Today, May 24, is the birthday of Bob Dylan, whom many consider America’s greatest songwriter.
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman (Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham) in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised in a tight Jewish community in Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan attended Hebrew school at Agudas Achim, an Orthodox synagogue, and enjoyed summers at the Zionist-oriented Herzl Camp in Webster, Wisconsin.
“The town didn’t have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed,” Dylan once said. “Suddenly, a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of winter. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes.
“They put him upstairs above the cafe, which was the local hangout. It was a rock-and-roll cafe where I used to hang out, too,” he said. “I used to go up there every day to learn the stuff, either after school or after dinner. After studying with him an hour or so, I’d come down and boogie.”
Dylan famously became a born-again Christian in the late 1970s. After releasing a couple of polarizing gospel music albums, he returned to his Jewish roots in the early 1980s. In recent decades, he has even participated in holiday services at Chabad synagogues.
“I’m a Jew,” Dylan told biographer Robert Shelton in 1971. “It touches my poetry, my life, in ways I can’t describe.”
In honor of Dylan’s birthday, we give you his five most Jewish moments.
Holding his son’s bar mitzvah at the Western Wall
Bob Dylan, third from left, with his son Jesse, in the white tallit on right, at the Western Wall in Jerusalem September of 1983. (Facebook)
Not too long after releasing the last of his Christian music albums in the early ’80s, Dylan made an extremely Jewish statement: he held his eldest son Jesse’s bar mitzvah at the Western Wall.
Jesse, born to Dylan’s first wife Sara (née Shirley Marlin Noznisky), went on to become a music video director and founded the media production company Wondros.
Playing “Hava Nagila” at a Chabad telethon
After his mysterious “return” to Judaism, Dylan studied with Chabad rabbis in the 1980s. His appearance on the Chabad telethon fundraiser in 1989 wasn’t his first endorsement of the movement (or his first telethon cameo) — but it might have been his “Jewiest.” A yarmulke-clad Dylan accompanied songwriter Peter Himmelman (his Jewish son-in-law) and Harry Dean Stanton on harmonica as the group played “Hava Nagila.”
Holding a seder with Marlon Brando
By 1975, Dylan had released many of his seminal albums, such as “The Times They Are A’Changin’,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blood on the Tracks.” Marlon Brando had already starred in most of his iconic films, from “On the Waterfront” to “The Godfather.” So the 1975 congregational seder at Hollywood’s Temple Israel — which Brando crashed, and where Dylan played his anti-war anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind” — was not your grandmother’s festive meal.
According to the JTA story on the event, Rabbi Haskell Bernat, the senior rabbi of the congregation, said that Brando, Dylan and a third guest — Dennis Banks, a leader of the American Indian Movement (misidentified in the story as “Kenneth” Banks) — “had contributed to the sense of justice and social awareness of the American people.”
The pro-Israel anthem “Neighborhood Bully”
Just after his son’s bar mitzvah at the Kotel — and a year after Israel’s controversial first Lebanon War — Dylan released the song “Neighborhood Bully” on his 1983 album “Infidels.” In what is arguably one of the most pro-Jewish rock songs ever recorded, Dylan describes Israel as an “exiled man” who is unfairly labeled a bully for fending off constant attacks from his neighbors.
One verse goes: “Well the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man/His enemies say he’s on their land/They got him outnumbered a million to one/He got no place to escape to, no place to run/He’s the neighborhood bully.”
Endorsing “Like a Rolling Stone” music video by an Israeli director
“Like a Rolling Stone,” one of Dylan’s most popular songs, was released in July of 1965. Nearly 50 years later, in 2013, Israeli director Vania Heymann — a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design — created an interactive music video for the song.
The video allowed viewers to change “channels” and choose from an array of celebrities singing the song’s lyrics. Dylan unexpectedly endorsed the project and promoted it on his official website.
Heymann, born to an Orthodox family in Jerusalem, has since directed the acclaimed music video for Coldplay’s song “Up & Up.”
Jmore staff contributed to this report.
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