Leonard Bernstein

08/21/2023

A. In 1945 Park Avenue Synagogue commissioned Bernstein to compose liturgy for their cantor to sing in the Shabbat morning service.

B. In 1963 Bernstein composed the symphony Kaddish, which he dedicated to victims of the Holocaust, inspired by the trial and hanging of Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

C. In 1974 Bernstein composed a ballet suite titled The Golem based on Saul Ansky’s Yiddish play of the same name. In Jewish lore, a golem is a clay creature that has been magically brought to life through Hebrew ritual incantations.

D. Composer Serge Koussevitzky told Bernstein he should change his name to Leonard S. Burns to avoid antisemitism but Bernstein decided not to do so.

E. Bernstein was hired to compose the music for the musical stage adaptation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist that became Oliver!. But he withdrew, telling the producers that he found the large nose on the Jewish character Fagin to be offensive. However, Bernstein returned to the project after Fagin’s children issued a statement saying, “It happens to be true that Fagin had a nice, big nose.”

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Hip-hop

08/14/2023

A. The Alchemist, born Alan Daniel Maman, released an album in 2015 titled Israeli Salad made up of  instrumental compositions which sampled Israeli songs. One track on that album is called Bone Thugs N’ Haifa.

B. The multi-lingual hip-hop group Hip Hop Hoodíos released a CD titled Carne Masada: Quite Possibly the Very Best of Hip Hop Hoodios which contained the songs Que Pasa in Israel, Asi Loncheamos! (Two Matzoh Balls), and Shalom Obama among others.

C. Los Serenos Sefarad (the “Sefardi Watchmen”) is a Jewish hip-hop group from Seattle which was formed by Rabbi Simon Benzaquen and Mexican-born rapper/guitarist Alejandro “Alex” Hernandez. Rabbi Benzaquen had no particular knowledge of hip-hop until he performed the conversion to Judaism of rapper Nissim Black (formerly Damian Jamohl Black).

D. Rapper Benjamin Landy Pavlon, who performs as BLP Kosher, has recorded songs and videos including Jew on the Canoe and Special K (which includes the lyrics And I'm forever smoking Nazis/I’ma pass the blunt to Anne Frank).

E. El-P, born in Brooklyn as Jaime Meline, was not raised in his mother’s Catholic faith or his father’s Jewish faith, though he noted of his Jewish ancestry that he “got none of it except a circumcision at birth.” He is an investor in the Jewish-style deli Frankel’s in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn.

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Paul Reubens z"l

08/07/2023

A. Reuben’s father Milton Rubenfeld was an American rabbi in Sarasota, Florida. Reubens noted in an interview that one of the inspirations for his Pee-wee Herman character was his father, who used to visit his synagogue’s nursery school every Friday for a Shabbat program where he would sit on the floor with the children and play games, using funny voices and silly hats to engage the children.

B. Reuben’s father Milton Rubenfeld was a pilot for the British Royal Air Force as well as the United States Army who later was a founding member of the Israeli Air Force. When his plane was shot down during the 1948 War for Independence, he bailed out and landed in the Mediterranean Sea near the Israeli coast. As he swam to shore, Israelis began to fire at him believing he was an Arab pilot. Not knowing Hebrew, he saved himself by yelling “Shabbos, gefilte fish!”

C. Reubens’s first acting experience was at the Jacobs Camp, a sleepaway camp in Florida under the Reform movement’s auspices. Reubens was cast as Motel Kamzoil in a production of Fiddler on the Roof.

D. Paul Reubens noted in a radio interview that the inspiration for his Pee-wee Herman look was a picture of himself at his bar mitzvah, where he had slicked back hair and was wearing a red bow tie. 

E. Among the running gags of Pee-wee’s Playhouse was the line “If you love ‘X’ so much, why don't you marry it?” This led to an episode where Pee-wee Herman married a salad. Originally the producers planned to have him marry an Italian salad, which included non-kosher pepperoncini. But Pee-wee told the producer that as a Jew he didn’t want to intermarry so he insisted that the wedding be performed with a fruit salad instead.

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Sinéad O’Connor, RIP

07/31/2023

A. In 1984, Sinéad O’Connor spent five months in Israel as a volunteer on Kibbutz Hulata, where she picked citrus fruit and began developing her songwriting skills.

B. O’Connor was scheduled to perform in a peace concert arranged by Israeli and Palestinian women’s groups in Jerusalem in 1997 at a festival called “Two Capitals, Two States,” but she canceled after receiving death threats from members of (now Israeli Minister of National Security) Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Kahanist organization The Ideological Front.

C. Sinéad O’Connor named one of her sons Ne’viim, the Hebrew word for “prophets.”

D. O’Connor’s father John Oliver “Seán” O’Connor was a barrister in Dublin. He worked for a law firm that was headed by a nephew of Israeli president Chaim Herzog, who was was born in Ireland.

E. Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky was a respected rabbi in Springfield, Illinois. But when his son Herschel decided to become a clown the rabbi was angry, as this was not what he considered a proper profession for a Jewish boy, leading the rabbi to disown his son, now known as Krusty. Sinéad O’Connor was in college at the time, and she once performed on campus, singing the song Tears of a Clown, after which she raised a picture of Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky and tore it into many pieces as she uttered the words, “Oy vey, Rabbi. So he’s a clown. Is that such a shonde?”

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