“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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