The Jewish Drummer Behind "The Boss"

What is it about drummers in the are-they-or-aren't-they Jewish game? Ringo Starr? Got the nose, but no. The Rolling Stones' Charlie Watts? Some say yes, some say no. Max Weinberg? Oh yes.

You probably know Weinberg as Conan O’Brien's former bandleader, or perhaps as the quiet drummer with the big beat behind Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band. As Mighty Max approaches his 40th year with The Boss, it's time to show some love for one of rock's top-rated drummers.
The Jewish kid from Newark, son of a lawyer and teacher, counts his childhood rabbi as one of the most influential people in his life. He spreads the good word of tzedakah and tikkun olam to Jewish audiences around the country, and he never said no to a little Jew-y shtick-ing with Conan.
Though he didn't join Springsteen until the Born to Run sessions in '74, he’s still arguably the best-known member of the The Boss' tribe – and definitely the most kosher.
- Marc Davis

A Different Kind of Holocaust Music

As one of the founders of musical minimalism, the composer Steven Reich's repertoire is full of impressive credits. But his 1988 Holocaust-inspired, Grammy-winning, 3-movement piece for string quartet Different Trains may be his crowning achievement.

Inspired by memories of the trains Reich took between L.A. and New York to visit his separated parents from 1939 to 1942, this stirring, utterly unique composition grapples with Reich's realization that those same 3 years of train-hopping would have looked very different had he been a Jew in Europe.

Drawing on speech samples collected from a retired Pullman porter who rode the same lines as Reich, several Holocaust survivors, and his old governess—as well as sounds of American and European trains from the '30s and '40s—Reich's music mirrors the pitch and melody of the collected sounds. The piece rolls from America to Europe with a tempo not unlike the cacophonous chug of a train.

But no part of the piece is too on the nose; when the music rests, the memory of the Shoah surfaces, and fills in the silence.

- Zachary Solomon

Nina Simone Sings Milk & Honey

Few songs capture the feeling of a people in exile like "Eretz Zavat Halav." Taken from a biblical passage, it speaks of Israel's abundant natural produce (milk and honey, especially), from the perspective of a people yearning for a better life. Few people sing it with the exquisite mixture of joy and longing as Nina Simone, the eloquent and sublime (non-Jewish) jazz singer, in this little-known live video performance with her band from the 1960s.

It's likely that Ms. Simone learned this song from Shlomo Carlebach, who she met in the 1950s, while they were both getting their starts in their chosen careers: Carlebach playing the folk circuit, Simone as a lounge singer.
Through her other musical work, and her role in the Civil Rights Movement, Simone stayed linked to several prominent Jewish ventures. On her 1965 album Pastel Blues, she also covered the song "Strange Fruit," written by a Jewish songwriter about lynchings in the South. But "Eretz Zavat Halav" is probably her most resplendent entry into the Jewish songbook, capturing both the longing of someone in exile, and the distant memory of how good it feels to be home.

- Matthue Roth

A Prayer for Deadheads

On a quest for Jewish soul at the ‘Blues for Challah’ Grateful Dead Shabbat retreat

“Most Jewish baby-boomers were born into a void,” explains Douglas M. Gertner in a 1999 essay called “Why Are There So Many Jewish Deadheads?” (which comes before “Understanding ‘Show’ as a Deadhead Speech Situation” in Perspectives on the Grateful Dead: Critical Writings). He answers his essay’s titular question with a Portnoysean take on postwar Jewish life: “Lacking both a strong chevra (a sense of community) and finding Judaism devoid of ruach or neshama (spiritual foundation or soul), third-generation American Jews were adrift in search of meaning, purpose, and roots.” Their grandparents were stuck in traditional Judaism, their parents were after the “all-American” lifestyle sold to them through television, and they wanted something different, to be unified in a spiritual community of fellow outsiders converging on a Haight-Ashbury promised land. Dead shows were like Shabbat services, Gertner explains, with their incense and their veggie burritos. Likewise, endless Talmudic analysis met its match in the nitpicking of Dead fans over song lyrics, and “Deep Deadheads” became the counterpart to the ultra-Orthodox in stringency of practice and devotion to their prophet.

There are plenty of Jews who don’t like the Dead, of course. I don’t. Nor did Jonathan Weiss the first time he heard one of their songs. He was lying outside, nestled in a sleeping bag in a field in Pennsylvania. It was the summer of 1970 at Camp Ramah. He was 8 years old. One of his campmates, an older boy, took out a Panasonic tape recorder and pushed play: Jon heard the din of the crowd, then a guitar. “C’mon, Jerry,” the boy asked, impatient. “Get going.” Jon didn’t know who Jerry was. He fell asleep.

A few years later, Jon’s mother decided her bookish son needed a hobby and bought him a stereo. He brought it home and plugged it in—all lights, buttons, flickers, and dials, with nothing to play. He started accumulating music, became a collector—Chicago, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Kiss. Around the time of his bar mitzvah, he was taking karate lessons at a dojo in his synagogue. “Have you heard of the Grateful Dead?” his sensei asked one day, then made Jon a copy of Live/Dead.

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