning. And the band makes no apologies for that. "I’ve heard people say money is the root of all evil, but of course they’re nuts," says Simmons. "Being alive means 'I want more.’ When is enough? When they stick you six feet underground!" Not Talmudic wisdom, perhaps. But Chaim Witz’s mother has got to be proud.

When Eli Attie isn't writing freelance pieces about pop music for The Washington Post, he's a writer and producer for The West Wing.

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*Eli Attie is a television writer and producer (The Diplomat, Zero Day) whose credits also include The West Wing, House, and Billions.*
### A Night in the Life
URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/a-night-in-the-life/
Last updated: 2005-02-08T00:00:00.000Z
*By Al Aronowitz, z”l*

Writers, historians, and journalists like to report that it was Bob Dylan who introduced the Beatles to pot, but that isn’t exactly true. Dylan was in the room and he got high on that night, August 28, 1964, in Manhattan’s Delmonico Hotel. But blame for turning that historic moment into a smoke-filled evening of inhalation and laughter—that belongs to me. I brought the Fab Four and Dylan together and on the night they met, I made sure everyone got stoned out of their minds.

The author and George Harrison share a joint. Photo courtesy Al Aronowitz.

At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory or perverse, this is one of the proudest achievements of my life. It’s true that John, Paul, George, and Ringo inevitably would have discovered pot, with or without me. But to be the handmaiden to a moment with such vast implications for pop culture, that’s something. Almost single-handedly, the Beatles infected pop with psychedelia. Their music evolved, taking on dimensions and colors that have never been surpassed. They "began to compose under marijuana’s spell," said authors Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. "It didn't show very much on the next album, most of which was already composed and recorded anyway, but you could almost smell the pungent smoke on the album that was to follow."

I was uniquely suited to bring Dylan to the Beatles, and vice versa. I was friendly with dozens of great artists, musicians, and writers then and I was—and still am—a journalist. When my cover piece about the Beatles sold more copies of the Saturday Evening Post than any issue since Ben Franklin first founded the magazine, the editors sent me to England in the summer of 1964 to write a second cover story about the Beatles.

And I already knew Dylan by then. I’d written a Saturday Evening Post article about Bob, and in the course of reporting that piece I basically fell in love with guy. To me, no other artist had ever come along with such wit, perception, insight, charm, cleverness, and charisma. To me, Bob was doing more to change the English language than anybody since Shakespeare.

Arranging a face to face in August of '64 was trickier than you’d think. Initially, Dylan had no interest. To him, the Beatles were "bubblegum," and he had a natural skepticism about anything so popular. He certainly didn't want any of his concerts drowned out by teenybopper screeches. "It'll never happen," he told me. But I badgered him. I felt that Dylan’s message was almost holy and that it was my mission to encourage him to expand his audience, especially to the young. I wanted his lyrics to enlighten the same kiddies then trying to claw the clothes off the Beatles.

For a while, Lennon was just as reluctant, though for different reasons. He kept saying he wanted to wait until he was Dylan's "ego equal" before they actually shook hands. "Yeah, I wanna meet 'im," Lennon told me, "but on me own terms."

To him, Bob Dylan might not have been as important an inspiration as Elvis Presley, but Dylan's magic had stopped an entire counterculture dead in its tracks. It had stopped Lennon, too. It was after listening to Dylan's first album that John had written his autobiographical "I'll Cry Instead," intended for use in the soundtrack of A Hard Day's Night. The song never made it into the movie, but it very easily could have been written by Dylan about himself. "I've got a chip on my shoulder that's bigger than my feet," the song said. "I can't talk to people that I meet."

Originally, I assumed that the Beatles smoked pot. I had thought for sure that any artist who could make music sound as hip as they made it sound had to be a pot-smoker. Besides, both Dylan and I were certain that when it came to the chorus of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" the boys were singing, "I get high! I get high! I get high!"

Not so. As John once obligingly pointed out, it was "I can't hide! I can't hide! I can't hide!" Before they took their first puff, the Beatles didn’t differentiate between pot smokers and junkies. Like the DEA, they put grass into the same category as heroin. It took some convincing, but Lennon was ready to smoke right around the time he was ready to meet Dylan, and when the Beatles arrived at the Delmonico, I brought along both. At that point, I was only following orders. I had been standing in the family room of my house in the suburbs of New Jersey when John telephoned.

"Where iz 'e?"

"Who?"

"Dylan!"

"Oh, he's up in Woodstock, but I can get him to come down."

"Do it!"

When we were ushered into their suite, the Fab Four and Brian Epstein had adjourned from their room service table to seats in an adjoining sitting room, separated from the room with the dining table by a wide rectangular arch. From the front room near the windows overlooking Park Avenue, we all seemed to migrate back to the room service table. That's where the glasses and the wine and the liquor bottles were. Bob just wanted what he usually drinks, cheap wine.

"I'm afraid we only have champagne," said Brian, apologetically. There also were some expensive French wines and the scotch and Coke, which had become the standard Beatles drink. The Beatles immediately started making a big fuss about not having any cheap wine, and they were about to send Mal Evans out to get some Chianti or something, but Bob started getting drunk on the harder stuff. Alcohol always was Bob's number one drug of choice. When the Beatles offered some pills, I said we'd rather smoke some pot.

I still hadn't learned how to roll a joint in those days, so Dylan rolled the first. Bob wasn't much of a roller either, and a lot of the grass fell into the big bowl of fruit on the room service table.

About twenty cops were stationed in the corridor outside the door of the suite. Room service waiters kept coming in and out. Before we lit up, Bob and I suggested that we all go into the bedroom and shut the door for some privacy. Epstein and the Beatles stationed themselves at the far end of the room near the front windows, clustering around John, at the head of one of the beds. Bob handed the joint to John, who immediately handed it to Ringo.

"You try it!" John commanded.

That act instantly revealed the Beatles' pecking order. Obviously, Ringo was the low man on the totem pole. When Ringo hesitated, John made some sort of wisecrack about Ringo being his royal taster.

"Inhale with a lot of oxygen," I instructed. "Take a deep breath of air together with smoke and hold it in your lungs for as long as you can."

As Ringo kept taking hits, Bob and I waited for him to pass the joint to John, who was sitting right next to Ringo. But the Beatles were unacquainted with the rituals of pot smoking, which include passing it around. It was obvious that Ringo was going to hold onto it as if he were smoking a cigarette filled with tobacco.

I didn't want to risk the possibility that Brian and the Beatles might recoil from the idea of passing a joint from lips to lips, like a bottle shared by winos on a street corner. So soon, everybody was smoking his own joint as if it were a cigarette. After a while, the band’s publicist, Derek Taylor, got into the act, popping in and out from the suite where he was keeping at bay all the press and VIPs who were awaiting their turns to meet the Beatles.

It didn’t take long for Ringo to get the giggles. In no time at all, he was laughing hysterically. His laughing looked so funny that the rest of us started laughing hysterically at the way Ringo was laughing hysterically. Soon, Ringo pointed at the way Brian Epstein was laughing, and we all started laughing hysterically at the way Brian was laughing.

"I'm so high, I'm on the ceiling," Brian kept saying. "I'm on the ceiling..."

We kept laughing at one another's laughter until every one of us had been laughed at. There also came a certain point when Paul realized he was really thinking for the first time in his life and he also realized that this was a great occasion. He told one of the band’s buddy/roadies to get a pad and a pen and to write down everything he said. What happened to those notes I have no idea, but nearly every word that Paul uttered was jotted down that evening, from that point on.

Yes, we all probably had one of the best laughs of our lives that night. I hadn't laughed so hard since the first time I smoked. That's why, after that night at the Delmonico, whenever John wanted to smoke some pot, he would never say, "Let's smoke some marijuana," or, "Let's get stoned," or, "Let's smoke a joint" or, "Let's turn on." To Paul, George, and Ringo he would say, "Let's 'ave a larf!"

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*Al Aronowitz (z”l) was a pioneering rock journalist — the man who introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles. He died in 2005.*