Meet the Skirt-Wearing Rock Star Cousin of Moshe Dayan Who Could Be Prime Minister

Touring on a new album, Aviv Geffen talks about Rabin, Mizrahi music, and why the Dayans are no Kennedys

By Adi Gold and Yoav Sivan for Tablet Magazine

Aviv Geffen wasn’t Israel’s first rocker, but he may have been the first to adopt the rocker’s role in an unprecedented totality: The unrelenting struggle for an audience coupled with the refusal to please fans, to whom the wrong things must be said at the wrong time. Indeed, Geffen, one of Israel’s most iconic and enduring rock stars, was, for years, filled with rage. He used to chant, “We’re a f*&#ed-up generation” and sing songs that dealt, not always kindly, with Geffen’s favorite subject matter of the last 20 years: his painful childhood, courtesy of a father who wasn’t available when the son needed him most. (The father is Yonatan Geffen, a songwriter who penned some of Israel’s greatest hits.) His musical influences include the local—notably Shalom Hanoch and Arik Einstein—and the foreign—David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and Supertramp. A dozen of his albums in Hebrew, for which he wrote most of the lyrics and music, reached gold and platinum.

But on “Pain on Top of Pain” (ke’ev al ke’ev), the second single off Geffen’s upcoming album, the singer strikes a different tone. The song begins, “I made a promise that I will not return here. … My childhood is buried in some song which I cannot recall,” and ends with very un-Geffen-like sentiment, “I forgive because there’s no time left.”

A country that extols family life might have needed the son of perhaps its most illustrious family to introduce the notion of unapologetic individualism. Geffen’s uncle was Moshe Dayan, the general-turned-politician; another relative was Ezer Weizman, the general-turned-president. To list all of Geffen’s famous relatives in arts and politics is nearly impossible. Geffen recalls how he, then a young boy, together with his Uncle Moshe (“an amazing uncle”), would piece together ancient shards onto an archaeological artifact in Dayan’s collection. Geffen purports to follow the example of his most famous uncle, but with a twist. “I’m the radical who wants to do the opposite of everything he did. He conquered Jerusalem, I want to give it away. He was macho, I want to be gentle.”

Continue reading.

Follow our    page.