The 150 greatest Jewish pop songs of all time – Forward
Posted By admin on February 2, 2022
Inspired in part by all the Jewish artists on Rolling Stones list of the 500 Greatest Songs, the Forward decided it was time to rank the best Jewish pop songs of all time. You can find the whole list and accompanying essays here.
After Rolling Stone magazine published its list of the 500 Greatest Albums last September, we started asking ourselves what are the greatest Jewish songs of the rock era? We began drawing up lists of our own, but soon realized that were we to be serious about it, this was a task that required input from a larger cohort. We then sent out invitations to a couple dozen writers, musicians, and writer/musicians, asking them to share their lists and thoughts about their favorite rock songs that address Jewish culture, ideas, themes, history, or religion.
We got back from them an astonishing list of 300 songs in all, as diverse as the contributors themselves, not all of whom are Jewish at least we dont think so; we didnt ask. We then culled the replies down to a somewhat manageable list of 150, with annotations and links. We could easily have populated the entire list with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen songs, so many of which touch on Jewishness that entire books have been written about them, so we tried to limit those entries in the spirit of inclusiveness.
About a dozen contributors chose to delve more in-depth in the form of short essays on songs and related topics. We have no doubt that for every song included in our list some readers will have alternative choices. Others will quibble with some of our selections. So be it; this is all in fun. What follows is our list of the 150 Greatest Jewish Pop Songs of All Time.
Contributors:Peter Aaron (PA), Jackson Arn, Steven Lee Beeber (SLB), Scott Benarde (SB), Doug Brod (DB), Michael Eck (ME), Dan Epstein (DE), Mira Fox (MF), Jennifer Gilmore (JG), PJ Grisar (PJ), Howard Fishman, Jon Karp (JK), Harold Lepidus (HL), Alan Light (AL), Gary Lucas (GL), Julie Potash Slavin aka Hesta Prynn, Ira Robbins (IR), Wayne Robins (WR), Nathan Salsburg (NS), Ed Siegel (ES), Jim Sullivan (JS), Rob Tannenbaum (RT)
WARNING BEFORE YOU CLICK:
Some of the songs linked here include explicit lyrics, terms and imagery that some might find offensive or disturbing, and graphic references to the Holocaust.
Intentionally or not, Bob Dylan pretty much invents rock n roll midrash with this 1965 hit, a slapstick retelling of the Akeidah the binding of Isaac. It opens with the line, God said to Abraham, Kill me a son, to which Abe (which happens to be Dylans fathers name) replies, Man, you must be puttin me on. Extra points for the Borscht Belt humor, and more extra points for accompaniment by Jewish guitar slinger Michael Bloomfield and keyboardist Al Kooper. AL
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The title song of Leonard Cohens final album in 2016 features backing by the choir from his childhood synagogue in Montreal, Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, and an authentic khazonish solo by Cantor Gideon Zelermyer. It includes a line from the Kaddish Magnified and sanctified be thy holy name and a quotation from Avraham Avinu in the original biblical Hebrew Hineni, hineni, Im ready my Lord. The song was released on Cohens 82nd birthday. He died 19 days later. He was ready. WR
No, this is not an ode to the hipster trend of inking every inch of flesh. Rather, the tattoo in question is one of the dehumanizing elements of the Holocaust. In this story of a young woman at Auschwitz, Janis Ian sings, Centuries live in her eyes / Destiny laughs over jack-booted thighs / Work makes us free says the sign / Nothing leaves here alive.
A soulful Holocaust remembrance with an unlikely country beat. ES
Psychedelic guitar wunderkind Randy California born Randy Wolfe solemnly intones the first line of Psalm 133 (aka Hinei Ma Tov) in Hebrew before letting loose with an ecstatic flurry of velvet fuzz over his bands jazzy 6/4 groove. Just to title a rock song Jewish in 1968 was a provocative statement. JK and DE
A searing rap statement on the Holocaust by Remedy (born Ross Filler aka Reuven Ben Menachem), the first non-Black and only Jew affiliated with the epochal hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan. Introduced with the familiar words of the Kiddush blessing over wine (in pointedly Ashkenazic pronunciation), the narration then descends into a Dantesque tour of genocidal horrors. Some listeners may flinch at the politics (The final solution is now retribution, Never again shall we march like sheep to the slaughter), but this is a tour de force performance and striking statement of American post-Holocaust Jewish sensibility in popular song. JK
As Jenny Singer noted in these pages, when the Haim sisters sing: The tears behind your dark sunglasses / The fears inside your heart as deep as gashes / You walk beside me, not behind me, they appear to be riffing on the lyrics to Lo Yisa Goy, the perennial anti-war anthem heard at Jewish summer camps throughout North America. Theres also the off chance that theyre drawing from Camus or the Polices ode to a pervy teacher, Dont Stand So Close to Me. Given the sisters quite explicit Jewishness, the Hebrew tune is a more likely source of inspiration. PJ
A midrashic rewriting of the story of Samson told from Delilahs point of view and chock-full of biblical references, by this Russian-Jewish singer-songwriter, whose family left the USSR for the Bronx when Regina Spektor was nine years old. MF
How did a song written by a west coast hip-hop group, a Catholic pop star and a French DJ become a Jewish dance tune second in popularity only to the hora? Read Julie Potash Slavins accompanying essay to find out.
On its surface, Eternal Flame, is a harmony-laden power ballad about everlasting love that the Bangles rode to the top of the charts in 1989. The title, however according to cowriter Billy Steinberg refers to the ner tamid (eternal flame) that burns above the ark in every synagogue. As a child learning about the different aspects of his synagogue, Steinberg was fascinated by the concept of an eternal flame and jotted it in a notebook he calls his Wonderment File. Years later, he would rediscover the phrase and turn it into a pop hit. SB
In which Jill Sobule asks that essential question: Would you have hidden me in your attic or pack me on that awful train?
In 1967, Lou Reed extolled the high he got from junk in the Velvet Underground song Heroin, in which he sang, Heroin, be the death of me / Heroin, its my wife and its my life. About 30 years later, Reed changed his tune in this nostalgic reverie about the simple pleasures of the egg creams of yesteryear, replete with recipe: When I was a young man, no bigger than this / A chocolate egg cream was not to be missed / Some U-Bets chocolate syrup, seltzer water mixed with milk / You stir it up into a heady fro, tasted just like silk.
This haunting track, penned by Human Sexual Response lead vocalist Larry Bangor, is the final cut on the new wave bands 1980 debut, Fig.14. Bangor, who is not Jewish, told the Forward that he grew up reading Anne Franks diary and she became an iconic presence in his mind. I was pretty affected by her story and what she lived through. The band recorded the track in Bostons historic Cyclorama, which lacked proper soundproofing. Just at the very end we could hear a siren going by, says Bangor. We thought it would ruin the take, but given the nature of the song, it was perfect.
In a four-and-a-half minute Rolling Stones-ish rocker, Bob Dylan recounts the story of the Jewish people in a manner leading inevitably toward an unrepentant Zionism. The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land / Hes wandered the earth an exiled man / Seen his family scattered, people hounded and torn / Hes always on trial for just being born.
Growing up surrounded by liturgy, Leonard Cohen often fondly recalled the awesome power of his shuls cantor and the ritual of the High Holidays. He was seldom more explicit about this influence than in this song, which pulls directly from the piyyut Unetanneh Tokef. PJ
An acoustic blues number by the late, great guitarist Michael Bloomfield (perhaps best-known as a favorite Bob Dylan sideman) may be the quintessential Jewish pride song. It starts out with a laugh and ends with a thunderclap of defiance: Im glad Im Jewish, Im glad Im Jewish / Hebrew to the bone / It kept me strong all my life SB
Though far more comfortable singing goofy lyrics about mental illness than political commentary, Joey Ramone was so disgusted by Ronald Reagans 1985 visit to the military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany and the Presidents remarks that the soldiers buried there, including members of the S.S., were victims just like those who died in Nazi death camps that he felt compelled to pen this uncharacteristically angry missive: Youre a politician / Dont become one of Hitlers children / Bonzo goes to Bitburg, then goes out for a cup of tea. DE
And the man upstairs I hope that he cares / If I had a penny for my thoughts Id be a millionaire / Were just 3 M.C.s and were on the go / Shadrach, Meshach, Abednago.
On their landmark 1989 album, Pauls Boutique, the Beastie Boys Michael Diamond, Adam Yauch and Adam Horovitz liken themselves to three Jews from the Book of Daniel Shadrach, Meshach and Abednago who, when thrown into a fiery furnace for failing to bow down to Nebuchadnezzar II, dance in the flames, protected from harm by God. Whether the song is a Holocaust allusion or a statement of pride in the face of accusations of cultural appropriation (Music for all and not just one people), its deeply Jewish. SLB
Neil Diamonds evocative 1968 ode to his working-class Jewish upbringing is a compelling mixture of warm nostalgia and unresolved emotional trauma and remains one of the best things he ever wrote. DE Read Dan Epsteins accompanying essay.
Think what you will about her stance on Israel (and keep in mind that she campaigned for Bernie Sanders for president), dance-pop singer Dua Lipa apparently had the Bible on her mind when she was putting together the songs for her eponymous debut. The album kicks off, appropriately, with a song titled Genesis, whose first line is, In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth. A few tracks later comes Garden, a retelling of the first couple of chapters of Genesis as a love story, replete with burgeoning self-consciousness, embarrassment, and nudity, and probably accurate to how Adam and Eve felt. MF
Honor Them All is a hidden jewel from Janis Ians 1997 album, Hunger. Although Ian admits she didnt have the Fifth Commandment in mind when she wrote it, its hard not to see the song as an exhortation to abide by it: Honor your mother / Honor your father / Honor yourself above all / Honor the gifts you bring one another / Each time you rise or you fall / Honor them all. SB
In which the singer recounts a nightmarish ride in a taxi, where the driver reveals himself to be an avid neo-Nazi.
As a kid, Randy Newman took a train trip with his mother from Los Angeles to New Orleans aka the land of dreams. In this 1988 mid-tempo ballad that sends up assimilation, Newman whose family name was originally Nemorofsky sings, Her brothers and sisters came down from Jackson, Mississippi / In a great green Hudson driven by a Gentile they knew / Drinkin rye whiskey from a flask in the back seat / Tryin to do like the Gentiles do / Christ, they wanted to be Gentiles, too / Who wouldnt down there, wouldnt you? JS
In which Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart sings, One mad man, six million lose / Down in Dachau blues, accompanied by appropriately mad, discordant electric guitar noise. Read Gary Lucas accompanying essay.
The title gives us three cities that weave a complicated tale of Diaspora, death and Jewish return, complete with a New York Jews sometime ambivalence toward the Jewish state. A hundred years or more / It feels like such a dream / An endless conversation since 1917, Koenig sings, which, as Jenny Singer noted in her full Jewish debrief on Father of the Bride, is the date of the Balfour Declaration. Koenig laments the Wicked World in which he, a Jew, always loses, when all I want is to win. In the end, his decision is to remove himself from the situation and its dynamics while hoping history is not repeated either in Jerusalem, New York or Berlin. Let them win the battle, Koenig offers, But dont let them restart / That genocidal feeling / That beats in every heart. PJ
Always one for blurring biblical time and contemporary references, Leonard Cohen used a poetic retelling of the Akeidah in this 1969 song to condemn those who would so blithely send their offspring off to fight an unjust and unpopular war: You who build these altars, to sacrifice these children / You must not do it anymore. PJ
Granted, David Bowies Kabbalistic education owed more to Aleister Crowley than to Gershom Scholem, but Station to Station remains one of the very few songs by a major rock star to reference elements of the sefirot, the vessels of divine energy from Kether to Malkhut sung in the original Hebrew.
The fiery reggae-rocker All You Zombies by the Hooters brims with biblical references: Moses, Noah, the Golden Calf, the Ten Commandments, the Israelites. Band co-founders Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman, both Jewish, who cowrote what became the bands signature song despite it not being a hit single, have long said they didnt really know what it was about, but agree that, It took two Jewish guys to write it. Read Scott Benardes accompanying essay.
A young warrior in training is given some rules: First rule is: The laws of Germany / Second rule is: Be nice to mommy / Third rule is: Dont talk to commies / Fourth rule is: Eat kosher salamis. Joey Ramone grew up as Jeffrey Hyman in Forest Hills, Queens, and eventually became the emblematic punk rocker from the most essential punk-rock band in the world. Read Steven Lee Beebers accompanying essay.
On the Dictators landmark 1975 debut album, Go Girl Crazy!, these predominantly Jewish, New York City-based punk progenitors wasted no time declaring their Hebraic heritage: The Next Big Thing, the albums hard-rocking leadoff track, features the brilliant couplet, I knocked em dead in Dallas, I didnt pay my dues / Yeah, I knocked em dead in Dallas, they didnt know we were Jews. DE
Not only does Mick Jagger drop Yiddish into this 1978 Top 40 hit dissection of New York City he even gets the historical geography correct when he sings, Shmatta, shmatta, shmatta, I cant give it away on Seventh Avenue.
Inspired by famous Jewish songwriter King Solomon and a chapter of his book Koheles (aka Ecclesiastes), Pete Seeger first assembled the lyrics and recorded a version before the Byrds applied their jingle-jangle folk-rock magic, turning these ancient words of wisdom into a hit single that went all the way to No. 1 on the pop charts in 1965. The message: Life as we know it is cyclical. JS
On Paul Simons criminally underrated 1983 solo album Hearts and Bones, the title track directly addresses his Jewish heritage in the somewhat comic, somewhat cryptic opening line, One and one-half wandering Jews, a reference to himself and his then-wife, Carrie Fisher, daughter of non-Jewish actress Debbie Reynolds and Jewish actor Eddie Fisher. Hence the half. HL
In which Lou Reed reveals himself to be a one-man Anti-Defamation League, calling out former Nazi and United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, Jesse Hymietown Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and even the Pope.
The psychedelic prog-rock outfit Electric Prunes followed up their Mass in F Minor concept album with 1968s Release of an Oath, whose opening track, a version of Kol Nidre, is replete with English translation of the declaration preemptively nullifying all vows. Absolutely one of the most bizarre moments in Jewish rock history.
Presumably folk singer-songwriter Tom Paxton had in mind the traditional gospel tune This Train (Is Bound for Glory) when he penned the line This train is bound for Auschwitz, in a song that pulls no punches and vividly describes the journey from boxcar to death camp to gas chamber. So much for glory.
Leonard Cohen never found the secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord, but after a decade or so, he did manage to find a vast audience for this majestic 1984 composition, which also includes references to Samson, Delilah and Bathsheba and which has since been covered by hundreds of other artists and even translated into Yiddish. DE
In which Marc Cohn finds common ground between Jews and the victims of Hurricane Katrina: The chosen ones are walking through the new desert / All the way uptown to Riverside / The faces of the fathers / They look a lot like mine Today they have all been forgiven / Washed clean before another year begins SB
Whats this peppy novelty song by Good for the Jews (co-written by Sean Altman and Rob Tannenbaum, a well-known music journalist and contributor to this feature) about? The title pretty much spells it out: persecution and celebration throughout the ages, set to a jaunty melody with comic lyrics referencing a Pharoah who looked like Yul Brynner, Madonna gone Jewish, Jews who sing Christmas music, Hitler, Schindlers List and so much more. JS
One of Randy Newmans greatest satirical numbers, wherein no one is spared: Lester Maddox, Dick Cavett, and some smart-ass New York Jew. Read the accompanying essay by Howard Fishman.
The late Chuck E. Weiss will always be best known as the inspiration for Rickie Lee Jones 1979 hit, Chuck E.s in Love. In 1999, Weiss, much influenced by his friend, Tom Waits, wrote Rockin in the Kibbitz Room, a gruff-voiced tribute to the Tuesday Night Jam Session at the Kibitz Room, the small nightclub inside the fabled Canters Deli in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. Have a matzah ball if you want to, sings Weiss, or maybe have some cabbage soup / Youll be sittin round diggin all that rock n roll music and hangin with those hepcat Jews. SB
Recounting a bar fight between the Jewish narrator and a racist redneck nerd, Kinky Friedman sings, No, they aint makin Jews like Jesus anymore / We dont turn the other cheek the way we done before. IR
Most hard-rock Jews (e.g., David Lee Roth, Gene Simmons) dont really address their heritage directly in their music. Rush bassist/singer Geddy Lee (born Gary Lee Weinrib) is the son of Holocaust survivors, and drummer Neil Peart, the groups primary lyricist, based this song on stories Lee told about his parents experiences: Ragged lines of ragged gray / Skeletons, they shuffle away / Shouting guards and smoking guns / Will cut down the unlucky ones. AL
Springtime for Hitler in punk-land, this seemingly happy-go-lucky tune bops with Holocaust-induced shpilkes. SLB
This Texas trio still looked more like cowboys than Hasidic Jews back in 1975 when this rocking paean to the pursuit of callipygian delights reached #20 on the Billboard Hot 100. Their pronunciation was a little off, and Billy Gibbons always claimed that the word was also southern slang for deluxe, but Tush nonetheless remains an extreme rarity: a classic rock hit with a Yiddish-derived title. DE
In what is ostensibly a satirical take on the religious ban against Western music in post-1979 Iran, the partly-Jewish English punks of the Clash paint a portrait of Middle East peace symbolized by a Hasidic Jew and a kaffiyeh-bedecked Arab dancing their way through the songs video, even though Sharif dont like it, he thinks its not kosher. DB
A cri de coeur lamenting white supremacy has plenty of Jewish musical precedent to begin with. But Ezra Koenig and his crew went above and beyond, identifying the specific stigma neo-Nazis and their precursors pin on Jews and Koenigs own deep, ancestral memory. Beneath these velvet gloves I hide / The shameful, crooked hands of a moneylender, Koenig sings, a jarring line in a jaunty radio-ready hit, cause I still remember. PJ
Warren Zevon, whose father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant, did not write particularly Jewish-themed songs, but here he kicks off one of his foreign intrigue numbers in a nuclear-armed Middle East where Israels attacking the Iraqis. When he comes around to singing about Syrian guns being trained on the Israeli capital, he pauses for a solemnly drawn-out, prayer-like, Oh, Jerusalem, seemingly hinting at where his loyalties lie. JS
Jay Black, who died this year, may not have made it through yeshiva, but he was keenly aware of his Jewishness, going so far as to devote a 1966 B-side to this song, sung in Yiddish and then in English as a tribute to family lost to the Shoah. His plaintive voice is unmistakable, his nigunim impeccable and no surprise given it was his first language his Yiddish is perfect. That Blacks label agreed to print a song in Yiddish for an English-speaking crowd tells you all you need to know about the power of his performance. PJ
Way on the other side of the Hudson, deep in the bosom of suburbia. To launch a pop song with that scene-setting description is pure genius. And the rest more than lives up to this promising start. Dean Friedman details a date between the singer and a girl he spotted one day at the Paramus Park shopping mall, collecting quarters in a paper cup for the socialist radio station WBAI. Ariel is a post-Sixties hippie and a free spirit; while he dresses up in his best blue jeans, she wears a peasant blouse with nothing underneath. He greets her with Hi and she responds with, Yeah, I guess I am. Following a bout of the munchies, the evening climaxes, literally, as they make love in front of the TV to bombs bursting in air (in the days when stations signed off at night with the Star Spangled Banner). A fantasy? For sure, but its made more affecting when we discover that She was a Jewish girl; I fell in love with her. Ariel offered by the standards of the day an adoring and appreciative, if objectified, image of Jewish femininity. JK
Written while Leonard Cohen toured Israel during the outbreak of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Lover, Lover, Lover reads as a primal plea for Jewish renewal. It is a pantheistic reinterpretation of the Hebraic tradition along Canaanite lines, whereby the supplicant seeks to cleanse himself of the fear and filth and cowardice and shame of millennial Jewish exile and reconcile with his estranged divine lover in a spirit that is calm. Anything but calm, Lover is as joyous, even ecstatic a performance as the monotonal Cohen could pull off, and it sounds like nothing he or anyone else ever recorded. JK
In this swinging three-minute tootle, Lou Reed imagines trading in life as a middle-class nebbish for becoming a Black Panther with a big prick and a stable of foxy little whores, while using his newfound might to fk up the Jews. He rhymes jism with natural rhythm and expresses envy for Martin Luther King Jr., 10 years after his murder. Too soon? Reed seems to be having some ironic sport with Norman Mailers The White Negro essay, which prompted James Baldwin to observe that for white men, African-American men are walking phallic symbols. RT
Joan Baezs hit song Donna, Donna began life as Dana Dana, also known as Dos Kelbl, or The Calf, written by Sholom Sekunda and Aaron Zeitlin for the Yiddish musical theater. Later on, Sekunda translated the song into English, along the way changing the title to Dona Dona. In the mid-1950s, Arthur Kevess and Teddi Schwartz retranslated the song into English, and it was their versionnow spelled Donna Donna but still pronounced with a long o that Baez included on her eponymous debut album. The song, about a calf being led to slaughter, became a staple of Baezs concerts and entered the canon of folk-protest (and summer-camp) songs of the 1960s.
For his second album with the Modern Lovers, circa 1976, Jonathan Richman went back to his roots: camp-fire singalongs, nonsense songs about abominable snowmen in the market, Martian Martians, and heartfelt paeans to Bostons Lonely Financial Zone. In New England, the one-time kibbutznik looks back nostalgically on his stint in the Promised Land: I have seen old Israels arid plain / Its magnificent, but sos Maine. GL
Written in the wake of the Yom Kippur war, Silent Eyes could well be Paul Simons most Jewish song. It is manifestly about longing and weeping for Jerusalem in prayerlike phrases She is sorrow, sorrow / She burns like a flame / And she calls my name. And it envisions a time when all will be called to account We shall all be called as witnesses / Each and every one / To stand before the eyes of God / And speak what was done. It isnt too much of a stretch to wonder if the Jerusalem of the song is a stand-in for the Jewish people. With its central image of silent eyes, its latent subject could be the Holocaust.
Madonna engaged the services of Yitzhak Sinwani of the Kabbalah Centre to help get across her most Jewish song, replete with Aramaic lyrics based on a Yemenite poem, a cantorial-style improvisation, English lyrics (Open up my heart / Cause my lips to speak / Bring the heavens and the stars down to earth for me) inspired by Psalms 19:15, and a verse inspired by Jacobs dream of wrestling with angels (Wrestle with your darkness / Angels call your name / Can you hear what they are saying / Will you ever be the same?). She gives Sinwani the last word when he intones, The gates of heaven are always open.
Vampire Weekends third album, Modern Vampires of the City, is full of references to Jewish thought. This catchy single has a chorus that goes: Through the fire and through the flames / You wont even say your name / Only I am that I am, a reference to G-ds reply to Moses (Ehyeh asher ehyeh) when the latter asks G-ds name. Jews dont say the name either, even if they knew it. That is why they say Hashem or Ya Hey. WR
On its surface, the theme song from New York, New York is the unofficial anthem of the unofficial capital of Jewish America, writes Jackson Arn in his accompanying essay, but scratch the surface and you might find Maimonides peeking out at you.
This song from Bob Dylans 1989 album Oh Mercy is not just a litany of things that are broken (e.g., lines, strings, threads, springs, bottles, plates, switches, gates). Rather, it refers to the concept from Lurianic Kabbalah, whereby the tzimtzum of Creation resulted in shattered vessels of divinity sprinkled throughout the universe. This is where the process of tikkun olam repairing a broken world begins.
The highly literate English rock singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock (Soft Boys, Egyptians) lived on a kibbutz as a youth, and he toured Israel as recently as February 2020. Cynthia Mask kicks off his fourth solo album, 1990s Eye. The songs second verse reveals his strong identification with the tribe: Chamberlain came crawling from Munich / With one piece of paper / He waved at the camera / Peace in our time / Oh thank you Herr Hitler / Tell that to the Polish / Tell that to the Jews. HL
Elvis Costello originally intended for his third album to be called Emotional Fascism, but his record label put the kibosh on it, instead titling it Armed Forces. The song Goon Squad is a vestige of the original concept, as Costello sings from the point of view of a young man beset by a group of Nazi-like characters: You must find the proper place for everything you see / But youll never get to make a lampshade out of me. HL
On this song from Leonard Cohens 1992 masterpiece, The Future, Cohen sings, There is a crack, a crack in everything / Thats how the light gets in. The couplet is an allusion to the Creation story of Lurianic Kabbalah, wherein shards of Divine light, the klippot, or broken vessels, fall to the Earth, spilling over from the contraction of Gods energy, the tzimtzum, into Himself.
Somehow, and for some reason, Don McLean, the troubadour behind American Pie, followed up that hit with a song called Dreidel. With lyrics like I feel like a spinning top or a dreidel / The spinning dont stop when you leave the cradle / You just slow down, its no Maoz Tzur. Its barely I Have a Little Dreidel. But it is the rare Hanukkah-adjacent song from a Gentile and, for that, it deserves a spot on this list. PJ
Without getting into the whole Rastafarian-Jewish relationship, consider this reggae classic by the Melodians, from the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, which incorporates words from Psalm 137 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down / Yeah, we wept, when we remembered Zion and Psalms 19:14 Let the words of our mouth and the meditation of our heart / Be acceptable in thy sight here tonight set to a lovely groove, guaranteeing that I forever sing the wrong melody in Rosh Hashanah services. AL
On his 1975 album Rock Around the Bunker, French pop provocateur Serge Gainsbourg took Springtime for Hitler and ran with it, creating an entire concept album mocking Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The bouncy boogie-woogie of Yellow Star contrasts with darkly humorous musings on the identifying patch that he was forced to wear as a Jewish child in Vichy France. Difficult for a Jew, the law of struggle for life, he shrugs, smiling inwardly at the irony of having outlived Hitler by three decades. See also Nazi Rock and Rock Around the Bunker. DE
Though hes mostly remembered these days for his ripping 1962 rendition of Misirlou, Dick Dale aka The King of Surf Guitar was one of the most exciting and influential guitarists who ever plugged into an amp. And his double-picked, reverb-soaked 1963 take on Hava Nagila is unquestionably the most badass version of the classic folk song ever committed to vinyl. DE
Forget Jimi Hendrix. Bob Dylans original, acoustic version of All Along the Watchtower is much more haunting and chilling, as it recounts an ominous scene with imagery lifted from Isaiah 21:4-9, wherein the watchmen spy a pair of horseman (two riders were approaching) galloping toward them, calling out like a lion (a wildcat did growl) to announce the fall of Babylon.
One of Metallicas greatest songs, this standout track from 1984s thrash-tastic Ride the Lightning album features numerous references to the Plagues of Egypt as recounted in the Book of Exodus. The songs title came from bassist Cliff Burton, who reportedly exclaimed, Whoa its like creeping death! while watching the 10th and final plague do its firstborn-killing thing in The Ten Commandments. Made all the more sweet by the fact that guitarist Kirk Hammett originally wrote the music to the middle section while he was a member of a band called Exodus. DE
Since he debuted this song on a 1994 Weekend Update segment of Saturday Night Live, comedian Adam Sandler has been having fun updating this seasonal confection intended to instill Jewish pride in children feeling alienated during Christmas. When you feel like the only kid in town without a Christmas tree / Heres a list of people who are Jewish just like you and me / David Lee Roth lights the menorah / So do James Caan, Kirk Douglas, and the late Dinah Shore-ah. ES
While living on Coney Islands Mermaid Avenue, Woody Guthrie spent plenty of time with his childrens bubbe, his wife Marjorie Mazias mother Yiddish poet and songwriter Aliza Greenblatt from whom Guthrie soaked up Jewish history and culture. He wound up leaving behind a cache of Jewish-themed song lyrics that his daughter Nora Guthrie wound up giving to the Klezmatics, who won a Grammy Award for their settings of Guthries lyrics on the 2006 album Wonder Wheel, which included this song recounting the story of Moses and the burning bush. ME
Sometimes you have to read between the lines to detect the Jewish traces in American popular music. In this case, the lines were all written by American Jews musically, by the stellar Brill Building composers Barry Mann and Mike Stoller and lyrically, by their respective songwriting partners Cynthia Weill and Jerry Leiber. The title was borrowed from the 1958 best-seller by the Charlotte, North Carolina, Jewish journalist Harry Golden, which lampooned both Southern segregation and Northern liberal hypocrisy. Like Golden, Weill employed the expression Only in America ironically to expose the fake promise of equality as it pertained to Black Americans. Finding this approach too controversial for 1963 pop radio, Leiber remade the lyric as a paean to unlimited possibility in America, land of opportunity. His twist was that the song would be performed by the great African-American vocal group, the Drifters, thereby transforming it into a subtle deconstruction of American Dream mythology. Yet even this move proved unpalatable to Atlantic Records president Jerry Wexler, so the song wound up sung straight by Jay and the Americans, an all-Jewish vocal group. As the lyrics patriotically proclaimed, only in America could a kid without a cent maybe grow up to be president. And surely a Jew would become president long before an African-American. Right? JK
Capturing Lou Reed at his most cynical and misanthropic: You cant depend on the goodly hearted / The goodly hearted made lampshades and soap.
Ofra Haza, Israels all-time greatest pop singer whose music transcended borders, reaching throughout the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. included this Holocaust-themed song, with lyrics in English (Endless nights, tortured days, trains of no return) and Hebrew, on her 1992 album Kirya, which was produced by Don Was (born Don Fagenson) and garnered her a Grammy Award in the Best World Music Album category, the only Israeli singer to have as yet attained such recognition.
English journeyman singer-songwriter, musician and producer Martin Page who has worked with everyone from Earth, Wind & Fire to Bernie Taupin to Robbie Robertson, and who wrote the music for the Starship hit We Built This City (now you know who to blame) wrote this touching song from the point of view of a death-camp survivor looking back on the horrors of the Holocaust: Tears in her pillow, she tightens her lips / Touches the number tattooed on her wrist / The sign says Treblinka, again she cant breathe / For all of these children shell always see.
Dont be fooled by the lovely Central European cabaret-style melody. When Leonard Cohen sings, Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin, hes talking about the string quartet that serenaded Jews at Auschwitz on their way to the gas chambers.
Jewish references abound throughout the songs of indie-rock group Say Anything, the nom-du-bande for singer-songwriter Max Bemis, who once had a modest hit with a song called Shiksa (Girlfriend) and whose sixth album is called Hebrews. The song Alive with the Glory of Love might seem tasteless on its face, until you learn that it is based on the true story of Bemiss Holocaust survivor grandparents, who, according to the song, made it through the war riding on the power of their love and lust (and, undoubtedly, with more than a little good luck).
While this Paul Simon song seems to question any religious belief at all How can you be a Christian? / How can you be a Jew? / How can you be a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu? it is filled with Jewish imagery. Simon refers to the Sabbath Everyone hears an inner voice / A day at the end of the week / To wonder and rejoice. He discusses Jewish prohibitions and customs How can you tattoo your body? / Why do you cover your head? And in the final verse, he seems to park himself solidly in the tradition of his ancestors Ive been given all I wanted / Only three generations off the boat / I have harvested and I have planted / I am wearing my fathers old coat. Spoken like the true grandson of a tailor.
In this 1964 song, Bob Dylan portrays the end days that will usher in the Messianic era. The scene culminates with imagery borrowed from the books of Exodus and Samuel: And like Pharaohs tribe / Theyll be drownded in the tide / And like Goliath, theyll be conquered. ES
Hip-hop star Drake addresses his Jewish upbringing on any number of songs, including Still Drake, in which he raps, I was born to do it, born to make bomb music / I flow tight like I was born Jewish / Well, actually I was born Jewish / I guess at this point you could say I was born foolish. Drake has the last laugh.
Following a visit to Israel in 1966 and the subsequent outbreak of the Six-Day War, Pete Townshend began work on Rael, a song cycle loosely based on Israels struggle to survive despite being massively outnumbered by its enemies. It was going to be the first rock opera. Rael short for Israel got sidetracked, partly due to the demands of the Whos record company for faster delivery of more hit singles, and the project was consigned to the shelf. The only song that has surfaced from that project is the title track, which appears on the late 1967 album, The Who Sell Out. Its lyrics hint at what Townshend was aiming for, as well as revealing his deep empathy for the Jewish people: Rael, the home of my religion / To me the center of the Earth. My heritage is threatened / My roots are torn and cornered / And so to do my best Ill homeward sail.
For two decades indie-rock avatars Yo La Tengo have been performing eight-night residencies at nightclubs in the Metro New York region to correspond with the eight nights of Hanukkah. While they farmed out the writing of this bossa nova-inflected Hanukkah song to their friend Sam Elwitt, they give it their indelible musical imprint while paying tribute to the miracle of light: Theyre alive and the windows aglow / Teasing shadows with nowhere to go.
Released the day after he turned 80 in 2014, this highlight from Leonard Cohens Popular Problems album paints the sort of dark, gloomy portrait of the world for which he became famous. In what could be a reference to the Shoah, the song opens, I saw some people starving / There was murder, there was rape / Their villages were burning / They were trying to escape. It only gets more depressing, although Cohen leavens the bleakness with a bit of black humor: Theres torture, and theres killing / And theres all my bad reviews. Toward the end of the song, he brings it all back home: Though I let my heart get frozen / To keep away the rot / My father says Im chosen / My mother says Im not / I listened to their story / Of the gypsies and the Jews / It was good, it wasnt boring / It was almost like the blues. HL
A crunchy 52-year-old love-gone-wrong song from Steppenwolf, heavy metal pioneers whose ratty leather biker image held strong sway over later (partly) Jewish rockers Blue Oyster Cult. Thematically, the number casts an eye at Moses and his peoples time in the desert significant in that East Prussian-born singer John Kay escaped the Nazis, along with his mother, at age five, and lived for a number of years in both the Soviet and British occupation zones before emigrating to Toronto. ME
Armed with a piano, a pleasant voice and an endless well of ingenuity and barbed wit, MIT math professor Tom Lehrer (who is still among us at 93) became the 1960s leading musical satirist, with pointed songs about organized religion, the nuclear threat, pornography, war, folk singers, education and celebrity politicians. In this wry number, he undercuts the good intentions of a national cant-we-all-get-along campaign with a bracing dose of reality: Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics / And the Catholics hate the Protestants / And the Hindus hate the Muslims / And everybody hates the Jews. IR
The Sound of Silence is a song about prophecy. It begins with visions implanted in the singers brain. His eyes are stabbed by the flash of a neon light, revealing 10,000 people, maybe more a number often used in the Bible for an army seemingly unable to speak or hear or communicate in any way. The singer grows enraged, calling the people fools for refusing to listen to him. Instead, they bow and pray to a Golden Calf-like neon god they made. But then a sign flashes out a warning: The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls. Will the people listen now? MF
Five Jewish studio musicians from New York City, including the legendary Al Kooper, combined forces for a brief time in the mid-1960s to form the incredibly influential Blues Project. This garage-band hit of theirs was based on a soul-gospel tune of indeterminate origin. But its thematic origin might surprise a casual listener. Read Wayne Robins accompanying essay.
This terribly underrated and overlooked alt-rock supergroup, featuring members and associates of groups including R.E.M., Dream Syndicate, Young Fresh Fellows and Hindu Love Gods, writes songs exclusively about Americas favorite pastime. On Long Before My Time, Steve Wynn pays tribute to Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, who became a Jewish hero when he sat out the first game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.
Singer-songwriter Dan Berns family history is drenched in the tragedy of the Shoah. In this number, Bern turns his sardonic wit which for a while had him performing under the moniker Dan Bern & the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy to the stark contrast between his life in America and that of his ancestors murdered by Germans: I saw my dad tell jokes, and teach me how to laugh / Thirty years after his parents, brothers, and sister were all shot / Murdered in the streets of Lithuania.
On their second album, Sparks, the Los Angeles art-rock band led by Ron and Russell Mael, wryly imagined an awkward social occasion: a young Jew takes his German girlfriend to meet his parents. Bring her home and the folks look ill / My word, they cant forget, they never will / They can hear the storm troops on our lawn when I show her in / And the Fuehrer is alive and well in our paneled den. IR
Time magazines best song of the 20th century was written by a Jewish communist poet, Abel Meeropol, about the lynchings of African-American. As Harold Heft recounted in these pages, an earlier short poem Meeropol wrote, I Am a Jew, made explicit the connections he felt between the two groups: I am a Jew / How can I tell? / The Negro lynched / Reminds me well / I am a Jew. ES
Are you one of the chosen few / who will march in the procession. Robbie Robertsons lyrics for this beloved gem from the Bands masterful third album, Stage Fright, essay a Faustian/Robert Johnson-at-the-crossroads parable that serves as a metaphor for, as Levon Helm explained it, selling your soul for music. The songs titular character, whose handle is Hebrew for God is my judge, is that of the hero of the Book of Daniel. PA
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