{"id":48867,"date":"2019-07-15T17:00:45","date_gmt":"2019-07-15T15:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=48867"},"modified":"2019-07-14T06:50:08","modified_gmt":"2019-07-14T04:50:08","slug":"14-05-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=48867","title":{"rendered":"Bob Dylan’s 10 Most Jewish Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Bob Dylan’s 10 Most Jewish Songs<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Seth Rogovoy<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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While Bob Dylan has, throughout his life and career, engaged in all sorts of mythologizing and playful biographical falsification, it has never been in the service of denying his heritage.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

This son of a middle-class appliance salesman from the Upper Midwest, who grew up with a Yiddish-speaking grandmother down the hallway in an extended Jewish family that was at the nexus of Jewish life in Hibbing, Minn. \u2014 mom was president of the local Hadassah, and dad was president of B\u2019nai B\u2019rith \u2014 wound up making several trips to Israel in the late-1960s and \u201970s (during one visit, he even began the application process for moving his family to a kibbutz). He sent his children to the same Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin that he attended for four or five summers as a teenager.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the time he arrived in New York City\u2019s Greenwich Village 51 years ago, he intended to make a name for himself on the folk scene \u2014 and that name was Dylan, not Zimmerman (the name is German and not Jewish, anyway, although his forebears were from Russia), and Bob fashioned himself a latter-day Woody Guthrie (as it turns out, Guthrie himself had a whole secret Jewish side to his work, born of his close relationship with his mother-in-law, Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt).<\/span><\/p>\n

So while Dylan didn\u2019t exactly grow up to be Shlomo Carlebach, the happy, guitar-strumming Hasid, he never strayed too far from his roots, nor did he deny them. One of his earliest original numbers, in fact, was a parody of \u201cHava Nagilah,\u201d then and now (thank you, Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman) probably the best-known Jewish song in the world. Throughout his career, his songs have been peppered with biblical allusions and paraphrases and informed by Jewish themes and concepts. How much of this is the result of a conscious effort on Dylan\u2019s part to address these issues, and how much is simply the result of magpie tendencies that see him draw variously from Shakespeare, French symbolism, movie dialogue, blues clich\u00e9s and even obscure Japanese yakuza novels? Well, only Dylan can answer that \u2014 and even then, probably not.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, based on the evidence of the songs themselves, Dylan was actually paying attention in the Hebrew classes leading up to his bar mitzvah, and also in his adult life, which has at times reportedly included private studies with various rabbis, often from the Chabad movement. A cursory review of songs from the past 50 years turns up many tunes that are inflected with varying degrees of Yiddishkeit.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTalkin\u2019 Hava Nagilah Blues\u201d Fresh off the boat (okay, the car) from Minnesota, the 20-year-old Dylan made this novelty in which he struggles to pronounce the words before letting loose with a yodel, a staple of his Greenwich Village folk-club gigs.<\/span><\/p>\n

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