But not Cohen: He’s featured on the album’s cover, dressed in a suit and a tie, donning his trademark fedora and wearing dark shades, sitting on a blue wooden chair in a Los Angeles backyard, grinning slightly, and reading a book. It’s a fitting pose for the man he’s become, the kind and pensive dispenser of profound truths who earns in acclaim what he lacks in raw popularity; he’s the only entertainer around who looks as natural receiving Spain’s top literary award from Prince Felipe as he does sharing the dais with Madonna and John Mellencamp at the 2008 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony that honored all three. Even that almanac of cool, the Financial Times, recently saw fit to lionize St. Leonard, calling him “a sage for the post-crisis age.”

It wasn’t a role he was preordained to play. Throughout his life, it often seemed as if Cohen’s greatest talent was for falling out of step. In 1965, when Dylan plugged in and Jim Morrison spent the summer subsisting on LSD and baked beans and forming the Doors, Cohen, then still a poet, appeared on Canadian TV. “I wake up every morning and check if I am in a state of grace,” he told a television crew. “If not, I go back to bed.” He was in his mid-thirties when he first stepped out on stage with a guitar, an experience so traumatic that he fled after a few bars and only came back when Judy Collins, his friend and patron, soothed him and accompanied him back into the limelight. When his career finally took off, mainly in Europe, he realized that the musical milieu with which he most firmly belonged, the singer-songwriters, was rapidly becoming passé. Young fans now wanted their music loud and spirited; Cohen’s was sad and soulful.

Many also found it depressing. In one of his songs, “Field Commander Cohen,” he poked fun at his public image, calling himself “the patron saint of envy/ and the grocer of despair.” An attempt to market him as a mainstream singer led to a collaboration with Phil Spector that ended with Spector holding a gun to Cohen’s head, hijacking the master tape, and releasing his version without Cohen’s consent. Spector’s arrangements took Cohen’s music from folk to funk; the singer, enraged, called the album “a catastrophe,” and the public and the critics agreed. This was in 1977; Cohen released another album, the largely forgotten Recent Songs, two years later, but by 1984 he felt ready for a breakthrough. He submitted nine new songs to his label, Columbia Records, including “Dance Me to the End of Love,” “If It Be Your Will,” and a biblically themed anthem he had hoped would catch on, “Hallelujah.” The label’s boss, the notoriously abrasive Walter Yetnikoff, listened to the tracks, took a long look at his 50-year-old artist, and said, “Look, Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.” He seemed to be speaking for the music industry in general; the album was shelved and eventually picked up by a much smaller label.

How, then, to explain Leonard Cohen’s unlikely third act, and the accolades he now enjoys from the same people who had once dismissed him as too grim for public consumption? Working on a book about Cohen, I asked myself this question frequently, and the best answer I found is right there in the title of his new album, Old Ideas. Although he’s rightfully celebrated for his grace with notes and his dexterity with lyrics, his ideas are the true engine of Cohen’s survival. In a pursuit like rock ’n’ roll, which is entirely devoted to redemption, Cohen’s ideas were not only old but radical. His peers all insisted that salvation was at hand. To go to a Doors concert was to stare at the lithe messiah undressing on stage and believe that it was entirely possible to break on through to the other side. To see Cohen play was to gawk at an aging Jew telling you that life was hard and laced with sorrow but that if we love each other and fuck one another and have the mad courage to laugh even when the sun is clearly setting, we’ll be just all right. To borrow a metaphor from a field never too far from Cohen’s heart, theology, Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, and the rest were all good Christians, and they set themselves up as the redeemers who had to die for the sins of their fans. Cohen was a Jew, and like Jews he believed that salvation was nothing more than a lot of hard work and a small but sustainable reward.

The Jewish messiah, it turned out, was a gaunt poet with a guitar who promised not to whisk us away to some other, better world but to teach us how to come to terms with this one. Cohen’s peers all generated heat, but it was Cohen we’d always turned to for light, sometimes literally, like in the summer of 1970, in the English Isle of Wight, the former home of Queen Victoria and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and a favored retirement spot for naval officers and other assorted Empire types. The island, with its salt-stricken limestone cliffs, looks like the footprint of some enormous animal long extinct, and a few cool cats from London thought the primordial spot could be the British equivalent of Yasgur’s farm. They obtained the necessary permissions and invited the usual suspects. One day, late in August, they arrived: Hendrix and the Doors, Joni Mitchell and Miles Davis, Jethro Tull and the Who all set up in trailers just behind the enormous makeshift stage and awaited their turn to play.

Continue reading: The troublemakers

Barry Feinstein, Photographer of Defining Rock Portraits, Dies at 80 [NYT]

Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by water and who by fire,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague,
Who by strangulation and who by stoning,
Who shall have rest and who shall wander,
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued,
Who shall be at rest and who shall be tormented,
Who shall be exalted and who shall be brought low,
Who shall become rich and who shall be impoverished.

—“U’Netaneh Tokef,” by Amnon of Mainz

For a while I preferred Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah,” which, like many covers, was strangely more authentic when not performed by the composer who created it, to the one Leonard Cohen himself recorded with all its production and flourish. I used to go see Jeff sing at Sin-é on St Marks Place in Manhattan sometimes, at least two decades ago, and his falsetto and acoustic guitar were a much better weapon against love and God above. And I remember when people like Tommy Mottola from Columbia Records and Clive Davis from Arista started showing up in their black Town Cars that would sit double-parked on the narrow streets outside, these guys would be taking up so much space in this small room, everyone was so skinny and grungy and they were big and fat in their pinstripe suits, and soon enough—soon enough: Who shall perish by water? Jeff drowned while recording in Muscle Shoals.

And I realized I liked the Cohen version of “Hallelujah” better than the gazillion others because it of course sounded like the High Holy Days, like an authentic attempt to connect with a time when God was real to me and maybe to Cohen too—to age 7 or so. The big bombastic chorus was most authentically shul-like. Not temple-like or even synagogue-like: I had it right the first time. That song is to Judaism what “Like a Prayer” is to Catholicism: It’s the heavenly sound of sin. And “Who by Fire” is Cohen’s rendering of Amnon of Mainz in a hipster beret with every possible way to die—it’s like the cumulative opening scenes of Six Feet Under in a song: Who by autoerotic asphyxiation? Who by driver in next car text-messaging? Who by mob hit?

OK, I lied. Leonard Cohen is not so graphic. And he’s deep. (What I really think is that he’s, like, deep) Like this: “Who by avalanche?/ Who by powder?/ Who for his greed?/ Who for his hunger?” He does not seem like a guy with a sense of humor.

I have always thought of Leonard Cohen as the Jewish Bob Dylan. Know what I mean? Cohen is Robert Zimmerman on the road not taken, or maybe he stopped short at the fork and thought: Fuck it, I’m literary, I’m allegorical, I’m liturgical, and folk music is not for me. I see Cohen as Robert Zimmerman with a different affect, what he would have been like if the coffeehouse scene and all those puritanical god-fearing peace-loving frizzy-haired farmers’ daughters and college coeds on Fourth Street had made him just a little more nauseated, if Dylan had gone urbane.

All of which is to say that unlike everyone I know, I am not a huge Leonard Cohen fan. Nothing against him, nothing for him, just not my thing. Deep down, I’m sincere. Actually, on the surface and in the middle, I’m sincere. That is not a Leonard Cohen emotion. Dylan is either downright mean or totally sweet, but Cohen is just embarrassed about getting caught with a soft spot for some girl—he’s the guy who is mesmerized at the sight of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and cries through the hill-of-beans speech at the end of Casablanca but walks around sneering and hissing so no one will know he has half a heart. He can never leave a tender moment alone: He can’t ask if someone truly cares for music without throwing in his sarcastic “Do ya?” And he cannot remind us that love is an incurable malady without saying of any elixir that “it’s all been cut with stuff,” like we couldn’t handle an uncut and overwhelming thought that heartbreak is unbearable. He cannot even report that the Grim Reaper has arrived—and may do so in many miserable ways—without reducing it to a joke, to a secretary passing the awful news of imminent death on to her bossy boss: “And who shall I say is calling?”

Where Bob Dylan is consumed with nastiness, can compose entire songs that are pretty much about what a drag it is to be with someone or anyone or everyone, Leonard Cohen likes the small jab. He’s the annoying elbow; Dylan will just tell you he needs the entire row or car or airplane or world to himself. Hence a cult following versus one of the most significant singers or songwriters or cultural figures ever.

Also: In the movie Martin Scorsese made about Dylan, No Direction Home, in all 10 hours of it, not once does it mention that he’s Jewish. And kind of the way the lack of a single female character in Lawrence of Arabia makes you notice that there is something sort of girly about Peter O’Toole, Dylan seems Talmudic and rabbinical in that epic filmic study.

Oh, but so what? The point of all this was really to say something about music and redemption, because it’s about to be Yom Kippur. I can’t stand synagogue, but I like prayer and repentance and tossing—perhaps even throwing—my sins away. I like the harshness and intensity that would ideally accompany all this atonement activity, and it makes me sad to realize that those of us who most need to connect with a big idea—like God—are the least likely to be able to manage it. God’s presence is inversely proportional to his necessity, it always seems. Complicated crazy people will tell you they believe in God, but they are usually hedging. Like, see you in heaven if you make the list.

Dr. Gregory House put it most succinctly: There can’t be an afterlife, because that means that all this is only a test.

I cannot figure out how it is that in a world that is devoid of divinity, and in which science didn’t even become spiritual until the theory of relativity, it took us so damn long to invent rock ’n’ roll, which is the way the faithless find their way into something like belief and meaning and hope. And there is no way that Vivaldi or Beethoven could have done in hours for anyone what “Rock Around the Clock” at long last did for everyone in 1956.

So, humanity had to starve for a very long time before that. The closest thing I have experienced to the exhilaration of the first time I heard “Mystery Train” is reading the poetry of the obviously deranged Yehuda Halevi. And by way of wishing one and all an easy fast, I offer you his words, in “The Home of Love,” and wish you redemption, that you may live to sin again:

Ever since You were the home of love for me, my love has lived where You have lived. Because of You, I have delighted in the wrath of my enemies; let them be, let them torment the one whom You tormented. It was from You that they learned their wrath, and I love them, for they hound the wounded one whom You struck down. Ever since You despised me, I have despised myself, for I will not honour what You despise. So be it, until Your anger has passed, and again You will redeem Your own possession, which You once redeemed.

• Egypt’s de facto ruler asserted, “The security situation in the Sinai is 100 percent safe.” It’s true, they’ve gone almost two weeks without an attack on the pipeline. [Ynet]

• “The start of the General Assembly each year is the Super Bowl of the U.N. spy games.” Oh, so much fun. [AP/MSNBC]

• The new, optimistic issue of Text/Context, a joint venture between New York Jewish Week and Nextbook Inc., has dropped. [Text/Context]

• A U.S. diplomatic delegation in the West Bank was angrily accosted by an organized group protesting the aid freeze. [AP/WP]

• Faced with Medicaid shortages, some states want to cut (sigh) circumcision funding. Bad idea, say doctors. [Live Science/MSNBC]

Contributing editor Ben Greenman reflects on Bob Dylan’s career of pilfering. He hints at this in his headline, but one of the staunchest examples to me is “Boots of Spanish Leather,” a pretty clear rip-off of his own “Girl of the North Country,” in turn a rip-off of English folk standards.

• One member of the U.N. Security Council is not going along with a new resolution to sanction a regime that could be said to be brutally occupying its own people. I refer, of course, to the Syrian regime, and Russia is the member that won’t act. [AP/WP]

• The Simon Wiesenthal Center has a point: Ben-Hur was Jewish, guys. [LAT]

• “Please Do Not Sit On This Chair.” Indeed. [FP Turtle Bay]

• Are some of Bob Dylan’s paintings at his new Gagosian show basically rip-offs of random photographs? You guys are aware that he didn’t write an original melody for the first five years of his career, right? [NYT ArtsBeat]

• Jews get their own bacon, and it’s chicken skin. [NYT]

• Daniel Maimon Kirschenbaum is a New York attorney who specializes in suing restaurants. [NY Post]

• Tevi Troy considers new books by Sen. Joseph Lieberman and David Horowitz. [Jewish Ideas Daily]

• Ryan Braun and Ian Kinsler both joined the 30-30 club this season. The third Jewish member? Shawn Green. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• John Judis argues the United States should have supported the Palestinian resolution. [TNR]

• One of the most prominent hard-right French politicians is a Jewish guy. [JPost]

• Bad Tony Blair. [Ynet]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Jacob Silverman on a newly translated Imre Kertész novel. [LA Review of Books]

• A Los Angeles bookstore tells the story of its neighborhood. [Forward]

Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.

Bob Dylan has his own official Website, of course, which contains things like lyrics to all his songs. But the leading (albeit unofficial) site for Dylan guitar tablature—for transcriptions of the music that accompany the lyrics—is, appropriately, Dylanchords.com (now Dylanchords.info, an “unofficial mirror” created in response to music publishers’ objection to tab sites). You can visit now to find the tabs on hundreds and hundreds of Dylan’s songs. That is, assuming you are not trying to access the site from Israel.

That’s right! A year ago, right after the flotilla raid, the site’s proprietor, a Norwegian-born musicologist and programmer named Eyolf Østrem, shut down his site to those trying to access it from Israeli IP addresses; they instead are told that they are being blocked “as a contribution to a cultural boycott of the state of Israel—a long overdue reaction to the absurd inhumanity that is demonstrated in its actions and that goes against everything that I and this site stands for.” It adds, “The boycott is not directed against individuals of Jewish descent or religion, but against the state of Israel and its actions.” (Thanks to my friend B.J. for pointing this out.) In a series of blog posts from around that time, Østrem expands on his decision. (Mr. Østrem: Get in touch, would love to chat!) Clearly Israel does go against everything he stands for. But his site? That is, Dylan? That is more dubious.

Østrem’s first post about the boycott was called “Neighbourhood Bully indeed,” a reference to “Neighborhood Bully,” a song off Dylan’s 1983 album Infidels. Written in the wake of Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak (an act widely condemned at the time and widely celebrated now), in it Israel is the titular neighborhood bully—except, of course, it’s not at all. Sample verse: “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.” The song is very obviously ironic, although apparently not obviously enough for Østrem.

In an essay about the song, contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg quotes a Dylan scholar: “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.” Adds Goldberg, “You have to deal with Dylan as a Jew and not as an ordinary, temporizing, self-conscious Jew—but a Jew with dangerous feelings.” Østrem, of course, fails to do this, to acknowledge that the man to whom he has devoted his site feels quite differently about the Jewish state. Indeed, click on Dylanchords’s link for “Neighborhood Bully,” and you are directed not to its tabs but to a blog post about it entitled, “Bob Dylan’s racist song.” (Østrem did tab it, though: Here it is.)

In fairness, “Neighborhood Bully” was 30 years ago. How does Dylan feel about Israel now? Does he, for example, join Østrem in his cultural boycott? Presumably no, given the concert he played in Tel Aviv last week.

Neighborhood Bully

My Back Pages
Related: Subterranean Homeland Blues [Jewsrock/Jewcy]

• “I don’t know if the U.S. has another option,” President Abbas said, “but if it does, we will not go to the U.N.” Something tells me the U.S. will find another option. [Ynet]

• Syria’s President Assad gave his first address in two months, offering “national dialogue.” [NYT]

• According to Egyptian reports, the investigation into Ilan Grapel’s alleged espionage continues. [JPost]

• The Holocaust memorial in Salonika, Greece—once home to a gigantic Jewish population—was vandalized with swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti. [JTA]

• Dylan plays Tel Aviv. And apparently not everyone had received the memo about how he totally, utterly lost his voice. [Haaretz]

• This is what right of return actually means. [Salon]

• Justin Bieber has the name Yeshua (that would be “Jesus”) tattooed in Hebrew on his ribs. Get over it. [Yahoo!]

• This portentous “Letter to President Obama” about the peace process has the man-bites-dog signature of former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. [NYRB]

• “Your mother took off her Jewish badge, and I took off my gay badge, and we got married.” Sounds like a great new film about to open. [NYT]

• An incredible story of dissidence and violent suppression within the Hasidic community. [Forward]

This weekend, in Bethel, New York, Phish performed “Quinn the Eskimo” a few miles from where Bob Dylan recorded it. (And I was there.)

• Bibi’s seven talking points. [Ben Smith]

• Trouble in paradise: A Hamas strongman in Gaza is pissed at the group’s leadership for its Fatah alliance and therefore its implicit backing of talks with Israel. [AP/WP]

• Frequent Scroll contributor Dan Klein has a great profile Center for Jewish History founder Bruce Slovin. [JTA]

• Excellent Christopher Caldwell essay on BHL. [Bookforum]

• The last Jews … of Delhi! [Reuters/JI Daily]

Well I mean what else?

My grandmother’s voice possessed a haunting accent—face always set in a half-despairing expression. Life for her hadn’t been easy. She’d come to America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right on the edge of a big body of water. Originally, she’d come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town, across the Black Sea—the sea that the ancient Greeks called the Euxine—the one that Lord Byron wrote about in Don Juan. Her family was from Kagizman, a town in Turkey near the Armenian border, and the family name had been Kirghiz. My grandfather’s parents had also come from that same area, where they had been mostly shoemakers and leatherworkers. My grandmother’s ancestors had been from Constantinople.

We learn two things from this. One: Bob Dylan, who was born 70 years ago today, is descended from Turkish Jews. (Interesting!) Two: He consciously traces his lineage this way, which means some part of himself still, as of last decade, saw himself as a Jew, or as coming from Jews.

Does this matter? Who the hell knows?

As the 2006 Todd Haynes film I’m Not There conveyed perhaps better than any other artifact of Dylanology, you cannot believe a word Dylan says—never more than when he is talking about himself. Is that story really his grandmother’s story? Probably. Does he identify with her Turkish Jewish heritage? Maybe. Is he even technically Jewish at this point? I’d doubt it: He famously converted to Christianity in the late ‘70s, and has since given it up and made the odd appearance in shul, but I wouldn’t wager that he has gone through the process necessary to become a Jew again. “I is someone else,” wrote Rimbaud, and that is the shape-shifting costume that Dylan has always worn during a career now entering its sixth decade. (“They say, ‘Sing while you slave,’ I just get bored.”)

But here are some facts. Bob Dylan was born to and raised by Jewish parents in a Jewish milieu, complete with bar mitzvah, in Hibbing, Minnesota. He made his name in New York’s early-1960s folk scene, which was to an almost hilarious extent dominated by Jews (record exec Lou Levy, folk music aficionado Izzy Young, manager Albert Grossman, magazine editor Irwin Silber, and on and on). He spent the first half of his career taking pre-existing genres, tropes, and even tunes and assimilating them into his act and his identity, and the latter half as the wanderer par excellence: Jewish archetypes both. He is also—in my opinion, and certainly many others’—the best and most important popular American artist of the past half-century. And there is surely at least some extent to which the Jews get to claim him.

Back to his grandmother. “She was filled with nobility and goodness,” Dylan says quite early on in the book, before he has fully described her, “told me once that happiness isn’t on the road to anything. That happiness is the road. Had also instructed me to be kind because everyone you’ll ever meet is fighting a hard battle.” It’s great advice. You’ve heard the first before, no doubt, from any number of people. And the second is attributed to Plato. Sigh. When you’re talking about Bob Dylan, there are no truths outside Bob Dylan.

Related: Dylan: Tangled Up in Jews [Washington Jewish Week]

“Homeward Bound”: For Israel.

“The Sound of Silence”: For the Israeli left.

“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”: For the myriad failures of the peace process.

“Loves Me Like a Rock”: That there may one day be peace at the Temple Mount.

“Mrs. Robinson”: For Mary Robinson, Israel’s favorite U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“Old Friends”: For Fatah and Hamas, apparently.

“I Am A Rock”: For Israel’s strength and the fact that it is an island of democracy in a sea of dictatorships (or, if you prefer, for Israel’s immobility and international isolation).

“One Man’s Ceiling Is Another’ Man’s Floor”: For Ehud Barak (get it, cause he’s short?).

“Keep the Customer Satisfied”: For ex-prime minister Ehud Olmert, who at least always did this in his real estate schemes.

ENCORE:

“Still Crazy After All These Years”: For Bibi.

“Me and Julio Down by the School Yard”: For Juliano Mer-Khamis (lyrics adjusted accordingly).

“Graceland”: For the Messiah.

Paul Simon May Perform in Israel [Ynet]
Earlier: Dylan Plays Israel: A Suggested Setlist

“Simple Twist of Fate”: For every Israeli sports team that has tried, and almost succeeded, and eventually failed to advance in any important international tournament.

“Maggie’s Farm”: For former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is always on the lookout for a good real estate deal.

“Somebody Touched Me”: For former President Moshe Katsav.

“I Shall Be Released”: For Marwan Barghouti, the popular Palestinian leader, currently languishing in an Israeli prison.

“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”: For Defense Minister Ehud Barak, quitter extraordinaire.

”You Gotta Serve Somebody”: For the evangelical Christian tour groups.

“It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”: For every child, Israeli and Palestinian, needlessly dying while leaders keep on missing opportunities and breaking promises.

“Subterranean Homesick Blues”: For Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier held in some subterranean basement in Gaza, homesick and, more importantly, probably actually sick.

ENCORE:

“Gates of Eden”: For the Messiah, who has not come yet.

“The Mighty Quinn”: Because when He does come, everybody’s gonna jump for joy (and maybe he’ll even be an Eskimo).

“Girl From the North Country”: For Golda Meir, Wisconsin’s own and still a rock star.

Dylan Show Confirmed for June in Ramat Gan [JPost]

• A letter bomb scare—which turned out to be false—caused the evacuation today of a branch of an Israeli bank in midtown Manhattan. [JTA]

• A Joan Rivers joke about Sarah Palin cost Joan Rivers a booking on Fox News, says Joan Rivers. [Arts Beat]

• New Yorkers! Go, tonight, to see Nextbook Press author David Lehman and novelist Rick Moody discuss Bob Dylan at the 14th Street Y. [Nextbook Press]

• A hodgepodge of journalists and ex-officials, including Peter Beinart, Andrew Sullivan, and Chas Freeman, signed a letter calling on the United States to support the Palestinians’ U.N. draft resolution condemning settlements. [Ben Smith]

• This article about the neighborhood of Murray Hill and its inhabitants is the most Jewish article that doesn’t explicitly refer to Jews ever written. [NYT]

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in pop, 3.5-minute form.

Most of these people had never met Debbie Friedman. Many had never even seen her perform live. They had only heard her music on recordings or sung her compositions in synagogue. Yet they grieved as if they had lost a close friend.

More than perhaps any other Jewish musician of the past 40 years, Friedman reached listeners in an extremely personal and intimate way. She helped pioneer the participatory, sing-along style of musical worship that now characterizes liberal congregations across North America. She also awakened listeners to a particular strain of Jewish spirituality—inclusive, progressive, and above all accessible—that they had either sought in vain, or could not articulate clearly enough to pursue alone.

In the late 1960s, when Friedman first began writing and performing, musical change had begun to infiltrate the nation’s synagogues. A new generation of rabbis, eager to reach young congregants who were alienated by traditional Hebrew prayer and nusach, or liturgical music, began commissioning services that borrowed from folk, rock, and jazz. At the same time, the rapidly expanding Reform summer-camp movement offered a forum for young Jewish musicians with a taste for socially conscious folksong to experiment with material that owed more to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan than it did to traditional hazzanut, or cantorial performance.

Born in 1951 in Utica, New York, and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, Friedman’s own tastes ran to Judy Collins and Peter, Paul, and Mary. From an early age, she said she yearned for a more vibrant alternative to what she once described to the New York Times as the “dull and passive” services of the Reform and Conservative synagogues her family attended.

She picked up the guitar while working at a Zionist summer camp in Wisconsin, and she soon began writing and sharing her own music at Reform synagogues and camps. Her peers and partners included Michael Isaacson, who helped invent the Jewish camp song and folk service at Camp Kutz before embarking on a distinguished career as a composer of both liturgical and commercial music, and Jeff Klepper, who studied songwriting with Friedman at Kutz in 1969 and who, along with Dan Freelander, founded the popular folk duo Kol B’Seder.

By the early 1970s, these and other participants in the burgeoning American nusach movement were exerting an influence well beyond summer-camp circles. Their use of mixed Hebrew and English lyrics, pseudo-folk melodies, and simple guitar accompaniment, along with their emphasis on participatory unison singing, began to filter into Reform synagogues, gradually displacing the more formal format of a cantor accompanied by a choir and organ that had previously been favored.

But like her predecessor and Hasidic analog, Shlomo Carlebach, Friedman possessed a personal warmth and charisma that set her apart and earned her a particularly devoted following. She also continued to break new ground throughout her career. A lifelong feminist who aspired to the goal of kol isha for col isha, the voice of woman for every woman, she was an early proponent of using gender-neutral language, and her own experience with recurring, and often debilitating, illness from the late 1980s onwards led her to pioneer the music-driven healing services that have become a staple in many communities. Her setting of the “Mi Shebarach” has been adopted as a communal prayer for healing by congregations across the country, just as her havdala melody is now the standard in most Reform synagogues (even though many who sing it don’t know its provenance).

Still, Friedman’s legacy is not entirely unmixed. Even as illustrious a collaborator as Isaacson now laments the extent to which the simple folk style that he and Friedman helped popularize has elbowed more traditional, and often classically influenced, liturgical music off the stage, leaving many younger congregants ignorant of their larger musical heritage. (Ironically, in 2007, Friedman—who had neither cantorial training nor a college degree—was appointed to the faculty of the School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where she taught both rabbinical and cantorial students.) And there are those who remain skeptical of the New Agey, “kumbaya” quality that adheres to so many of the guitar-wielding song-leaders who have followed in her footsteps.

Yet Friedman herself never inspired anything but gratitude and devotion among those who knew her or her music. Indeed, she seems to have lived the lyrics to one of her most popular songs, “Lechi lach,” a song that now seems a fitting tribute to a woman who was both a guide and a blessing to the many people whose lives she touched.

Lechi lach to a land that I will show you
Lech l’cha to a place you do not know
Lechi lach on your journey I will bless you
And you shall be a blessing, you shall be a blessing
You shall be a blessing lechi lach

Lechi lach and I shall make your name great
Lech l’cha and all shall praise your name
Lechi lach to the place that I will show you
Li-simchat chayim, li-simchat chayim
Li-simchat chayim lechi lach.
And you shall be a blessing, you shall be a blessing
You shall be a blessing lechi lach.

But think of the music Sachs leaves out. What do we do with George Gershwin and Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, with the songs belted out by Fanny Brice in the Ziegfeld Follies or Lou Reed at Max’s Kansas City—the whole messy sprawl of 20th-century American pop music history, which, from I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” to I’ve Gotta Be Me” to “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)” has been inflected by the Jewish genius for passing and pastiche? And where, for that matter, does it leave Serge Gainsbourg, Israeli techno, Jonathan Richman, Yo La Tengo, or Ofra Haza? Or ”Hanukkah in Santa Monica”?

Perhaps a better answer to the Jewish musical conundrum is a famous quip. The story goes that the composer Jerome Kern and the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II were discussing the possibility of a musical based on the life of Marco Polo. Hammerstein said to Kern, “Here is a story laid in China about an Italian and told by Irishman. What kind of music are you going to write?” Kern replied, “It’ll be good Jewish music.”

Here, then, is our list of the 100 Greatest Jewish Songs. Some were created by Jews, as Jews, for Jews. Some are by Jews pretending to be gentiles—or by gentiles pretending to be Jews. If history has taught us anything, it’s that Jewish music is a dizzyingly broad and fluid category, encompassing an extraordinary range of sounds and styles and ideas and themes, from the sacred to the secular—from the normatively Jewish to the Jew-ish to the seemingly not-at-all-Jewish. Our list includes a bit of everything: sacred songs and synagogue staples and Yiddish ballads and Broadway showstoppers. There’s even some disco and hip-hop. All of them are great songs—and good Jewish music.

CLICK HERE TO SEE A LIST OF THE 100 SONGS ON ONE PAGE.

1. “Over the Rainbow” (1939)

In 1900, L. Frank Baum wrote a strange, 259-page novel about a Kansas farm girl who travels to a magical land. Critics couldn’t help reading it as a Gilded Age political allegory, but Baum insisted it was simply a children’s fairytale. Thirty-nine years later, a movie mogul hired a pair of Tin Pan Alley pros—a cantor’s son from Buffalo and a Lower East Side lefty—to write a theme song for the novel’s film adaptation. The result was a grandly orchestrated echt-Hollywood ballad, crooned by the movie’s 16-year-old starlet to a little black doggie on a barnyard set filled with clucking chickens.

And it was the most beautiful Jewish exilic prayer ever set to music.

In formal terms, “Over the Rainbow” is flawless, lit up by Harold Arlen’s luscious chromaticism and startling octave leaps. Yip Harburg’s lyrics are a triumph of artful artlessness: “Somewhere over the rainbow/ Way up high/ There’s a land that I heard of/ Once in a lullaby.” Call that land Oz, if you’d like. Or call it Israel. (For that matter, call it Miami Beach or Shaker Heights or the Upper West Side.) Any way you slice it, the story “Over the Rainbow” tells is the oldest Jewish story of them all: There’s no place like home. (JR)

2. “Hava Nagila” (1918)

Harry Belafonte has sung it. So has Chubby Checker and the Boss. Dick Dale shredded it; Lionel Hampton swung it. It’s been Latinized, technoized, and Bollywoodized. It’s the Little Freylekh That Could—the Jewish party song that belongs to the world.

The history of “Hava Nagila” is shadowy. The tune is thought to have originated in 18th- or 19th-century Eastern Europe as a niggun, or mystical musical prayer, possibly among the Sadigorer Hasidic sect. By 1915, the melody had migrated to Palestine, where it was transcribed by the musicologist and folklorist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, who was then serving as a bandmaster in the Ottoman Army. Three years later, he played the song in a concert commemorating the British victory over the Turks. Idelsohn added a Hebrew text based on some biblical verses, and “Hava Nagila” was born.

To millions who know no better, “Hava Nagila” is Jewish music. Of course no musical culture, particularly one as rich and variegated as ours, can be represented by a single tune. Still, it’s hard to imagine another song doing the job so well. Like all great dance music, “Hava Nagila” puts the emphasis on joy and community—on the ecstatic fellowship forged by an infectious tune and insistent beat. “Hava nagila, hava nagila/ Hava nagila ve-nismeha/ Hava neranena, hava neranena/ Hava neranena ve-nismeha” (Let us rejoice, let us rejoice/ Let us rejoice and be glad/ Let us sing, let us sing/ Let us sing and be glad).” That’s not a half-bad philosophy of music or, for that matter, of life. (JR)

3. “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965)

U.S. Highway 61, wrote Bob Dylan in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One, “begins about where I came from,” stretching from southern Minnesota, near Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, to New Orleans. “Highway 61 Revisited” begins a bit further afield. “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’/ Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on,’ ” Dylan sings in the opening measures, as the song settles into a bluesy lope.

As always with Dylan, it’s impossible to untangle the strands of autobiography, mythology, and carnival barker gibberish. Many commentators have pointed out that Dylan’s own father was an Abraham—Abe Zimmerman—and that the songwriter’s retelling of the binding of Isaac may have personal resonance. But what is a Dylanologist to make of Georgia Sam, Mack the Finger, Louie the King, and the other cartoon characters that populate the song? And what about the burst of biblical mumbo-jumbo in the song’s fourth verse?:

Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren’t right
My complexion she said is much too white
He said come here and step into the light he says 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

As always with Dylan, the meaning is blowing in the wind. What’s unmistakable in “Highway 61 Revisited” is the tone. Delivering Old Testament imagery and cosmic jokes in his most exaggerated nasal drawl, Dylan is part-prophet, part-provocateur, part-badchen, and full-time blabbermouth. In other words: He’s just so Jewish. (JR)

4. “Kol Nidre” (13th century)

It’s the “Stairway to Heaven” of Jewish liturgical music; just about anyone who has ever recorded a Jewish album or led a congregation in prayer has toyed with the idea of recording his or her own version of the annual Yom Kippur eve negation of vows.

The text is vexing, saying basically that one is not responsible for the vows one makes. Not surprisingly, it inspired centuries of anti-Semitic speculation about the shiftiness and general untrustworthiness of Jews in business. Jewish tradition suggests that it was written for Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity who might be looking for a legal loophole through which they could reclaim their connection to Judaism. Still, it’s a strange way to begin the Day of Atonement, when one is supposed to take serious stock of one’s shortcomings, not try to explain away one’s inability to make good on promises.

But it’s the music that really matters. Anti-Semites and Conversos aside, nobody comes to synagogue on Yom Kippur because they believe in those words—they come to hear that unmistakable opening cadence. Unlike much of liturgical music, Kol Nidre has no single known author. Musicologists suggest that Kol Nidre is less a proper composition than a mashup cobbled together from a number of different Jewish liturgical and folk motifs. Nevertheless, the melody of that first line is as heart-aching and moving as any melody in any liturgical tradition. Ever. (AYK)

5. “Hatikvah” (1888)

The Jewish national anthem was in wide circulation well before it unofficially became the Israeli national anthem in 1948. Part of a much longer poem written in 1878 by Naphtali Herz Imber, the text was shortened and adapted a few different times by early Zionist settlers before it became the anthem of political Zionism, concluding with the line: “To be a free nation in our land/ The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

The melody, however, took a slightly more roundabout route on its way to Jerusalem. Samuel Cohen, its composer, said that he adapted the melody from a Romanian folk song, “Carul cu boi.” The song’s central motif can be heard there, and it can also be heard in the Italian madrigal “La Mantovana,” and again in Czech composer Bedrich Smetana’s “Ma Vlast,” his ode to Bohemia.

The song’s resonance lies somewhere between the obvious folk roots of the melody and the haughty and explicitly Jewish political aspirations of the lyrics: Critics hear Zionism-as-colonialism in the non-Jewish folk roots of the melody; Zionists hear the in-gathering of Jewish exiles echoing in the combination of notes.

Everyone else might just hear the unreconciled struggle between the two. It’s still an anthem, but one of a different kind—in some ways, it’s an anthem that captures the contradictions of modern nationalism rather than the bombastic heroism of rockets red glare. (AYK)

6. “My Mammy” (1918)

Before Frank Sinatra, before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson, the 20th century’s first pan-media “rock star.” With his dynamic stage act and rafter-rattling voice, he was for millions of fans the embodiment of pop modernity—the poster boy for ragtime, which was unmooring America from its Victorian past one raucous song at a time. But Jolson was not just a New American; he was vividly, unapologetically a Jewish American, with a fearless devotion to schmaltz and a “tear in a voice,” his birthright as a cantor’s son.

He was also, infamously, history’s most famous practitioner of blackface minstrelsy. Today, we are rightly repulsed by Jolson’s blackface act. But to shunt Jolson to history’s margins is to betray history. Listening to his signature song, “My Mammy”—the 1918 hit that he reprised in the landmark first film talkie, The Jazz Singer—we confront the sheer weirdness of pop music’s early days, when beauty and vulgarity, Jewish immigrant striving and primordial American racism were inextricably enmeshed. Jolson was a pop vocal genius whose art most majestically took flight when he slathered his white skin with burnt cork, affected a broad “darky” accent, and belted out an Oedipal ode to his little old Jewish mother. It’s not a comfortable story, but it’s a true one. (JR)

7. “Shema Yisrael” (19th century)

“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The English translation of this central prayer leeches the deep spirituality of the original Hebrew—which powerfully asserts that all is unified, connected, related, intertwined, one. It’s about as close to a theo-national pledge of allegiance as we get.

It’s been crammed into mezuzot and tefilin, and—apart from Tzvika Pik’s 1972 uptempo version (shunned by many for being too poppy for prayer)—it has, to Ashkenazic Jews, only one melody.

Many treat that melody as if it had been handed down to Moses at Mount Sinai along with the lyrics. In fact, written grandly in 3/4 time by the Austrian cantor Salomon Sulzer, it’s from the early 19th century. Sulzer is credited with helping to modernize Jewish worship by introducing a choir and a handful of other updates to suit his Viennese congregation.

As it’s sung by millions of Jews across the world, it sounds a little uptight, even when belted with big gusts of meditation-y breaths punctuating the text. But the irony is that what now sounds uptight was once considered both radical and modern, an exalted sentiment set to a Viennese waltz. In this way Pik’s 1972 version was just doing what Sulzer did 150 years earlier, giving the “watchword of our faith” a little sonic makeover. And what’s so bad about a little syncopation in the face of the unity of everything? (AYK)

8. “White Christmas” (1942)

“Not only is it the best song I ever wrote,” said Irving Berlin when he finished writing “White Christmas,” “it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.” There’s certainly a lot in it. Its dreamy scenery belongs to the same tradition as Currier and Ives’ wintry landscapes and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The melodicism is pure Broadway and Hollywood sophistication, but the maudlin sentiments—that vision of snow-blanketed yuletides “just like the ones I used to know”—has deeper, homelier roots, drawing on Stephen Foster’s antebellum nostalgia and Victorian parlor ballads, and ladling some Jewish schmaltz over the top.

“White Christmas” was released in the middle of World War II, in November 1942, the first Christmas season that American troops spent overseas. It stirred such homesickness that it became the definitive pop hit of the war—a “why we fight” song that never mentioned the fight. And that was just the beginning of its success. It’s doubtful any song has generated more total record sales. Bing Crosby’s definitive version stood as the top-selling pop single for more than a half-century.

Tonally “White Christmas” stands apart from the cheeriness of most Christmas songs: It’s as dark and blue as it is “merry and bright.” Some have attributed this plaintive quality to Berlin’s Jewishness—to the seasonal melancholy of a man doomed to view the holiday from a distance. But “White Christmas” is sneakier than that. “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin … ‘White Christmas,’ ” wrote Philip Roth in Operation Shylock. “If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!” (JR)

9. “Be My Baby” (1963)

It starts, literally, with a bang: the thunderclap rumble of Hal Blaine’s drumbeat, among the most famous opening salvos in rock ‘n’ roll. That’s just the beginning of the bombast, as hand claps, castanets, swooping strings, braying brass, and background vocals pile on, inflating the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” into something like pop Wagner.

Of course, it isn’t Wagnerian—it’s Spectorian. Phil Spector, a diminutive studio geek from the Bronx, was 23 years old in 1963 when he co-composed “Be My Baby” with two Jews from Brooklyn, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. To realize Spector’s “Wall of Sound” vision took weeks of rehearsal, 42 studio takes, and saintly patience on the part of lead singer Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett, who would marry Spector later that year. On paper, the song’s sentiments are insipid: “Won’t you please/ Be my little baby?/ Say you’ll be my darlin’/ Be my baby now.” But bolstered by a rousing melody and the full fathom force of Spector’s production, they become sublime, proof that a 3-minute-long declaration of puppy love can be as overwhelming—sonically, emotionally, spiritually—as any symphony. (JR)

10. “I Got Rhythm” (1930)

As American credos go, the Gershwin brothers’ most famous chorus is hard to top: “I got rhythm/ I got music/ I got my girl/ Who could ask for anything more?” For declarative brashness, it’s right up there with “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” And it’s got a more danceable beat.

Composed in 1928, “I Got Rhythm” became a hit in the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, thanks in no small part to the performance by Ethel Merman, just 22 years old but already a human wind turbine. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics are a study in compression and pithy interior rhymes. (“Ol’ Man Trouble/ I don’t mind him/ You won’t find him/ ’Round my door.”) But it was George’s chord progression, soon to be known simply as “rhythm changes,” that made the song musical holy writ, the basis of countless jazz songs in the swing and bebop eras. (JR)

Every show on children’s television seemed to feature chirpy efforts to rescue Santa or induce some animated sourpuss to feel the spirit of Christmas. Before long Maxine was pouting, “Where is Hanukkah? Why is there no Hanukkah on these shows?”

“Because we live in a country that is mostly Christian,” I told her. “Hanukkah isn’t a major holiday for us, anyway—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot—those are a way bigger deal.” I started to explain that Hanukkah has turned into a whole megillah in the United States because of its proximity to Christmas, but Maxie just wanted to watch Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends.

Just as well. It’s not as if my answer was very satisfying.

That night, Maxie had some chicken soup, then she and her older sister Josie and I watched Glee. (I told you not to judge.) Maxie gazed wide-eyed as Britney the dumb cheerleader sat on Santa’s lap and told him that for Christmas, she wanted her wheelchair-using boyfriend Artie to walk. She yelled at the screen, “You can do it, Santa!” Josie and I gulped and looked at each other.

We sat Maxie down and explained that Santa was not real. But the kid insisted. “If you just believe in him,” she said, “he can help you.” I told her that Santa was an idea, a jolly symbol of kindness and harmony for our friends who are Christians, but not a real or powerful figure. She seemed unconvinced, and I went on thinking about the very different ways Jewish parents can address life during Christmastime:

Attitude No.1: The Blackout

Dora and Miss Spider are not invited into the home. Shalom Sesame is on an endless loop. There is no need for Hanukkah to compete with Christmas, because Christmas is not a factor. This attitude is hard to sustain halfway; it generally works better to commit year-round. Kids know when you’re uncomfortable, so suddenly insisting on pop-culture withdrawal the day after Thanksgiving is likely to bring up some thorny questions. In many ways it’s easier to pull the full Borough Park—keep the goyish world at a general remove year-round rather than trying to disengage from secular culture only in December.

Attitude No. 2: The Buy-In

Let’s get a Christmas tree! Christmas is really more about peace on earth and goodwill toward men than about religion! And the Christmas tree is really just a Hanukkah bush! And the kids look so cute on Santa’s lap! And even though he converted/even though she’s an atheist, Christmas is a lovely cultural tradition from my spouse’s childhood, and I don’t really feel right taking it away! It’s not like you can lock the real world out, you know?

Attitude No. 3: The Competitive Condescension

It’s way better to be Jewish because you get eight days of presents instead of one! Your friends are secretly really jealous! Jesus was a Jew! Don’t tell your classmates that Santa isn’t real because it will upset them, but you and I know he’s just a silly myth! (The same, of course, isn’t true of the tooth fairy. She’s legit.)

Attitude No. 4: The Dance of Ambivalence

Sure, we love to go look at the lights in the Dyker Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn and gape at Clopper the Donkey in the enormous Christmas display at the La Salette Shrine in Attleboro, Massachusetts. We’ll even help our friends trim their tree. But over and over we stress that it’s not our holiday. It’s normal to feel a little left out at Christmastime, but pretending it’s a secular holiday or puffing Hanukkah up to Christmas dimensions isn’t a solution. In fact, this is a good opportunity to talk about the commercialization of our culture. You know, Christmas isn’t a celebration of candy canes and thermonuclear reindeer and velvet bows and nebulous warm feelings. It’s the commemoration of the birth of a god. That’s a pretty big deal, and something that too many people forget. Some Christians are upset that Christmas has become this celebration of buying stuff and having parties rather than a serious opportunity to think about their faith, and—hey, wake up; I’m not done moralizing.

Becoming a parent is the impetus for a lot of us to examine some tangled and heretofore left-alone feelings about being a minority (albeit a minority that often doesn’t feel like a minority and often isn’t considered a minority) in a majority culture. Whether we marry Jews or non-Jews, many of us really don’t think through exactly how we’re going to do Judaism and secularism in the great big world. But when you have a kid, you have to make the call. Not deciding isn’t a decision.

As my (non-Jewish) friend Joe pointed out, this holiday is a fascinating opportunity to eat Chinese food and ponder a culture in which Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, and Barry Manilow can have top-selling Christmas albums and in which the biggest musical Christmas hits of all time were written by Jews. It’s the perfect chance to think about our strange middle ground as consummate insiders and consummate outsiders. Sure, government offices are closed on Christmas, but Hollywood’s biggest movies are all open, Hollywood being yet another thing our people run.

And you remember how that episode of Glee ended, right? Artie did walk, with the help of a robotic exoskeleton designed by Israeli scientists.

So Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s dates back 26 years, but Yo La Tengo during Hanukkah at Maxwell’s dates back only nine. As such, the self-conscious nostalgia is practically built into the evening (nostalgia, that ultimate escapist comfort, must have been on everyone’s mind during the first Hanukkah show in December 2001), and both the Gen-X band and their mostly Gen-X fans, who were predominantly early-middle-aged and laughed at comedian Jim Gaffigan’s jokes about the gym and a high preponderance of whom sported earplugs, did not disappoint. There is no back room at Maxwell’s: Performers climbed onto the stage from the room, and disappeared into the crowd after performing. An electric menorah, correctly lit right-to-left, two candles glowing dark turquoise, sat on an amp in the back, stage right.

After a quite good opening act—a local six-piece band named Parting Gifts, some of whose members had clearly known Yo La Tengo for years—and Gaffigan, Yo La Tengo took the stage at 10:42, and immediately entered a wall of sound, bassist Jim McNew expertly laying down thick chords that allowed guitarist Ira Kaplan’s own chords to sound like a solo.

They wore ‘90s slacker apparel, and played the part. Drummer Georgia Hubley looked annoyed (though less so after her husband Kaplan’s vocals were removed from the speaker next to her right ear). McNew looked nonchalant, chewing gum during the opening numbers, quietly singing when it was his turn to sing, cracking the odd, supporting-cast joke.

Kaplan, the clear frontman and leader, is really into noise, and he throws himself into it earnestly, his expression never changing even as he is creating the musical equivalent of the Big Bang. Yo La Tengo struck me as embodying everything that makes one want to be in a successful rock and roll band—commitment to music and each other, adoration of fans, creative freedom, lack of a day job, the ability to look and indeed be really, really cool—once you boil away the part where you are actually a rock god (I suspect Kaplan would not have sex with groupies even if he didn’t happen to be married to the drummer).

The band was intimate with the audience, which could not have numbered above 250, but more, they were intimate with each other. They switched places and instruments several times. At one point, Kaplan, over at the keyboard, taped himself and put it on loop, keeping it going as he walked over to put on his guitar for the next song, as the others continued to play; when they were finally ready to go into the next song, the loop was still playing, Kaplan was over on the other side of the stage, and McNew went and shut the loop off, timing it exactly to coincide with the beginning of the next one. It was thrilling showmanship and it is why you go see live music. Trigonometry is an interesting mathematical discipline because the triangle is the only polygon where altering one side must alter every other side. The triangle is therefore the most delicate of shapes, but also the most dynamic and, potentially, the most fascinating. This was brought to mind as I watched Kaplan whale away at the keyboard with pure confidence that the rhythm section behind him would do what needed to be done, that it literally had his back.

Some of the tracks were quite tight: “Stockholm Syndrome,” the amazing center of their 1997 magnum opus I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, clocked in at three minutes. They played several tracks off their most recent album, Popular Songs, which was quite good; they played “The Weakest Part,” from 2001’s I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. As 11:30 passed, things picked up. They played Beating’s “Sugar Cube”—the closest thing they have ever produced to a hit single, and the basis for a beloved, quintessentially Gen-X music video—before leaping into something very noisy indeed. Kaplan screamed brief, three- or four-syllable lines into his microphone as two chords played behind him, and it took a few of these before I caught one: “I … I have made … A big decision.” They were doing the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” but unlike many covers, which are designed to draw some sort of bond between audience and band—it’s a song everyone knows equally as well, since the band itself is “new” to it—this “Heroin” was an assault, loud, and with the lyrics reassembled in a random order, like a collage, subverting the possibility of singing along. It was reminiscent, moreover, not of the album “Heroin” but of the barely controlled fury of the live versions (whose closest album equivalent is the VU masterpiece “Sister Ray”).

That was the set-closer. It was almost midnight, which is when I assumed the curfew was (I mean, it’s Thursday in Hoboken, and people live upstairs). I guessed they’d come back onstage, do a quick encore, and that would be that.

Instead, the encore was almost a second set, filled with random guests—most notably Glenn Mercer of the legendary Jersey post-punk group The Feelies. And here, the Hanukkah theme came to the fore, as there was a conscious effort to play songs by Jewish songwriters. These included Burt Bacharach, Jonathan Richman (“Roadrunner”!), Lou Reed again (this time “White Light/White Heat”), and one Mary Weiss, whom one of the guest performers, from Parting Gifts, insisted wasn’t Jewish, prompting Kaplan to respond, “Mary Weiss is Jewish. I’m not being disabused of that notion. What, she changed her name from Williams?”; the requisite Dylan cover found Hubley coming up to the microphone and, with the barest accompaniment on guitar and bass, singing “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” Nico-inflected but with a prettier voice. (Also in the encore: An improbable punk cover of the Stones’ “Brown Sugar” with the words “Rice Krispies” substituted—“How come you taste so good?/Just like a breakfast should.”)

“You guys don’t have to work tomorrow, right?” Kaplan asked as 12:30 approached. “No, it’s Hanukkah!” someone shouted from the audience. Well, eventually the thing had to end. “Thanks for coming,” Kaplan said. “Oh, and because it’s our birthday, there are cookies.” And cookies there were: almond cookies with chocolate chips, from “Giorgios,” as the familiar type of white box announced in red lettering, which must be a local Italian bakery, one that has probably been there since 1952 and maybe was used for a Sopranos location. The audience sang “Happy Birthday” in appreciation. Then some of us walked the ten Hoboken blocks south to the PATH station in the freezing late-autumn late night to catch the train back to New York City.

Next week brings Britain’s Man Booker Prize announcement. Here we have a stronger rooting interest: Harold Jacobson, whose nominated The Finkler Question was reviewed by books critic Adam Kirsch today, is one of only six names on the shortlist. His book remains, however, the underdog at 7:1 odds; Tom McCarthy’s C is the 2:1 favorite.

UPDATE: No idea how I missed the four (4!) Jewish Nobel laureates since Brodsky, especially since I knew that three of them were Jewish (have to plead ignorance on Jelinek). But as more than one commenter pointed out, Nadine Gordimer, Imre Kertész, Elfriede Jelinek, and Harold Pinter, have won since Brodsky. Which means, of course, that five Jews have won the award since 1987. The number of Americans? One (Toni Morrison).

Nobel Literature Prize Betting Odds [Ladbrokes]
Booker Prize Betting Odds [Ladbrokes]
Related: Mirror Images [Tablet Magazine]

Though Silber is credited with an integral role in the folk music revival of the ’50s and 60s—many classic folk songs, for example, including “This Land is Your Land,” were first published in his magazine—he did make one colossal error of judgment: He was among those voices most loudly chastising folk hero Bob Dylan when he decided to plug in his guitar and play rock music at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Like to think that Silber realized the error of his reaction. Anyway, and also because it’s Monday, here that is.

Irwin Silber, Champion of the Folk Music Revival, Dies at 84 [NYT]

I didn’t know the whereabouts of the fugitive they were seeking, although I did know who he was. I’d seen him on the floor below me in the red brick tenement building on Bleecker near Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The floor that served as the headquarters of what was invariably called “the extremist Jewish Defense Organization.” Extremist? I’d heard vague rumors of a connection with the attempted murder of an aging Nazi war criminal on Long Island, although I never knew if there was a real connection and still don’t know if that was why one of them became a fugitive.

But they were, in one way or another, extreme. Some might say extreme moralists, in a slightly Dostoevskian Underground Man way. Others might call them single-minded Jewish fanatics because the cause that gave them birth was the bitter struggle of millions of Soviet Jews to survive and escape vicious repression by openly anti-Semitic Russian authorities. A struggle given more emotional intensity by the fact that Americans, and particularly the human-rights wing of American liberalism, composed in great part by Jews, seemed detached if not disdainful of the plight of their co-religionists, content to follow the lead of the Nixon-Kissinger policy: Don’t make noise about Soviet Jews because it threatened the delicate preservation of detente between nuclear powers.

And so it was left to outsider Jews, to “fanatics,” to “extremists,” like Meir Kahane, to make noise about what was happening behind prison bars in the Soviet Union, the prison bars of the Soviet Union: the murders, the imprisonments, psychiatric lock-ups for dissidents, the deprivation of even the few rights of non-Jewish citizens of the Soviet police state.

The more one reads—as in Gal Beckerman’s forthcoming book, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone—on the struggle to save Soviet Jews, the more one understands the frustration with official Jewish organizations that gave rise to the impulse to extremism.

Now, the “extremist JDO” is often confused with the original “extremist JDL,” the Jewish Defense League, founded by an extremist, Kahane, which earned its extremist label by being accused of bomb plots against Carnegie Hall and other venues for touring Soviet orchestras and ballet groups that were used as the window dressing for detente.

It should have been considered a universal human-rights cause, but it was often dismissed as a right-wing—because anti-Communist—cause. I must admit to my own guilt here.

In any case I’ve lost track of the details, but there’s extremist and there’s extremist and it’s my understanding that the JDO, my downstairs neighbors, broke off from the JDL because the JDL wasn’t extremist enough. It wouldn’t go the extra mile. And the JDO under its founder, Mordechai Levy, began to focus its attention on other American anti-Semitic manifestations, including neo-Nazi, white supremacist, Klan, and Holocaust-denier groups. And the alleged Nazi war criminals the Justice department was not pursuing vigorously enough for their notion of “justice.”

Perhaps for this reason, “the enemy of my enemy,” etc., the JDO found a haven in the various New and Old Left enclaves of the Lower East Side, long home to Jewish fanatics, now haven for the remains of the counterculture, including such figures as A.J. Weberman, the well-known “Dylanologist” who was a patron of the JDO and someone I became familiar with during my first reporting job, the perilous post of counterculture reporter for The Village Voice. It was a job in which one met all sorts of exotic characters. Indeed I recall when Weberman lived in the JDO building, I had occasion to meet a figure known as “One-Legged Terry,” an American-born Israeli who was said to be responsible for Bob Dylan’s pre-born-again engagement with Judaism.

But I was not seeking a cause, just a refuge, a place to lay my head after a divorce. And it sounded like a good deal, two floors in a solidly built brick tenement building. On the other hand, I didn’t realize the unwanted attention it would entail. I was not seeking to find myself frisked by the Joint Terrorism Squad, however mistakenly.

It was a strange arrangement and a strange episode in my life but, looking back on it, the mistaken-identity episode and my conversations and arguments with the JDO guys did cause me to think about my real identity and its lack of definition. And, eventually, through one Killer Question, gave me the impetus to write Explaining Hitler.

Mistaken identity? What distinguished my Jewishness from the vigilante Jewishness of the JDO?

Well, I was not an observant Jew, not even much of a believer, though not an atheist. Just not a monotheist. So, sue me.

But I loved Jews and Jewish culture and living for the first time in a Jewish city. (I’d grown up in non-Jewish small-town suburb and gone to school in New Haven and had not experienced much anti-Semitism in either locale; now I was drowning in philo-Semitism, and I liked it.) I will admit that what made me identify as Jewish more than anything else was the Holocaust, rage at it and its perpetrators. Even though I had no direct ancestors die in it, I knew they could have. And shortly before he died my father told me about a second cousin of his who lived in Paris and probably died in the camps. I came to feel Hitler’s victims were all part of my extended family.

I know I also had the vague idea for a novel that would attempt to exorcise this, an alternate history in which a group of Jews took on Hitler and the Nazis before they came to power—and won. I think it was derived from a legendary, probably apocryphal, story that back in the 1930s the Lower East Side’s own Jewish mobster king, Meyer Lansky, came to Fifth Avenue to ask august spokesman for the Jewish Establishment, Rabbi Stephen Wise, do you want me to put a contract out on Hitler? And the dignified civilized rabbi said no, it was not the right thing to do, it might backfire, be bad for his image, bad for the image of Jews, something. Too extremist. Lansky left, although there are stories that he didn’t entirely drop the idea right away. I haven’t either.

Still, from day to day it wasn’t visceral, my sense of Jewish identity and rage. I preferred the Simon Wiesenthal approach: hunting down ex-Nazis, bringing them to justice, and trying them (like Eichmann) for their crimes against humanity, not shooting them through Long Island screen doors. But could I utterly condemn the “wild justice” (as revenge is sometimes called) the fugitive I’d been mistaken for had been suspected of? What’s the morality of killing an 80-year-old Nazi war criminal?

Some notable pieces from the Spring 2010 number:

• Tablet Magazine book critic Adam Kirsch reviews 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, a new novel from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who is also the author of Nextbook Press’s Betraying Spinoza (got all that?).

• Hillel Halkin—author of Nextbook Press’s brand-spankin’-new biography of Yehuda Halevi—considers a new American Orthodox siddur.

• Ron Rosenbaum discusses Bob Dylan as an explicitly Jewish figure.

• Michael Weingrad interrogates why, amid a sea of Christian allegories, there are few if any good Jewish-inspired fantasy novels.

• Harvey Pekar and Tara Seibel offer a graphic review of comic artist R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis.

Jewish Review of Books
A Jewish Journal of Ideas is Born [Forward]

“I Gotta Right To Sing the Blues?”—a concert inspired by Lehman’s book, produced by Hal Willner, and starring Rufus Wainwright and others—takes place tomorrow night at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center.

American Classics With a Yiddish Accent [Soundcheck]
A Fine Romance [Nextbook Press]

We will leave the final word here to Bob Dylan and his 1983 song “Neighborhood Bully,” which, as Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg has noted, was penned in response to the international outcry that followed the Osirak raid:

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.

‘Israel Must Compensate Iraq For Osirak’ [JPost]

Related: Subterranean Homesick Blues [Jewcy]

Bob Dylan [The Big Issue]

1. If you look hard enough, you will find something: “It involved a lot of dedicated listening over and over again to all of Dylan’s recordings; re-reading fundamental Jewish texts and key guidebooks, including Abraham Joshua Heschel on the Prophets—you read him on the likes of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and just substitute Bob Dylan for the ancients and it totally resonates.”

2. Evidence against your point can always be turned around to support it: “I go to great pains to show how, in fact, the gospel albums are a lot less about the narrator’s belief in Jesus than they are about the narrator’s identification of Jesus with the Jewish prophets.”

3. Don’t speak for the man, he doesn’t like that: “I don’t really pretend to have any insight into what, if anything, Bob Dylan believes in.”

Interview with Seth Rogovoy, author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet” (Part One) [Examiner]

The richness of Jewish liturgy notwithstanding, those without Hebrew fluency—and that’s sadly the majority of America’s Jews—can relate to the tunes of their prayers much more directly than to the words of, say, a densely allusive medieval Hebrew poem. That helps to explain why prayer-leaders play such prominent roles in American synagogues. Judah Cohen, an ethnomusicologist, spent two years watching and listening to the cantors-in-training at Hebrew Union College’s School of Sacred Music to produce The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor: Musical Authority, Cultural Investment (Indiana, November), which reveals exactly how a regular Jew with a good singing voice can be transformed, institutionally and personally, into a bearer of Jewish musical tradition.

* * *

Cohen’s exploration of what makes a cantor a cantor seems necessary given how powerfully Jewish prayers resonate even outside of religious contexts. Take Avinu Malkeinu, one of the most striking prayers of the Rosh Hashanah service: since 1987, and as recently as this past June, the jam band Phish has often inserted a jazzy version of it into their sets (much more frequently, in case you’re counting, than they’ve performed their cover of Naomi Shemer’s “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav”). Parke Puterbaugh’s Phish: The Biography (Da Capo, November), based on his decade as the band’s in-house scribe, offers a detailed portrait of the group beloved by a generation of suburban Jews, one of whom turned himself, with help from Phish, into a superstar ba’al teshuva.

In their fervent fandom, admirers of secular musicians often invest them with religious authority, a dynamic exemplified most clearly, perhaps, by the case of Bob Dylan. The Artist Formerly Known as Robert Zimmerman has inspired any number of readings attentive to his Jewish roots, but no Dylanologist has gone quite so far as veteran music critic and klezmer revivalist Seth Rogovy. In Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet (Simon & Schuster, November), Rogovy scavenges for any echo of Jewish resonance in Dylan’s lyrics, cooking up some rather grand claims about the biblical sources of Dylan’s images: “Blowin’ in the Wind” is lifted right from Ezekiel and Isaiah,” Rogovy has remarked in an interview, while “‘All Along the Watchtower’ is a midrashic retelling of Isaiah 21.”

* * *

To say that such readings of Dylan’s lyrics seem a bit far-fetched is not to deny that some contemporary Jewish poets draw on prophetic texts with midrashic intentions. The title poem of Shirley Kaufman’s collection Ezekiel’s Wheels (Copper Canyon, November), for example, takes up Ezekiel 1:16’s reference to a “wheel within a wheel,” as a symbol of the whirling, uncontrolled nature of life. But Kaufman remains self-conscious about the oddness of an American poet and translator living in Jerusalem engaging with such tropes: “What can / my eyes wake up to what / vision of Ezekiel in exile / or holiness ever / Where / will I find him / in the midst of the valley / and it was full of bones.”

Other contemporary poets draw from sources closer at hand, but that’s not necessarily any less complicated a task. Marilyn Hacker, for one, has lived for long periods in both Paris and the United States, and French words and European progressive politics appear in her new formalist work—her latest collection is Names (Norton, November)—alongside reflections on her childhood in a working-class Jewish home in the Bronx. David Lehman meanwhile remarks in a book trailer that the title poem of his Yeshiva Boys (Simon & Schuster, November)—which, among other things, treats his parents’ experience of the Holocaust and his days in a traditional Orthodox school—took almost two decades to write: “It’s not an easy subject to confront, since you’re dealing with nothing less than your own heritage and the most crucial things about your identity and your life.”

* * *

How exactly does the Jewishness of such poets matter, especially if they do not write in Hebrew or Yiddish and mostly eschew participation in Jewish religious traditions? Answers to this question abound in Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture (Alabama, November), edited by the literary scholar Daniel Morris and the poet and professor Stephen Paul Miller. Based on a 2004 forum at the Center for Jewish History (which can be watched online here), the book includes contributions from a range of literary scholars, such as Marjorie Perloff and Kathryn Hellerstein, as well as some impressive poets, including Paul Auster, Alicia Ostriker, and Jerome Rothenberg.

One reason Jewishness has mattered in modern and contemporary American poetry—a fact that literary scholars have often neglected to mention—is that several American Jews played key roles as publishers, patrons, and advocates for verse throughout the 20th century. Partially redressing this scholarly gap, Chris Green’s The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, November) highlights the role of Jewish publishers and scholars such as Albert and Charles Boni, B. A. Botkin, and Horace Kallen in promoting the literature of American regionalism and specifically the poetry of Appalachia. Green also shows how Appalachia means as much to a New York Jewish poet, Muriel Rukeyser, as it does to Southerners Don West and James Still—a useful reminder that a poet’s or musician’s most fruitful sources of inspiration cannot necessarily be predicted based upon his or her race, religion, or place of origin.

I Dreamed I Saw St. Nicholas [Slate/Browbeat]
Related: A Fine Romance [Nextbook Press]

This year, though, they’re trying something a little different. Yossi Cunin, the head of Chabad’s Beverly Hills outpost, plans to try for a Guinness World Record at this Sunday’s broadcast: the longest ever recorded Hasidic dance. To prepare, the 36-year-old has been training with Dave Honig, best known as the co-author of LL Cool J’s Platinum Workout. So far, Cunin hasn’t achieved the rap star’s chiseled physique, but he has lost about 100 pounds, partly by running up and down stairs at Dodger Stadium with weights strapped to his back. (We’re pretty sure that wasn’t in the book.) Cunin told the L.A. Jewish Journal that he’s expecting to dance nonstop for six hours, to demonstrate “joy in the extreme.” Maybe Honig can brand it as the Goin’ Back to Cali workout?

Chabad Rabbi Trains for Dance-a-thon [Jewish Journal]

Or on Highway 61. Or on Desolation Row.

Need Direction Home? Ask Bob Dylan [NYT]

“Hang your stockings and say your prayers,” indeed!

Bob Dylan Recording Christmas Album [Bully Pulpit]
Related: A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs by David Lehman, coming soon from Nextbook Press

To commemorate this ancient ritual of love, then, we at Tablet Magazine—not the most sentimental bunch—are celebrating with a tribute to love’s darker side.  Here are the top ten greatest break-up songs ever written by Jews. Get out that photograph of your ex, let self-pity flow, and listen to what the heartbroken have to say…

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover: How do I leave thee? Let Paul Simon count the ways.

Famous Blue Raincoat: “You treated my woman to a flake of your life,” Leonard Cohen laments, “and when she came back she was nobody’s wife.”

Idiot Wind: Bob Dylan, the poet laureate of loneliness, was never more cruel than this.

“You’re an idiot babe,” he croons, “It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.”

Somebody Kill Me: Adam Sandler is the most unromantic wedding singer out there.

Baby Bitch: Gene Ween, otherwise known as Aaron Freeman, has some choice words (cover up the kids’ ears!) for a former lover.

Love on the Rocks: Pour Neil Diamond a drink, and he’ll tell you some lies: love on the rocks ain’t no surprise.

Baby Get Lost: Leonard Feather wrote this hit for Billie Holiday (though this version is performed by Franco Tenelli). Rage was never quite so elegant.

(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame: It was Elvis’s voice that made this treacherous lover famous, but we have Doc Pomus, born Jerome Felder, to thank for the green-eyed, monstrous Marie.

Through With You: When it comes to breakup song titles, Maroon 5’s Adam Levine prefers the straightforward approach.

Every Man Has a Molly: Say Anything’s Max Bemis wrote candid songs about his personal life, which is why Molly dumped him, which is why he’s asking fans to purchase the band’s merchandise. Isn’t this, really, the story of every relationship?

I Love You, Scumbag X: 12 Things Woody Allen Just Doesn’t Get [A.V. Club]

Ask The Rabbis [Moment]
Statement By Chadad-Lubavitch World Headquarters [Lubavitch.com]
A Statement from Rabbi Friedman [InTheMoment]

After 42 years as a cult figure, the Godfather of Gloom has a hit single to promote. (Of course, there’s also the matter of Cohen recouping some of the $5 million his former manager and lover, Kelley Lynch, stole from him.) It all started when dreadlocked Jason Castro sang Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on American Idol last March. Simon Cowell was duly impressed, as were American audiences who promptly sent Jeff Buckley’s 1994 cover of the same song to the top of the iTunes charts.

In December, the “Hallelujah” hysteria spread to England where 20-year-old Alexandra Burke—the winner of Britain’s American Idol counterpart, X Factor—hit the top of the Christmas charts with her own cover of the song. Fans disgusted with Burke’s bombastic, gospelized take on the Cohen classic launched an Internet campaign dedicated to Buckley’s version, propelling it to No. 2. “Hallelujah”’s success marked the first time two versions of the same song took the top two spots in England in over 50 years. Not to be outdone, the Cohen original, from the 1984 album Various Positions, rode the Hallelujah choir all the way to no. 36, giving Cohen his first ever Top 40 hit.

Listen to “Hallelujah” by Alexandra Burke

“Hallelujah”’s triple hit, beyond fattening Cohen’s wallet, also demonstrated the ferocious allegiance fans have toward one version of the song over the others. And there’s no shortage of competitors—Leonardcohenfiles.com lists nearly 200 recorded covers of the tune, from renditions by Michael McDonald, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson, to an instrumental version by trumpet-player Chris Botti and one by a New York blues guitarist named Popa Chubby (born Ted Horowitz).

Unfortunately, unlike Cohen himself, the original “Hallelujah” has not aged well. As with much pop music from the 1980s, it’s marred by chintzy synths, plodding bass, and glossy, reverb-drenched production. Much of the song sounds like it’s been coated in gold laminate. What’s so powerful about the song, and what assured its cult status long before its recent popularity, are Cohen’s lyrics—their brilliant mix of Old Testament spirituality (“Hallelujah” is a Hebrew word meaning “praise God,” often used in liturgy) and real-world romantic desire. “Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord,” Cohen begins, before conflating God with a tone-deaf lover, “but you don’t really care for music, do ya?” Then Cohen weaves effortlessly through the stories of David’s seduction of Bathseba and Delilah’s humbling of Samson to find something sexual, almost kinky:

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

It’s lines like these that have helped transform Cohen into one of the only true poets in popular music and something of a modern mystic—a prophet for a secular world.

Listen to “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen

The recording that started the whole cover frenzy of the last 15 to 20 years is a version by John Cale (co-founder of the Velvet Underground) that appeared on a 1991 Cohen tribute album, I’m Your Fan. In it, Cale combined the two opening verses of the 1984 original—crucially lopping off Cohen’s redemptive ending—with a slew of new verses that Cohen had added during a 1988 live performance. (Cohen claims to have penned 80 verses for “Hallelujah” over the course of more than two years.) Cohen’s newer, darker lyrics focused almost exclusively on the doomed relationship and sexual longing that lay hidden just under the surface of the original. When Cale combined them with Cohen’s riffs on David and Delilah, he created a more perfect union out of Cohen’s unnerving marriage of the divine and the damaged. No less crucially, Cale set Cohen’s lyrics over nothing but stark piano arpeggios—an arrangement that perfectly suited the song’s tale of human frailty. The modestly triumphant “Hallelujah” of 1984 had become a “cold” and “broken Hallelujah” in Cale’s hands.

Listen to “Hallelujah” by John Cale

It’s this take that inspired Jeff Buckley three years later to record the song—which he described as an homage to the “hallelujah of the orgasm”—for his debut album Grace. Buckley’s may be the canonical “Hallelujah,” and it’s also the best, for two reasons: 1) It pushes the intimacy and pathos in Cale’s version to its very limits without descending into soap opera. And 2) Buckley makes use of his four-octave vocal range and virtuosic guitar-playing without ever distracting us from the magic of Cohen’s words. The song’s extended introduction and bridge—courtesy of Buckley’s gorgeous Telecaster—were new and welcome additions to the song’s legacy.

The countless “Hallelujah”s that have emerged since fall into three basic categories: those that honor the Cale/Buckley legacy, those that don’t, and those that are just plain silly. In the first category, renditions by Rufus Wainwright, Damien Rice, and the Canadian singer Allison Crowe are all decent examples, though the most effective may be k.d. lang’s from her 2004 album Hymns of the 29th Parallel. Lang’s “Hallelujah” retains Cale’s verse structure (as do most successful versions of the song) as well as his stately piano and funereal tempo, while her velvety alto adds a touch of seduction to the gloom. By focusing on simple piano or guitar-based arrangements, these tunes get at the tragedy and loneliness in Cohen’s song, and behind his statement that, as he recently told Australia’s Sunday Age, “although we don’t often know what to do with it, love is the only redeeming possibility for human beings.”

Listen to “Hallelujah” by k.d. lang

That’s what the heretics who fail to honor Buckley’s legacy forget—they puff their chests out and belt “Hallelujah”s as if they were a celebration instead of a capitulation. Opera singer Katherine Jenkins and the Spanish-language group Il Divo both missed the point when they re-imagined “Hallelujah” as big, pompous arias. And at the risk of offending the more than 570,000 Brits that bought the single over the holidays, Alexandra Burke is most definitely guilty of similar trespasses. There is, of course, the haughty choir and vaulted string arrangements, but then Burke also murders Cale’s verse structure—cutting out half of Cohen’s lyrics, including his most potent mix of religious and sexual imagery:

And remember when I moved in you,
And the holy dove was moving too,
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.

Of the silly variety, there are predictably many, including a version sung entirely in Welsh entitled “Haleliwia,” and a few parodies: “My Halloumia,” an homage to Cypriot cheese, and “Lamb Bhuna,” a lament for a misplaced Indian entree by British DJ Chris Moyles. And then there’s Bono and his unlistenable spoken-word rendition, released on the 1995 tribute album Tower of Song. Over a muffled drum machine and jazzy horns, Bono sings—or rather reads—Cohen’s lyrics as if it was beat-poetry night down at the Village Vanguard.

Listen to “Hallelujah” by Bono

It is to Cohen’s credit that his song can stand up to such abuse. “Hallelujah” is eternally open to interpretation—no musician can pin it down. While Cale and Buckley seem to have discovered the best combination of lyrics and arrangement to give voice to Cohen’s wine-soaked existential malaise, “Hallelujah” will remain an irresistable temptation for artists around the world”whether we like it or not.

in the latter camp. His first solo effort, One, is stuffed tight with nostalgia and melancholy, and feels like a fuzzy sweater you could fall asleep in on a cold winter night. On the first song, “All I’d Like to Say,” Fox-Rosen sings, “I’d like to give you my heart but I can’t / It’s still beating in my chest and I need it for the time being,” his voice ballooning with emotion that’s more Motown soul than Matador irony; his guitar practically drips with the earnestness that’s boiled over from his voice.

Fox-Rosen’s voice is strongly reminiscent in both tone and emotional heft of Jeff Buckley, and in a genre where people often cite Bob Dylan as a vocal—not lyrical—influence, it’s not outlandish to imagine that some of his potential fanbase might be repelled Fox-Rosen’s perfect alto and polished-sounding sadness. Lyrically, he has his Dylan moments, waxing poetic about long and lonely streets and his place in the universe (“O Lord, I fear the truth will devour me / because we live in contradiction and sing out loud”), but then he’ll turn around and drop a straight cliché that lasts the length of a song, musing on girls and crushes and the intimated romance of crushes. “If I could I would cage you in a palace,” he sings on “Man,” “If I could I would break these chains of my mind.”

“Jerusalem,” the penultimate song, is the album’s cornerstone; a mission statement that unites Fox-Rosen’s elegant existential soliloquies with his emo-esque relationship reveries. At moments, it seems he could be referring to a lover, but it turns out he’s talking about the anthropomorphized city itself: “Out of the ashes, you rise up from the dead / your bridal gown’s in tatters, your long dry tears a river of dust.”

Although One was Fox-Rosen’s main project of 2008, he also fronts a four-piece bluegrass band, the Frozen String Quartet, which released a self-titled album this year. A collection of quaint, mellow originals and odd covers (a laid-back country rendition of “Summer in the City,” for one), the album is like a window into Fox-Rosen’s influences, including Fairport Convention and Lyle Lovett, and is more lighthearted and fun than One.

But Fox-Rosen’s newest work, a one-off cover of Santogold’s top-40 single “Creator,” might be his most complex yet. He trades in the tortured-poet uber-emotiveness for David Byrne–like gymnastics; the rhythm track plays a manic game of “duck, duck, goose,” jumping from different percussion instruments to a bowed bass to Fox-Rosen’s own wry vocals. Flighty and sexy, his “Creator” serves as a knowing wink to the people who heard his first album and will inevitably gawk at this out-of-left-field cover, but it may also be a hint of what’s to come from the musician. Coming from him, the line, “The rules I break got me a place / Up on the radar”—written by Santogold, appropriated by Fox-Rosen—is either mightily egotistical or massively spiritual; sure, he is heralding his bravado, but when set beside the testimony of “Jerusalem,” the song almost seems like an attempt to embody God’s own voice. This indicates a less introspective, more self-aware state of mind for Fox-Rosen—he is making fun of his own seriousness without entirely giving it up.

Today, Yiddish versions of popular songs have been condemned to the pop-cultural bargain bin—email forwards and hammy YouTube videos.

But once upon a time, the Barry Sisters fused the Jewish language with then-popular music (songs by Frank Sinatra, Burt Bacharach, and Perry Como), creating covers that, at worst, were convincingly swinging versions of the originals and, at best, reinterpreted the lyrics to songs like “Cabaret” (“Put down the knitting / The book and the broom / Time for a holiday / Life is a cabaret, old chum / Come to the Cabaret”), providing a fresh and distinctive take. Now, thirty-five years later, label Reboot Stereophonic is reissuing their album Our Way (Tahka-Tahka) as part of an ongoing revival of milestone recordings in Jewish culture.

The music drips with so much sap and sentiment that it’s practically sweating. It begs for a backdrop of dancers in shiny polyester dresses, men in tweed suits, and mixed drinks named after once-famous celebrities. The Sisters captured the self-conscious glamour of the era in such a smart way that it almost seems like they planned for this kind of revival (which extends beyond the rerelease to include such tribute bands as the Sisters of Sheynville).

In hindsight (something many artists wish they had while churning out their holiday albums and grandparent-ready gift books), the Barry Sisters did a remarkable job of picking songs with staying power. “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” played totally straight, is kooky and enjoyable. The showy but stylish twists in their voices as they launch into their full-throttle, Jewish-woman-empowering version of “My Way” feel like a seductive wink at the listener.

The difference between old-time borscht-belt acts and the new crop of irony-laden Jewish comedians, a friend of my grandmother’s told me, is that the old guys, even when their jokes fell flat, still seemed like they were putting in the effort to be funny. True to form, the Barry Sisters are unapologetically kitschy, from their photo sessions in the extensive liner notes (both the original and an expanded version are included with the reissue) to the loungetastic feel of the songs. But theirs is a finely-tuned, ageless kitsch—here’s hoping it sticks around this time.

To be fair, it was Dylan himself who said “don’t follow leaders.” Dylan never wanted to be the voice of a generation, and he certainly never asked to be King of the Jews or a vessel for our hopes and dreams. His struggle with faith was part of his being a flawed person. If during the Jesus years, Dylan fell off the pedestal, it’s our own fault for putting him on it. But the question remains: Why did Dylan temporarily convert to Christianity in 1979, and record two religious albums proclaiming the word of God? It remains an enduring mystery, and for many Jews, the ultimate shande far di goyim: one of “our” greatest heroes becoming one of them.

Unfortunately, Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years doesn’t answer these questions. After two hours of seemingly unedited interviews, ludicrously amateurish clip art, and cliched religious imagery, viewers emerge as unenlightened as we were at the outset. Widely advertised (for a documentary), Jesus Years is an unauthorized biographical film; Dylan did not participate, did not grant an interview, and did not even authorize the use of his music. It is, paradoxically, the consummate Bob Dylan film: To reference two recent efforts, the artist is so masked and anonymous, he’s not there.

It’s also just not a very good movie. The film can’t resist illustrating any point in the cheesiest way possible; when someone says “Jews,” we get a picture of Hasidim at the Western wall; when someone says “cops,” a clip-art picture of a police car; and the less said about the pictures of Biblical scenes, the better. The film’s director/interviewer, Joel Gilbert—mysteriously trying to look just like the Bob Dylan of the 1970s—inserts himself needlessly into frame after frame while giving us no reason to care about his own narcissistic journey through music studios and Hollywood homes. Art this bad can make religious people look dumb, or crazy, or both.

And yet, Jesus Years nearly succeeds in spite of itself, leaving the viewer with a certain appreciation of religious sentiment—coupled with a puzzlement at how the religious and secular seem to speak two different languages. The film’s spiritual center is Pastor Bill Dwyer of Los Angeles’s Vineyard Christian Fellowship, who Dylan called in late 1978, seeking counseling (at least according to Dwyer). Dwyer is a down-to-earth, no-bullshit kind of guy; at least as represented in the film, he’s more interested in matters of the heart than those of the hereafter, and it’s no surprise that Dylan, like many other Hollywood celebrities, reached out to him. (Then again, Dwyer’s answers to those in need relied heavily on the Book of Revelation, not exactly a handbook for trauma counseling.)

But Dwyer is cagey; like a good pastor, he doesn’t violate confidence, and we’re left clueless as to the exact nature of his relationship with Dylan. It’s not until the very end of the film—long after I would have stopped watching had I not been reviewing it—that we get any inkling of why Dylan reached out at all. Only Dylanologist A.J. Weberman mentions, in passing, that Dylan was addicted to heroin in the late 1970s, still reeling from his recent divorce and dislocation. He was, indeed, a lost soul—and Jesus found him.

In one of the few snippets of actual Bob Dylan footage in the film—included presumably because it aired on network television and is not owned by Dylan—he says that he “never cared too much for preachers who were just looking for a contribution,” but that he found something real in Dwyer’s teaching of Jesus. This is an illuminating moment. Throughout his career, Dylan has embraced both sincerity and dissimulation; his latest incarnation, as a moustachioed journeyman musician, is made of equal parts authenticity and con. What his earnest early fans never realized is that this was true from the beginning. Here was Robert Zimmerman playing at Woody Guthrie—or, as Todd Haynes’s brilliant I’m Not There suggested, a minstrel version of an African-American folksinger. Subsequent roles as an acerbic hipster and airy country music crooner similarly blended directness and diversion, truth and show.

In Jesus, Dylan seems to have found something authentic—and here is where, for me, Jesus Years became interesting. The film consists largely of a series of interviews with true believers—many of whom are Jews. It’s disconcerting and just plain weird to hear New York Yiddish accents testify about being born again. But underneath all the weirdness, I got the sense that all the people being interviewed really do believe. They’ve had some kind of genuine experience, which they’ve interpreted according to Christian mythology and symbolism. As Dwyer eloquently describes, these are people who were in great pain, and came to know great love through powerful religious experiences. These are not vulnerable sheep taken advantage of by profiteers; they are people who were hurt, and who found healing in Christianity.

Many Jews will probably find it impossible to look beyond this transparent attempt at outreach. We’re scarred and traumatized by two thousand years of Christian hegemony, anti-Semitism, and proselytizing. We’re too accustomed to the endless efforts to convert us—and Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years often seems to be one—to actually listen to the message. And indeed, when Dylan himself preached from the stage in 1979 and 1980, many fans felt the same way. The guy seemed to have fallen off his rocker.

Of course, all fans like to imagine that they share some secret bond with their idols. With Dylan, who always seems to be in on the con when he’s not perpetrating one himself, I find myself thinking “I get it” even when no one else does: like him, I see the hypocrisy; like him, I think I can understand the appeal of authentic religious experience in the context of superficiality and doublespeak. This was 1978, after all; the high water mark of disco, post-Watergate malaise, and post-1960s hangover. Everyone seemed to be on the make, or drowning in drugs and decadence. Some of the doughy-eyed interviewees in Jesus Years don’t seem to get it—but, I imagine, I do. Here was something real.

Not surprisingly, the film spends very little time discussing why Dylan left Jesus—and turned to Chabad-Lubavitch, no less—after just two years and two and a half albums. Again, Weberman sheds the only light on the subject: Dylan came to believe that his Christian advisors were exploiting him. Dwyer, too, says that he “became concerned” that some preachers were over-publicizing Dylan’s initially private conversion. What a disappointment that must have been: the old time religion turned out to be yet another con. No wonder Dylan spent most of the 1980s wandering in the pop wilderness, only regaining his footing at the end of the decade, when he got back to musical basics and rediscovered the authenticity of folk music and the blues.

Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years is more a symptom of this pattern than a study of it, exploiting Dylan’s fame to get Jews like me to sit through testimonies of salvation in Christ. Its warped perspective gives the sense that Jews for Jesus is a nationwide force rather than a peculiar outlier, and that the secular world is coextensive with aimlessness and lies. Yet in objectifying and exploiting Dylan, it also subtly manages to humanize him.

Jay Michaelson is a columnist for the Forward, a founding editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, and the author of God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness, and Embodied Spiritual Practice.

Pat Crest, Playboy Playmate

That the book should appear now makes for its own strange sort of irony, for this is the age of the retrospective Dylan, in which he has become reflective and, for him, accessible, willing to engage with his history even as he acknowledges (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) that it’s another pose. Partly, that’s a matter of pop star reinvention, but Dylan has never been a pop star in the traditional sense. Rather, he’s a one-man diaspora, who blew into Greenwich Village in 1961 like a figure out of what Greil Marcus has called the old, weird America.” As he wrote in Chronicles about 1941, the year of his birth,” Luc Sante notes in his foreword to Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, ‘If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D. Everybody born around my time was a part of both.’”

What does it mean to be born at such a moment, when the verities are revealed as lies? What does it mean to have to reimagine everything, to rewrite the world from day to day? All of us now have a certain sense of that, living, as we do, in the aftermath. But for Dylan, this has meant a fundamental air of exile, which has, at times, led to some startling juxtapositions. When he appeared (with his son-in-law Peter Himmelman and actor Harry Dean Stanton) at the 1989 Chabad telethon in Los Angeles and performed Hava Nagila”, it was an experience equally bizarre, in its own way, to that of watching him sing Saved.”

Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric evokes these same sorts of tensions. It’s an unlikely project that ends up making unexpected sense. To be sure, the conflation of Dylan and Hollywood takes some getting used to, especially when you remember that 1964 was the year of the Beatles and the Freedom Summer, and thus, almost perfectly emblematic of the seismic social shift to which Chronicles refers. And yet, Dylan gives us a clue to the allure of the project in that same introductory Q&A. I liked Barry’s photos a lot,” he says. They reminded me of Robert Frank’s photos. … Just in their stark atmosphere.” In fact, they’re particularly reminiscent of Frank’s landmark collection The Americans, published six years before. In that book, Frank caught the United States, its small towns and cities, at the very moment it was undergoing the changes Dylan writes about.

Feinstein’s photos do something similar for Hollywood, tracing the eclipse of the old guard and its replacement by a more fluid territory of storefronts and star maps, and nondescript bungalows in which women smoke in cheaply paneled waiting rooms while others perform figure modeling” (read: pose nude). Among the images here is a sequence taken at Gary Cooper’s funeral, to which Dylan riffs:

looking at life
watchin it being lowered into the ground
unable t change a thing
you too
yes
have committed
some wicked sins.

It doesn’t matter whose funeral it is; Dylan’s being impressionistic, after all. What’s important is the idea that illusions cannot sustain us, which makes the dream factory, with its dependence on the manufactured image, the most nefarious sort of lie.

Stairway to Paradise, 20th Century Fox backlot

Such a notion resides at the heart of Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, which is not a book of glamour shots but something more ambiguous, full of grainy black-and-whites that reveal a kind of flattened bleakness, the hunger and yearning beneath the surface of the myth. Even when celebrities are present, they’re not thinking of the camera. In one picture, Jayne Mansfield strolls along a walkway with a life-size statue of Jesus rising up behind her. In another, Judy Garland chews her thumb on a rehearsal stage. More often, Feinstein shoots along the edges, capturing discarded sets, extras at Central Casting, street scenes, makeup artists, waiting rooms. It’s the old, weird America transformed into a more modern disconnection, the diaspora gone Hollywood.

In such a landscape, Dylan discovers a perverse sort of freedom, the freedom to step outside himself. He’s lost, we’re all lost, but as any diasporic knows, that’s the point. What’s important are the contradictions (between past and present, celebrity and substance, social commentary and art), and what they tell us if we can just look at them clearly and see them for what they really are.

These are the issues that have always motivated Dylan, and he addresses them in language that is off the cuff, even spontaneous, simpler than his lyrics, although not without its own distinctive bite.

t be born with choice
t be carried free
out of cradled touch
clothed completely
in rapid change

he writes in a long poem that accompanies a photo of a discarded stairway, reaching up into the empty sky like a metaphor for the ephemerality of everything. In another poem, he observes that today no one thinks of / himself as the devil”; the implication, clearly, is that everyone should.

There’s a certain Old Testament morality at work here, the old world breaking through again, the glimmer of a connection that evaporates in the face of our flawed fragility and loss. Nowhere is this more movingly expressed than in an eight-line poem that accompanies two shots of Marilyn Monroe’s backyard swimming pool, taken on the morning of her death. Even then, perhaps, Dylan recognized Monroe as a cautionary symbol of the dangers of celebrity. death silenced her pool,” he writes,

the day she died
hovered over
her little toy dogs
but left no trace
of itself
at her
funeral.

Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric closes with an explicitly autobiographical poem in which Dylan writes about winning the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in December 1963. At a ceremony just three weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he shocked the crowd by declaring, I have to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where—what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too—I saw some of myself in him.”

From the perspective of the present, it’s obvious that Dylan was talking about shared complicity, the idea that we are all responsible, that a society is only as good as its basest impulses, its most destructive acts. This, of course, is a classically Jewish notion, although he probably didn’t think of it in those terms. Either way, the experience stayed with him, and is recounted here alongside a group of photos of disembodied hands clutching Oscar statuettes. ah mama but it’s so hard,” he writes,

for I’m living in movement
not stopping an categorizing
the movement
an so
I could not explain t them
about what I was doin
instead I finished
my thoughts
without compromise
(a course
of course
for none
but one).

Here, we see Dylan at his most elemental, as he has always seen himself. a course / of course / for none / but one”—that’s the code of the exile, born between cultures, between generations, with one foot in the past and one in the future, yet condemned to live in the unreconciled present tense. It’s a hell of a wilderness in which to wander, and Dylan’s known this from the start.

i cupped it t my breast,” he writes, describing his reaction to the Paine Award,

looked into its eyes
stroked it
fixed it as a club
pretended it was a barbell
the room was silent mama
the room was silent
except for this hysterical laughin
stemmin from the ridiculousness
of such useless property
but i couldn’t tell
who was laughing mama
i couldn’t tell if it was me
or this thing
i was holding.

David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology.

Six degrees of separation? Hah! I span half that distance to reach Mr. Dylan, and my nearness bestows special status and a whole lotta insight. I, Sara Ivry, by dint of befriending someone related to someone who used to live with Dylan, am uniquely qualified to add my five cents on that living legend. And by that same dint, my thoughts are deep, man, so listen up to them.

Here’s what: “Love Sick” cures what ails me. I’d enjoy little more than to sing “Hurricane” while drinking a hurricane at karaoke if only it were a choice on the damn playlist. And “Don’t Think Twice it’s Alright,” is, well, quite alright with me.

But the Talmudic parsing of every incident from the annals of Dylan’s life must stop! (This very website now has one, two, three, four essays about the songwriter). Why do we need to keep repeating that he went through various religious phases? Who cares that he dated Joan Baez? Are there any subscribers to Dylan-mania who don’t already know that? What’s more, does it change your feeling about the music to possess such information? Is your appreciation deeper?

And when I say “you” I mean principally men, since they overwhelmingly are the ones to write about Dylan, to make their female friends listen over and over to particular songs in the zealous way I used to listen to Paradise Theater when I was in junior high, to talk about his shattering and profound influence on the very notion of civilization. He seems to be more God than even George Burns.

Sure, I acknowledge his importance in contemporary American music. I see he’s a bridge between genres, that he is a searcher, that he is the American dream—come here, reinvent yourself. Do it again if it pleases. And then once more again, this time with a smile. This comes out in his songs, their lyrics and motifs. Can’t we let them speak for themselves? And if we cannot possibly, then lets let Dylan’s prose do the trick. He has, after all, written one memoir already.

Besides, there are other people to parse. Where are the volumes of deserved exegesis on my beloved Thom Yorke? Maybe, if I add up the numerical value of the letters in the word Radiohead they equal the word for Shekhinah! The truth is I like what I like notwithstanding the biographical details, and yet in Dylan’s case they are so pervasive—scratch that, invasive—that having not read a single book on him, I nevertheless know more about the dude than I do my own grandfather. (Lets not even get into the film accounts).

Dylan is like that most unmanly of foods—tofu. He takes on whatever characteristics you want him to. Every group yearns to claim him as his own. Good for the Jews! Good for the Minnesotans! Good for the harmonica players! Yes, sure, good for all of us but unless someone has an inside line that Dylan is secretly addicted to General Hospital or rolls with Paris Hilton every third Monday in a white hummer while blasting Black Star through the windows, there is surely nothing left to say.

Is Bob Dylan Jewish? Of course he is. Of course he’s not. Why do you ask? What’s in it for you? What was it you wanted? Do I understand your question?

If that’s a confusing answer, well, Dylan’s evasive identity games aren’t just the context for his art, they’re part of it. That’s the idea behind Todd Haynes’ new movie I’m Not There, which may be the smartest biography of Dylan yet created. It’s also the most perverse: plotless, chronologically scrambled, more about Dylan’s presence than about his particulars. The words “Bob Dylan” are never uttered in the course of the movie. Instead, we see a succession of Dylan avatars, each with his own name, each played by a different actor and filmed in a different style and setting.

The first one to appear is a young African American boy, played by Marcus Carl Franklin, who calls himself Woody Guthrie; he announces that “singing’s kept me right in the world more than any Bible’s ever done.” Another version, the protest singer Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), becomes a born-again Christian, as Dylan did in the late ’70s, and is last seen singing “Pressing On,” from Dylan’s gospel-era, to a tiny audience on folding chairs in a community center. (John Doe’s recording of it, which Bale lip syncs, is actually pretty terrific.)

The most consistent Jewish presence in I’m Not There comes from Allen Ginsberg, played to hilarious perfection by David Cross. In his first scene, he tells Jude Quinn—the mid-’60s incarnation of Dylan played by Cate Blanchett—something he’d told a reporter who’d asked if the singer had sold out: “Perhaps you sold out to God.” But there’s only one direct allusion in I’m Not There to Dylan’s Jewish background: A tightly wound reporter who’s been investigating Quinn triumphantly announces on television that the rock ‘n’ roll idol’s real name is “Aaron Jacob Edelstein.”

The reporter isn’t trying to smear Quinn by declaring that he’s Jewish; he’s trying to claim victory by pinning him down to any identity at all. (In fact, even beyond the “Jude” = “Jew” wordplay, the name “Jude Quinn” has plenty of religious resonance in the context of Dylan’s career. I’m Not There restages the famous moment at a May 1966 concert in Manchester when disgruntled fan Keith Butler called Dylan “Judas”; the “Quinn” part refers to “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn),” a slightly later Dylan song that arguably turns on a metaphor for the arrival of the Messiah.) But that scene is also the last we see of the reporter, and the last we hear of “Edelstein.” That’s part of Haynes’ point: Whenever you expect Dylan to be something, he’ll instantly be something else.

Of course, the very first identity Dylan had to escape was being a Jewish kid named Robert Allen Zimmerman from small-town Minnesota who had an upscale bar mitzvah and went to Camp Herzl in Webster, Wisconsin, over the summers. For a while, when he was very young, he even tried to claim it wasn’t true. Anthony Scaduto’s authorized 1971 Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography quotes “a Jewish coed who dated him for a time,” evidently during his brief period in college at the University of Minnesota: “When I knew him he was in no way being Jewish. That was something he was absolutely not being at all. Even after he knew that I knew he was Bob Zimmerman from up on the Range, he was not being Jewish. He was saying his mother wasn’t…” (The quote trails off there.)

By the time he started calling himself “Bob Dylan” and headed for New York City, he’d learned that being slippery about identity, or constructing new identities, was more fun and effective than blunt denials. The first newspaper article ever written about Dylan—Robert Shelton’s September, 1961, New York Times write-up—mentions a novelty song in his live repertoire: “‘Talkin’ Hava Nagilah’ burlesques the folk-music craze and the singer himself.”

Later, he learned to use “going back to his roots” as another kind of mask. Scaduto notes on the last page of his 1971 book that “Bob has started to study Judaism, and Hebrew…. He has even attended several meetings of the militant Jewish Defense League. The JDL’s head, Meir Kahane, will say only that Dylan has ‘come around a couple of times to see what we’re all about’ and has promised to donate money to the organization. Dylan refuses to discuss it.”

And Dylan’s own take on that period? In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles Volume One, he writes that he wanted to make the public reaction to him “lukewarm, indifferent and apathetic”—this was around the time that he released a deliberately awful record (1970′s Self Portrait) to get rabid fans to quit paying such close attention to him. Also, he says, “I went to Jerusalem, got myself photographed at the Western Wall wearing a skullcap. The image was transmitted worldwide instantly and quickly all the great rags changed me overnight into a Zionist. This helped a little.”

In the middle of I’m Not There, there’s a hilariously jolting take on Dylan’s appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—the performance at which, myth has it, he “went electric” (three years after his first electric recording; he can’t even be pinned down to that). In Haynes’ version, Jude Quinn and his band take the stage, open their guitar cases, pull out machine guns and open fire on the audience. Then the film cuts directly from metaphor to representation—they’re playing very loud rock ‘n’ roll—and, as in the legend, a tall fellow who looks just like Pete Seeger grabs a hatchet and tries to sever the power cables. Blanchett, as Quinn, is lip syncing Stephen Malkmus’s performance of “Maggie’s Farm,” in which the former Pavement lead singer bears down on its central line, “I try my best to be just like I am/But everybody wants you to be just like them.”

As it happens, Dylan’s actual performance at Newport that year was filmed by Murray Lerner, and has just been released on a DVD, The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965. We don’t see Seeger and his axe, but we do hear the audience’s reaction to the electric “Maggie’s Farm,” a mixture of cheers and boos. We also see Dylan’s solo acoustic performance earlier the same day: He’s playing a bunch of whimsical songs in the vein of what he’d been doing a year before, he’s giving his devoted audience exactly what they’re expecting from him, and he’s pretty evidently bored out of his skull and itching to slough off his “folksinger” identity.

For all his perversity, Dylan is a brilliant artist, so of course everybody wants him to be just like them: folkies, Jews, filmmakers, you name it. He seems to have at least a detached interest in virtually everything he’s ever encountered, and he’s almost never been willing to be part of any club that wants him as a member. He made only one exception—during his born-again Christian period—and it can’t have hurt that the ideology he chose was one that horrified a lot of his longtime fans.

Since then, though, he’s been spotted in various Jewish contexts. He showed up at synagogue in Atlanta this year on Yom Kippur. He’s studied with Lubavitchers. He’s blurbed a book by Rabbi Manis Friedman. On the other hand, he’s said of his “roots” that “I ain’t looking for them in synagogues with six-pointed Egyptian stars shining down from every window, I can tell you that much.”

If you’re looking for Jewish content in Dylan’s songs, you’ll find it for sure, because their glory is that everything is in there—his lyrics are impossibly rich in connotation and subtext, and he seems to have absorbed, synthesized, and transfigured everything he’s ever read or listened to. Some of those sources, inevitably, are Jewish sources, right alongside the lines from Confederate poet Henry Timrod that show up on Modern Times, or the phrases from Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza that resurface on Love and Theft, or the fragments of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” that Christopher Ricks has found peppered throughout “Not Dark Yet.” This site, for instance, along with its catalogue of Dylan’s documented and rumored links to Judaism, features a convincing exegesis of the Jewish language and ideas in his intensely Christian song “Jokerman.” And as deep as Dylan’s onstage catalogue has become, the one song that reliably turns up in his set list virtually every night is “Highway 61 Revisited”—which begins, “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’”

If you’re looking to claim Dylan as Jewish, though, you’ll probably be frustrated: He’s been having cameras pointed at him for over 45 years, and not one of them has yet managed to fix his identity in place. I’m Not There is named after a 40-year-old recording that had never officially seen the light of day before it appeared on the film’s soundtrack, despite the fact that it’s never taken much work for anyone with more than a passing interest in Dylan to track it down. That title is also effectively Dylan’s comeback to anyone who wants him to definitively be Aaron Edelstein or Woody Guthrie or Jack Rollins or Jude Quinn. Or, for that matter, Robert Zimmerman.

I was 20 years old, the proud owner of an exceptionally dull childhood and a brand-new used Mercury Bobcat. Everything was thrilling. Proofreading the box scores? Wowzer! Writing up my own profile for the company newsletter? Awesome! Listening to the sports editor berate me for fetching him decaf (“I’m what now, a faggot?”) An honor!

About a month into my stint, the pop music critic fell ill. I knew this only because one afternoon I spotted the features editor whispering to the city editor, who then shouted to the entire newsroom, “Anybody know anything about Bob Dylan?”

Afternoons were the dead zone at the PTT. There was nobody around, aside from us sports goons and the mushrooms on the copy desk—populations deeply, almost tenderly committed to the avoidance of discretionary labor.

“Bob Dylan!” the city editor bellowed. “We need someone to review Bob Dylan. We need someone to go and review Bob goddamn Dylan!”

After a minute or so, I marched over to the city editor and said, with what I’m sure I considered self-possession, “I can do it.”

“I give up,” he said. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Almond,” I said. “The new guy in sports.”

“Why’reya always standing around?”

“I don’t have a desk,” I said. “I’m the intern.”

The city editor closed his eyes and pressed the heels of his palms into the sockets. This did not strike me as a good sign.

“You know anything about Dylan?” he said, finally.

“Know about him? He’s only my favorite singer in the world.”

Was Bob Dylan my favorite singer on earth?

Technically, no. I had heard of Dylan of course. My parents were late-model hippies, after all. But I’d never really heard his music. This seems absurd to me now, but back then I was not such a music freak. I was a lonely sports intern who had worshipped Styx through high school and whose appreciation of 60s music extended no further than the Beatles. So it was off to the public library, which is where people went to find out about things before God invented the Internet.

I asked the woman at reference if she had any records by this Bob Dylan character. She pointed to a shelf that ran the entire length of the wall. Holy shit, I thought. I checked out the maximum number of LPs (six) and raced home to read the liner notes and memorize the songs.

It was clear to me—based on the volume of his output alone—that Dylan was a rather large cheese in the music biz. And his melodies were often quite lovely. But my first impression of his music—one that will be familiar to other ingrate schmucks who come to Dylan late—was this: What, the guy can’t afford a decongestant?

The show was at the Shoreline Amphitheater, a lovely outdoor venue built atop a landfill in Mountain View. I had two tickets, but no one to go with. So I gave it away instead, to a pretty girl I hoped might sit next to me. Dylan was traveling with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers back then. He was in the midst of the longest slump of his long career, having just released Knocked Out Loaded to general indifference. The Reagan era had boiled him down to mush. In a year or so, he would join the Traveling Wilburys, a supergroup whose ultimate musical significance can be summed up with these two words: Trivial Pursuit.

I didn’t know any of this back then, though. He was just this legendary sinus sufferer I had to review. I found a seat on the grass and scribbled notes as he played and begged the folks next to me for the titles. Did I enjoy the show? Not especially. I was too caught up in the need to write the review, which I imagined would launch my brilliant career.

There was one moment, though, that managed to penetrate my cloud of anxiety. An hour into the show, Dylan dismissed his backing band (the Heartbreakers), so he could perform an acoustic set, just him and his guitar. The first song he played was “Masters of War.” No sooner did he begin than we heard a dull roar overhead. It grew louder as Dylan sang:

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes

And just then—I mean, even as the words were coming out of his mouth—a C-24 transport plane banked over the amphitheater, its massive belly passing no more than a few hundred feet above where we were sitting. The crowd let out a collective gasp.

It was clear to me now that I had somewhat underestimated Dylan. I still didn’t quite get why so many people worshipped his music. But I now understood—with something of a jolt—why people worshipped him. Dylan had some very powerful mojo.

You’ll be relieved to know that the Freak Archives do not contain an extant copy of the subsequent review. It was everything you’d expect from a 19-year-old sports intern. There was no appreciable criticism of his music, more a string of adjectives and song titles, several of them wrong. (I referred to “Ballad of a Thin Man” as “Mr. Jones.” Nice.)

But the experience was exhilarating, nonetheless. It was enough to convince me that perhaps sports reporting wasn’t my only option, that, in fact, music criticism might be more my thing.

My transformation from sports geek to music geek didn’t happen overnight. It was gradual, just like my conversion to Dylanism. I quit the soccer team and became a DJ at the college radio station. A couple of years later, I graduated and took a job as a features reporter in El Paso. One day, not long after I arrived, my editor asked me if I’d ever reviewed concerts before.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “I reviewed Dylan back in ’86.” Then I told her the story about the plane swooping over the amphitheater, which—along with the fact that my editor had no other real options—landed me a job as the paper’s music critic.

I certainly owed Dylan big time for this. But I still wasn’t what I’d call a fan. I had a few of his albums. Still, the hardcore obsessives, the dudes who parse his lyrics as if they were written on a Dead Sea Scroll, struck me as sad. I frankly still didn’t get what they were so worked up about.

A decade later, I found myself on Folly Beach, outside Charleston, South Carolina. I was ostensibly visiting my uncle Pete, who was filming a documentary on Reconstruction. But really, I was in full retreat from my life, which I’d mucked up pretty thoroughly.

I was supposed to be in Greensboro, North Carolina, having fled newspapers for an MFA in creative writing. But grad school wasn’t going so well. Everybody there seemed to hate me, especially my professors. What’s more, I hated them. I didn’t want to go back.

Pete said he understood. I didn’t have to stay there. There was no law. Then he slipped me a copy of the Dylan record he was listening to at that time, Saved. As Dylan fanatics will happily inform you, Saved is the second of his three born-again Christian records. In other words, obscure and not well regarded.

But Pete had always been something of a guru to me, so I placed my trust in him and popped the cassette into my car stereo anyway, and listened to it all the way back to Greensboro, in a state of swelling rapture.

Dylan’s lyrics were those of an evangelical looneybird—he talked lots about the blood of the lamb—but the music was lush, insistent, and absolutely heartfelt. He threw his pinched and whining voice right out there, against bubbling organ riffs and a full gospel choir. The title track hit me hardest. It was a rousing anthem built for tent revivals. Dylan’s words spoke to my precise spiritual condition:

Nobody to rescue me
Nobody would dare
I was going down for the last time
But by His mercy I’ve been spared

Much has been made of Dylan’s starring role as the Judas of Modern Jewry. How he leaves Hibbing, Minnesota as an obedient Zimmerman and washes up on the shores of Greenwich Village, with a bogus Woody Guthrie accent and a new name inspired by a Welsh poet. How he gets himself washed in the blood of Christ, then tacks back to Judaism. It would be a fool’s errand to argue against his spiritual confusion.

But I could give a rat’s ass about another man’s faith, as measured against his imagination and candor. Which is the very reason Saved hit me so hard. What Dylan was saying, what he was saying (as I understood things) to me was this: There is no shame in true belief. You must soldier on in the face of doubt, for doubt is not just the proof of your faith, but a joyous cause.

He was talking about his shiny new savior, and that was kind of creepy. Sure. But the larger lesson was one of mercy. I needed to forgive myself, not my enemies. There was no other way to survive the days, with only my suckass prose for company.

More years went by. I moved up north and set about writing short stories. The big money sector—that was my grand idea. I wasn’t ready to start proselytizing for Dylan, but I amassed a decent collection of his records, and his songs continued to come to me, as necessary.

I indulged in a frantic live version of “Maggie’s Farm” upon my liberation from a particular dismal literary agent. I binged on “Man of Constant Sorrow” during the first of my annual winter depressions, trudging the dirty snow to the rhythm of his plucked and descending minor triad. Upon the implosion of the modern electoral system—I refer here to what the historians still call the 2000 Presidential Election—I listened to “Everything Is Broken” 271 times in a row. (I can no longer suffer the song without an accompanying surge of nausea.)

These were but infatuations, with their zippy mood and velocity. But Dylan had big things in store for me. Yes, he did. Five years on, deep into my thirties, I found myself still alone, crashing into the wrong women, or treating the right ones as if they’d been leased. The writing had finally gotten on track a little, but this hadn’t made me any happier, or any more pleasant to be around.

One day I was sitting around, marinating in self-pity, when the phone rang. The voice on the line was my old friend Tom, a devoted sadsack who, oddly, looked remarkably like Dylan from certain angles.

“You know what’s great?” he said to me.

There was no introduction necessary. I knew his voice well enough, though his tone was frighteningly placid.

“No,” I muttered. “Tell me.”

“Listening to Bob Dylan with your daughter,” he said.

In the background, I could hear the gentle chords of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Then an image came to me, quite clearly, of Tom lying in his basement with his baby daughter sprawled on his belly. He sounded at peace, in a way I’d never known him to be, Tom with his disappointed brow, his soft complaints.

Is this what family life might be like?

I had always assumed (without quite realizing I was making this assumption) that a family of my own would return me to the wordless, loveless feud that marked my own upbringing. But here was Tom—every bit my equal as a commitment-phobic depressive—suggesting that the finding of a wife, the spawning of a child, might in fact produce scenes such as the beatific one inside my head.

And it wasn’t just Tom. Dylan was saying the same thing, even though his lyrics were about ditching a lover and walking off into the sunset, because, the thing is, as I sat in my empty apartment imagining the warm embrace of Tom and his daughter, I realized that this wasn’t just another kiss-off tune, but that Dylan was himself in despair, aware of his failure before the great task of love, dreading the solitude that awaits him and—just beneath his tone of casual dismissal—desperate for absolution:

And it ain’t no use in turning on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was something you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talking anyway
So don’t think twice, it’s all right

And I, too, was on the dark side of the road, listening to that bittersweet song of my own heart, and Dylan was saying: Take a look around, bub. Is this really the way you want to lead your life?

I will spare you the long version of what ensued, which involves a lot of air travel and therapy. The short version is that I now have a daughter of my own, along with a dim basement where we listen to Dylan through the broiling summer afternoons.

Do I read a bit too much into Dylan? Probably. He provokes this sort of exegetical excess. He doesn’t mean to, exactly. Not in the same way the authors of the Bible do. Those guys—they wanted to play God. They wanted to instruct people morally. With Dylan, it’s more a case of chronic self-examination, which seems to run in his blood. He also writes very beautiful melodies, the kind that seep into the tender parts.

I am not suggesting that Bob Dylan has magical powers. His gift is for pop music, not prophecy. His songs cannot cure the ill, or redeem the damned. They merely provide us an occasion to heal ourselves. They unlock the transformative aspects of belief within us. That’s what Dylan has done for me since I discovered him 20 years ago. He may not be much of a cantor, but he’s a helluva rebbe.