With guitar and harmonica, inveterate hitchhiker, wanderer, and folk poet Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), was America’s “Dust Bowl Troubadour” and Depression-era balladeer. He wrote thousands of songs, including protest songs decrying the treatment of the downtrodden; antiwar anthems; and love songs to America, most famously the now-iconic This Land is Your Land, which he reportedly wrote as an angry rebuke to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. A figurehead in the folk movement, he provided inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including the likes of John Lennon and Bob Dylan. However, most people do not know that Woody’s wife and children were Jewish; that he purposely raised his children as Jews; and that he wrote songs about Jewish history, Jewish holidays, and the Holocaust.
Guthrie was undoubtedly familiar with Jewish life well before his marriage to Marjorie Mazia, a Martha Graham dancer (1945) and before his move to Coney Island, where they lived at 3520 Mermaid Avenue across the street from Marjorie’s parents. His manager was Harold Leventhal, the son of Orthodox Jewish immigrants; his politics were inspired by Ed Robbin, a Jewish editor with The People’s World, a Los Angeles newspaper; and Moses (Moe) Asch of Folkways Records, perhaps the chief folklorist to record Woody, had specialized in Jewish liturgical music. His real interest in Jewish lyrics, however, may be traced to the warm relationship he later developed with his mother-in-law, Aliza Waitzman Greenblatt, a prominent Yiddish poet.
Coming to America after illegally fleeing her shtetl in Ozarinetz, Bessarabia (1900), Greenblatt was an ardent Zionist who established a ZOA branch and served as national president of Pioneer Women. “Bubbe” Greenblatt, who cared for her grandchildren and served Friday night Shabbat dinners to the family, shared Woody’s passion for social justice, anti-fascism and union organizing – all causes dear to the immigrant Jewish community – and they often discussed their artistic projects and critiqued each other’s works. Through her, Woody came to identify the Jewish struggle with that of his fellow Okies and other oppressed people about whom he sang.
Enchanted by his immigrant mother-in-law’s Jewish rituals and by her stories – and by her incredible blintzes – Guthrie immersed himself into learning everything he could about Judaism, even taking several courses on Judaism at Brooklyn Community College, and his Jewish songs and lyrics were the result of his desire to pass her traditions and observances on to her grandchildren. He loved living at Coney Island, which enabled him to enjoy the bustling Jewish life on the boardwalk. He would take his young daughter, Cathy Ann, on morning walks there, have breakfast at Nathan’s, and watch the old men playing chess while arguing politics in Yiddish. Thus, in Mermaid Avenue, he wrote:
Mermaid Avenue that’s the street,
where the lox and bagels meet,
where the hot dog meets the mustard,
where the sour meets the sweet;
where the beer flows to the ocean,
where the halvah meets the pickle…
Guthrie also wrote many Jewish ditties for his children, including particularly Chanukah songs, including Chanukah Gelt; Spin Dreydl Spin; Do The Latke Flip Flip; and Hanukkah’s Flame, in which he wrote:
Hanukkah candlelight, see my flame/
shining on my window’s pane/
Come flicker ’cross my glassy glass/
and light each lonesome to pass.
As Woody’s daughter, Nora, tells it, her father wrote most of his Chanukah songs within five days “because he had bookings in December for children’s Chanukah parties in assorted Brooklyn community centers.”
Some of Guthrie’s Jewish lyrics were somber and serious, such as The Bitch of Buchenwald, a chilling ballad about the sadistic Ilse Koch written in the voice of a concentration camp inmate (“I’m here in Buchenwald, my number’s on my skin…) in which he describes seeing chimney smoke, piles of bones, and “lamp shades made from skins.” And in The Many and the Few, Guthrie displays his knowledge of Jewish history during the Babylonian captivity:
My name is King Cyrus, my order I give, you Jews can go back to your home
To build your holy temple again, in the land of Palestine.
We’ve sung and danced o’er the hot rocky roads, back to Eretz Yisroel’s land,
we worked with plow and rake and hoe, and we blessed the works of our hands.
My name is Ezra the Teacher man, I brought my scroll book along
I brought my flock to Yisroel, from that land called Babylon.
I’ll read you my Talmud Torah book, and the prophet’s dreams to you,
and you’ll be fertile and multiply, if you keep your Torah true…
My name is Judah, the Macabee, by the name of the hammer I’m called,
we’ll pray to God before every fight, till all of our enemies fall.
Appolonius, the Governor, this day I killed, and his army we did bust,
some few of his soldiers run away in the wind, but most we’ve dropped dead in the dust…
My name is Jerusalem where Judah came back, to build up my Temple once more,
to cut down the weeds and thorny brush, that grows ‘round my windows and doors.
Whole stones, whole stones, we’ll build and pray, to God as a wholehearted Jew,
God’s love the hateful many did place, in the hands of a God-loving few.
We found in our temple a little oil jug, just enough for the lamps for one night,
that one little jug burned eight whole days, and it kept our new temple in light.
Eight candles we’ll burn and a ninth one too, every New Year that comes and goes,
we’ll think of the many in the hands of the few, and thank God we are seeds of the Jews.
In the very rare exhibit displayed here, Guthrie writes heartbreaking lyrics for his daughter Cathy Ann in this unpublished April 20, 1946 work shortly before she died in a fire at age four on February 9, 1947 (the print is a bit light, as Guthrie has written in pencil):
Tragic handwritten poem by Guthrie on the loss of his young daughter.
Cathy on guitar, guitar lays on rug,
and Cathy sits playing on strings and talking: Hm hm hm hm/
This is how the little kitten sounds/ hm hm hm hm/
And this is how the mama cat sounds and the mama cat is in the lake/
hm hm hm/
and the big daddy cat sees the mommy in the water and here is how he sounds/
And he sees the little baby cat/ Hm hm hm hm/
And the little baby cat is crying/He is crying on the sand/
He is crying for his Mommy in the water/ mmm mmm mmm/
And the Daddy kitty goes this way/ mm mm mm/
And do you know what the daddy cat done?/no?/ mm mm/
No?/Don’t you?/Don’t you know?/
Did he jump into the water and pull the mama cat out?/
I don’t know/ mm mm/
I don’t know.
Aliza accepted the non-Jewish Woody as a son-in-law, but Marjorie’s more traditional father, Isidore, did not. However, Cathy’s tragic death led to a family reconciliation and later, when Guthrie was fighting Huntington’s Disease (which eventually killed him), Marjorie’s parents moved back to Brooklyn from Israel (they had made aliyah in the early 1950s) to help raise the grandchildren, including Arlo, Joady, and Nora.
Arlo – who later became famous in his own right, including writing Alice’s Restaurant and performing at Woodstock in 1971 – occasionally sang a song about the lament of his “Bubbe Greenblatt” for Cathy’s death, saying that it fit a lullaby that Bubbe often sang to the family. And, in a wonderful historical coincidences that I so love to feature in my Jewish Press articles: While Arlo’s Jewish friends went to Hebrew school, he was given bar mitzvah lessons by a “sweet young rabbi” who came to the home – Rabbi Meir Kahane!
“Rabbi Kahane was a really nice, patient teacher,” Arlo recalled, “but shortly after he started giving me my lessons, he started going haywire. Maybe I was responsible.” Apparently, Arlo was, indeed, a bit “spirited;” Woody’s affectionate nickname for his son was “dibuck” (for dybbuk).
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Known internationally as the “King of Calypso,” singer, actor, and civil rights leader, the barrier-smashing Harry Belafonte (1927-2023) was one of the first black artists to achieve widespread commercial success in the United States and he became best known for his worldwide popularization of calypso music, a Caribbean style of music that originated in Trinidad and Tobago that is characterized by highly rhythmic and harmonic vocals. Calypso (1956), his breakthrough album, became the first record by a single performer to sell a million copies, and his best-known recordings include Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) and Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora). A close confidant of Martin Luther King, he served the American Civil Liberties Union as its celebrity ambassador for juvenile justice issues. He won three Grammy Awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Tony Award; he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 1994; and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.
Although he was raised Catholic, Belafonte regularly engaged with Israeli and Hebrew culture and his life often merged with the Jewish people and their values and causes. While speaking at the Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple in New Jersey in 2016, he explained that when he joined the navy as a teen, he learned about the horrors of antisemitism and “Jews being crucified in gas chambers.” In the course of his civil rights work, he came to admire and work closely with many Jewish activists as part of the black-Jewish civil rights alliance in the 1950s and 1960s. His second marriage was to Julie Robinson, a Russian Jewish dancer and actress who became the first white member of choreographer Katherine Dunham’s all-black dance company, and his other significant Jewish connections include facilitating a meeting between Nelson Mandela and Jewish leaders (1989).
Belafonte began singing calypso songs at Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains, which launched his fame. One of his most beloved roles as an actor was as the titular Jewish angel alongside Zero Mostel in The Angel Levine, a film based on a short story by Bernard Malamud. In that film, his character is on probation until he can successfully help a Jewish tailor (Mostel) attend to his sick wife; in one scene, he dons his hat and perfectly recites the Hamotzi blessing over bread.
Record album of Belafonte singing Hebrew songs.
In My Song: A Memoir, his 2011 autobiography, he disclosed that the paternal grandfather he had never met was “a white Dutch Jew who drifted over to the islands after chasing gold and diamonds, with no luck at all.” He describes how during his childhood growing up in Harlem with an absent father, his mother, who struggled with finding work, established a warm relationship with a Jewish tailor, who taught her how to mend garments; Belafonte said that “that tailor gave me my first sense of kinship with Jews, which would deepen over time.”
One of Belafonte’s early successes was his Hebrew rendition (with an exotic Arabic-inflected pronunciation) of Hava Nagila at the classic downtown folk club the Village Vanguard. He recorded this iconic Hebrew folk song for his 1959 album Belafonte at Carnegie Hall and he frequently performed it live, proclaiming that it, along with The Banana Boat Song, were the two standout songs of his career. He boasted that “Most Jews in America learned that song from me” (and he may well be correct) and he bragged (tongue-in-cheek) that he had thereby become “the most popular Jew in America.” He also performed several other Jewish standards, including Hinei Ma Tov (U’ma Naim), which he performed with an Israeli military choir, and Erev Shel Shoshanim, which he recorded in his 1963 album, Streets I Have Walked.
Photo of Belafonte singing Hinei Ma Tov with the Israeli army choir.
Belafonte performed in Israel several times, including in 1966, when he came to Jerusalem to receive Hadassah International’s first “Citizen of the World” award during its tenth Annual Congress (which coincided with Israel’s celebration of the 3,000th anniversary of Jerusalem’s founding). He met with Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan, among others, but he emerged as a strong supporter of “Palestinian rights.” In a March 13, 2002 interview with The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, he characterized Israel’s leaders as “villains:”
The Middle East’s point of view? I dare say that as one of the earliest, at least in my circle, articulators of Israel’s right to safe borders and being a nation, but then also coupled with the fact that when I was championing all of that, Ben Gurion was around, and I got to talk with him. And I got to talk a little with Moshe Dayan, as a military figure and what his vision was for Israel and where it had to go. And what a remarkable crowd of men and women they were. Like us, they’ve lost that. They’ve now come upon a time in their democratic expansion and growth, evolution, when villains are at the helm, just like we’re experiencing…
I think that Palestine has a right to exist with the same set of rights we want to see Israel have, the same sense of security for its people, and that that debate must be held, and it must be held among Jews and Arabs first and foremost. And we must insist that those voices bring honor to the table, and do [all that we] can do to make it work.
I was quite enthusiastic when I read The New York Times a couple of days ago and saw that [U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Anan] just told Israel “Cut it out,” you know? Now, does this means that Israel is exclusive to the villainy? No. But I think that we’ve got to begin to shake the tree and be more just in how we define what’s going on and not be intimidated by what we’ve come out of traditionally…
I mean, Israel got billions of dollars from Germany, and now they sit at the doorstep of a new villainy in the lives of all their citizens. I think that money thing is a trap and we should be careful.
Belafonte was honored with awards by many Jewish organizations, including The Anti-Defamation League, The American Jewish Congress, Hadassah International, Yeshiva University, and the National Council of Jewish Women. Later in his life, however, his extreme leftist politics led him to increasingly use Judaism to denounce his political opponents, particularly black Republicans. For example, he compared National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to a “Jew” who was “doing things that were antisemitic and against the best interests of her people” and when an interviewer challenged his characterization of George W. Bush a “racist” by noting that several African Americans were highly placed in the Bush administration, Belafonte snapped that “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich [a proposition that is demonstrably false]. Color does not necessarily denote quality, content or value.”
He led two delegations to pay tribute to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, a notorious antisemite and, in a speech at the Arts Presenters Members Conference, he referred to the “new Gestapo of Homeland Security” (2006). At an appearance at Carnegie Hall in October 2017, he manifested his loathsome leftist derangement by characterizing the election of President Trump as “a mistake and I think the next mistake might very well be the gas chamber and what happened to Jews [under] Hitler is not too far from our door.” Finally, in Restoring Hope, he wrote with great admiration for prominent antisemite Louis Farrakhan: “The only one who speaks outside the system is Farrakhan. He’s captured the hearts and the imaginations of millions of black people because he’s outside the system.”
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“I’m a Jew,” Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham Zimmerman, aka Robert Allen Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, told biographer Robert Shelton in 1971. “It touches my poetry, my life, in ways I can’t describe.”
Born to an observant Jewish family, his father was president of the local B’nai Brith, his mother was president of the local Hadassah, and his Yiddish-speaking grandmother lived down the hallway as part of an extended Jewish family. Dylan had a Jewish upbringing as part of the tight-knit, small Jewish communities of Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota, growing up in a kosher home, attending cheder at the Orthodox Agudas Achim shul, and attending a religious-Zionist summer camp, Camp Herzl.
In the 1980’s, a friend of Dylan’s was learning at Shor Yoshuv, an Orthodox yeshiva in Far Rockaway, and, when Dylan came to visit, he ended up forming a deep connection with the rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld. (Dylan was said to have seriously considered purchasing an apartment near the yeshiva so that he could continue to learn there.) After a period flirting with other faiths, including Christianity, Dylan returned to Judaism when he was a guest at the Chabad Telethon in September 1989 and 1991, and, from 1986-1991, he made three appearances on the Chabad “To Life” Telethon, an annual fundraiser broadcast from Los Angeles.
Dylan playing harmonica accompanying his Orthodox son-in-law on a rendition of Hava Nagila.
While recording his second album in 1963, Dylan recorded an outtake called Hava Nagila Blues, in which he slowly sings Hava Nagila before yodeling to the sound of the harmonica (but the audio was not released until his Bootleg Series, Vol 1-3 in 1991). At Chabad’s 25th Telethon in 1989, Dylan, wearing a velvet blue yarmulka, played the harmonica accompanying his son-in-law, Orthodox musician Peter Himmelman, on a rocking version of Hava Nagila.
Many of Dylan’s songs are replete with biblical references hearkening back to his Jewish studies in childhood. For example, Forever Young (1974) begins with the first line of the Birkat Kohanim with which he was blessed every Friday night. In With G-d on Our Side, a 1963 protest song, he takes the Germans to task for having “murdered six million… in the ovens they fried”; in All Along the Watchtower (1967), the narrative and imagery are straight out of Isaiah 21:1-10, which discussed the fall of Babylon; and Highway 61 Revisited is a midrashic retelling of the Akeidat Yitzchak (the Sacrifice of Isaac), which includes the lyrics “Oh, G-d said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!’ / Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.” Most significantly, however – although, most surprisingly, the song is generally unknown, even among Jews – is Neighborhood Bully on his album, Infidels (1983), which is arguably one of the most pro-Jewish rock songs ever recorded, a powerful pro-Zionist song which, as one commentator cogently notes, “warms the cockles of the most rabid, right-wing Zionist, positing Jewish history and the State of Israel like some rock ’n’ roll Vladimir Jabotinsky:”
Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man,
his enemies say he’s on their land.
They got him outnumbered about a million to one,
he got no place to escape to, no place to run.
The neighborhood bully he just lives to survive,
he’s criticized and condemned for being alive.
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin,
he’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land,
he’s wandered the earth an exiled man
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,
he’s always on trial for just being born…
Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone,
Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon.
He’s made a garden of paradise in the desert sand,
in bed with nobody, under no one’s command.
Now his holiest books have been trampled upon,
no contract that he signed was worth what it was written on.
He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth,
took sickness and disease and he turned it into health…
Ticket to Dylan’s June 2, 2011 concert in Israel.
Dylan visited and performed in Israel on multiple occasions including his 2011 concert at Ramat Gan, when he bravely withstood pressure from the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement not to appear and ignored threats to his safety from Arab terrorists and Palestinian sympathizers. He also performed in Israel in June 1993, bringing his summer tour to Tel Aviv, Beersheba, and Haifa, and he took the stage in Israel for the final time at Tel Aviv’s Ramat Gan Stadium in June 2011, where the attendees were “overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly native-born Israelis.” There was even a time when he considered moving to the Jewish state; during one visit, he began the application process for moving his family to a kibbutz.
Photo of Dylan at the Kotel in tallit and tefillin.
Not only did Dylan perform in Israel, he also inspired the Rolling Stones to do so. According to Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood, after a concert, Dylan told him with great delight and sporting an ear-to-ear grin (Dylan was not known for such exuberant expressions, to say the least) “Next is Israel – we’re going to Tel Aviv!”
In 1983, the same year he released Infidels, Dylan visited Israel for a very important occasion: his eldest son Jesse’s bar mitzvah at the Western Wall., when he famously laid tefillin at the Kotel. He has also been periodically seen at various Orthodox shuls and yeshivas across the country for holiday services and on Shabbat, including several Yom Kippur services in Chabad shuls.
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Other leading singers who have sung in Hebrew include Johnny Mathis (Kol Nidre, in the original Aramaic); Nina Simone (Eretz Zavat Chalav U’Devash, “Land of Milk and Honey”); Julie Silver (Erev Shel Shoshanim); Idina Menzel (Mi Shebeirach); Amy Grant (Kel Shad_dai); Jack Black (Chad Gadya); Barbra Streisand (if you have never heard her soul-stirring Avinu Malkeinu, you must!); and Connie Francis, Lena Horne, Glem Cambell, Neil Diamond, Chubby Checker, and Bruce Springsteen, all of whom sang Hava Nagila.
