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.