Question: What do Marion Anderson, Pete Seeger, John Lennon, Woody Gutherie, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Dylan all have in common?
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Exhibited here is a signed program for Marian Anderson’s appearance as a guest artist with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Haifa on April 27, 1955. The program is also signed by her accompanist, Franz Rupp.
Rupp (1901-1992), a Jewish pianist who had escaped with his family from Nazi Germany, was already a star when he began working with Anderson as her accompanist, a relationship that lasted for over 25 years and produced recordings of several masterpieces they performed together. Anderson’s favorite genres were lieder, the 19th-century German art song characterized by the treatment of the piano and voice in equal artistic partnership, and her beloved Negro spirituals, and Rupp, who was already a renowned lieder performer, quickly came to share Anderson’s passion for spirituals. He remained deeply devoted to her throughout their long association, and he famously took the lead in fighting against venues that insisted that Anderson enter the theatre through segregated entrances.
Perhaps the seminal event that brought international prominence and fame to Anderson (1897-1993) was the refusal by the Daughters of the American Revolution to permit her, or any other black performer, to sing at Constitution Hall (1939). First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt publicly resigned from the DAR in protest, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes offered Anderson the opportunity to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939. Her performance that day became one of the most notable concerts of all time, with 75,000 people of all races hearing her rendition of patriotic and spiritual songs and millions more listening in on radio. Perhaps more importantly, it served to raise American consciousness about racial discrimination and paved the way for the nascent civil rights movement.
Not as well known is that long before Anderson was denied permission to sing at Constitution Hall, she was refused lodging at Nassau Inn in Princeton during her April 16, 1937 concert at the McCarter Theatre there, and Albert Einstein invited her into his home as a guest, the beginning of a long friendship. Whenever she returned to Princeton, she stayed at his home on Mercer Street, including a visit two months before he died.
Also not as well known is that Anderson had a Jewish grandfather; was managed by a Jewish impresario (Sol Hurok); worked during the large part of her career with a Jewish accompanist (Rupp); established an important scholarship for young Jewish musicians; and was a profound Zionist.
Anderson’s maternal grandfather, Benjamin Anderson, was a deeply religious man who, after converting to Judaism, referred to himself as a “Black Jew” and proudly practiced his religion in a household of Baptists. He observed Shabbat, belonged to a small local congregation whose members called themselves Hebrews or Israelites and where the men wore traditional yarmulkes, and may well have influenced his granddaughter’s positive attitude toward Israel. He also observed Passover; according to Anderson, “I first heard the words `Passover’ and `unleavened bread’ from his lips.”
Shortly after Israel’s War of Independence, Anderson sang at a concert and dinner sponsored by the American Fund for Israel Institutions to help raise funds for the new Jewish State. Referring with great affection to the citizens of Israel, she explained that “Music is my method of saluting these people who have built a country against tremendous odds.”
Anderson originally planned to visit Eretz Yisrael as early as 1935, the same year that the Nazis barred her appearance in Berlin, but the trip never took place. In April 1955, two decades later, she arrived at Lydda airport, where she was greeted by Eleanor Roosevelt who, coincidentally, was leaving Israel on the very day that Anderson arrived.
Touring Israel for much of 1955, Anderson visited the places that had inspired her beloved Negro spirituals, including the high walls of Jericho, the wide river Jordan, and the eternal Jerusalem:
I could see in Israel the geographic places that represented the reality, and they stirred me deeply. I kept thinking that my people had captured the essence of that reality and had gone beyond it….
You [the people of Israel] make it easy for one of my race to feel very, very much at home here from the first moment. To stand on the banks of the Jordan, or to see Jerusalem and those other places so tied up with one’s religious background and our spirituals, makes a profound impression.
One unforgettable highlight of her triumphant tour, which included sixteen appearances in less than three weeks, was her performance of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody with the Israel Philharmonic. The piece, written in German, was generally boycotted by Israel following the Holocaust, but the men’s chorus prepared a Hebrew translation for Anderson’s concert, and she thrilled her audience when she sang the entire oratorio in Hebrew! (The Israeli critics characterized her Hebrew as “perfect and articulate.”)
On her visit to Israel, Anderson was impressed by the Jewish spirit of creativity and idealism, particularly as to members of her audiences who had found a “refuge and a home” on kibbutzim (she helped to celebrate a Passover Seder at Kibbutz Givat Brenner and also sang at Kibbutz Ein Gev near Yam Kineret):
The audiences in Israel were something special. They were made up of young people who had found a refuge and a home there, and their hunger for music was exceptional. But no audience was more remarkable than those we had when we performed at the two kibbutzim, those pioneering agricultural communities created by dedicated men and women who had the faith and energy to cause a desert to bloom.
During the 1930s, Anderson had been condemned by Nazi Germany for performing Aryan music – and, of course, for her skin color (an invitation to perform in Germany was rescinded after the Nazis learned that, despite a Nordic-sounding surname, Anderson was actually black) – and in the Soviet Union for singing about Jesus, all of which may also have contributed to her spirit of amity with the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who had created the State of Israel. Echoing the 1948 NAACP statement that Israeli independence “serves as an inspiration to all persecuted people throughout the world,” she stated that she understood anew how “the Negro made images out of the Bible that were as vaulting as his aspirations.” For Anderson, the translation of Biblical history into the realized political dream of a Jewish state constituted “an act of liberation” that equally well expressed “the deepest necessities of [blacks’] human predicament.” She was particularly moved by a thousand-strong Passover “liberation Seder” in which she participated and by the singing of Go Down Moses, one of her favorite spirituals, in the original Hebrew. Wanting to create a more permanent bond with the Israeli people, she contributed part of her fee to endow an annual scholarship to be awarded to gifted Israeli singers.
In 1930, Anderson had traveled to Scandinavia, where she met Jean Sibelius and performed several of his lieder for him. Stirred by her singing, he commented that he felt that she had been able to penetrate “the Nordic soul,” and they became close friends. The friendship further developed into a professional relationship, as the Finnish composer altered and composed songs for Anderson to perform. Sibelius wrote A Jewish Girl’s Song for contralto and piano and, when it was performed as part of the incidental music for Procope’s play, Belshazzar’s Feast, Sibelius dedicated the song to her (1939).
On November 14, 1960, Anderson was presented with an illuminated scroll by the National Women’s Division of the American Friends of Hebrew University, who named her “Woman of the Year.” Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Michael Comay, announced that a Marian Anderson United Nations document reading room would be installed in the library on the new Hebrew University campus in Jerusalem, and the AFHU Women’s Division announced a campaign to raise $1 million for the library.
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Musician, singer, songwriter, folklorist, labor activist, environmentalist, peace advocate, and perhaps the most influential folk artist in American history, no person has done more to preserve folk music than Pete Seeger (1919-2014). From his pop-folk successes with the Weavers in the late 1940s; through the 1950s, when he was blacklisted by the government; through the 1960s, when he became a cultural hero through his outspoken commitment to the antiwar and civil rights struggles; and even relatively recently, when he played at President Obama’s inauguration; his passion for liberal politics, the environment, and humanity have earned him both ardent fans and vociferous enemies.
A gifted storyteller and music historian, Seeger’s works, including If I Had a Hammer, We Shall Overcome, and Where Have All the Flowers Gone, served as anthems in the anti-establishment protests of the late 1960s and have become classic standards in the folk music repertoire. He was instrumental in transforming the five-string banjo into a popular acoustical instrument and helped to make the instrument “mainstream” by singing and recording popular songs played on it.
In the January 1995 handwritten letter to the author exhibited here, Seeger writes:
Dear Saul Singer – I’ve occasionally sung songs in Yiddish and Hebrew, but have not had time to go very deeply & now I have almost no voice left. I visited Kibbutz Hatzor in ’67.
Though Seeger did sometimes acknowledge the centuries of antisemitism experienced by the Jewish people, his outspoken anti-discrimination views did not translate into support for the Jewish State. He first came to Israel in 1964 with his wife and children to visit several kibbutzim because they were characteristic of the collective communal projects he so admired. As he describes in our correspondence, he returned there before 1967 Six-Day War (he actually departed Israel on June 5, the very day the war began) and engendered great controversy when he publicly declared his disgust at what he called “monstrous” Israeli military actions against Palestinians and when he announced in Tel Aviv that he would donate the proceeds from his concert in Israel to “Palestinian refugees.” He refused to enter the Israeli section of Jerusalem and, in a Tel Aviv concert before 26,000 people, he declared, “Let’s dedicate this to all exiles, not only the exiles of 2,000 years, but also of 20 years, as I said last week at the University of Beirut” – even though he was warned during his trip to Lebanon not to ever mention that he had been in Israel.
In Pete Seeger: In His Own Words, he writes about the “militant Irgun” and about Deir Yessin, at least implying that this unfortunate massacre was the general rule rather than a horrible exception. He characterized Moshe Dayan as an “authoritarian” who motivated the Arab world to act against Israel. He even found a way to criticize Israel for executing Adolph Eichmann, citing a little girl in Tel Aviv who wrote to him: “Don’t kill him. Take him instead and show him our life in Israel.” (And let’s all sit and sing “Kumbaya”…) None of this should have been surprising to those who knew him well because he was always first and foremost an unrepentant Communist who, despite his repeated assertions of standing for “peace and mutual cooperation,” was actually a great anti-Israel public figure.
For years, Seeger had sung Hey Zhankoye with a Yiddish group, a song which helped spread the monstrous fiction that Stalin’s USSR freed Russian Jews by establishing Jewish collective farms in the Crimea – at the very time that Stalin was planning the obliteration of Soviet Jewry. He spoke to the great Israeli “injustice” in deciding to establish their national home where a million Palestinians already lived. He contributed half his royalties from Turn, Turn to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and he withdrew his support of a Jewish National Fund project after, he claimed, Israeli and Palestinian activists misrepresented JNF’s actions and that the JNF drove Bedouins out of their Negev areas. A few years before his death, he officially lent his name to efforts by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (“BDS”) campaign to pressure and sanction Israel through economic means.
Nonetheless, Seeger recorded and performed many Jewish and Israeli songs. He performed Israeli folk tunes with the Weavers in the late 1940s and 1950s as part of the larger folk revival he was helping to champion, and Tzena, Tzena, which he recorded with the Weavers in 1949, became one of his greatest early hits, quickly selling over two million copies. Tzena is a buoyant call to join the celebration with people from every nation who will dance the hora until “dawn will find us laughing in the sunlight dancing in the city square.” Issachar Miron, a Polish emigrant to Eretz Yisrael, had composed the melody for Hebrew lyrics written by Yechiel Chagiz while serving in the Jewish Brigade in 1941. Gordon Jenkins arranged the song for Seeger and The Weavers, and Tzena reached #2 on the Billboard charts. (The flip side, Goodnight Irene, reached #1.)
According to Seeger, he knew nothing about Jewish culture until he began living in New York at age 20, where he met many Jewish musicians, from whom he initially heard Tzena, Tzena. He went on to record and perform many other Jewish songs, including Dayenu from the Passover Haggadah in the album Folk Songs for Young People (1959); Hineh Ma Tov, which he performed with Theodore Bikel and later with the Weavers in their Reunion at Carnegie Hall album (1963); Tumbalalaika, which he recorded on his album, Jewish Songs and Games; and, of course, he lifted the lyrics of his famous Turn, Turn, Turn from chapter 3 of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes). He also recorded Jewish Children’s Songs and Games (1957) with Ruth Rubin, a preeminent authority on Yiddish folk songs, whom he accompanied on banjo.
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Shown here is a ticket to a luncheon organized by Foyles Bookshop – which was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s largest bookshop in terms of shelf area (30 miles) – that was held at London’s Dorchester Hotel on Thursday, April 23, 1964 to mark the publication of John Lennon’s book, In His Own Write. The book, a collection of stories and illustrations which includes short stories, poems, and bizarre line drawings, is noteworthy for being the first solo Beatle project in any form. The ticket is signed on the verso by Lennon and by Helen Shapiro who, from 1961-1963, was England’s reigning teenage pop music queen.
In early 1963, Shapiro met the Beatles, who had just been signed by EMI, and she headlined the band’s first national English tour; at age 16, her popularity was such that the Beatles opened for her! Lennon and McCartney saw an opportunity for Shapiro to record one of their songs – they wrote Misery especially for her – but EMI, apparently not yet appreciating exactly the gold they held in their hands, declined to give Shapiro the chance to record a Beatles tune. This cost her the opportunity to be the first artist to cover a Beatles song just when the band was about to become the most popular pop act in the world. The Beatles went on to perform Misery on Please Please Me, which was released on March 22, 1963, just days after they completed the Helen Shapiro tour.
Post-World War II Liverpool was generally very antisemitic and Lennon came from an anti-Jewish background. He was known to make impromptu antisemitic comments; for example, he was aggravated by the number of Jews involved in the Beatles’ financial affairs, and commented that “show business is an extension of the Jewish religion.” Much to the chagrin of George Martin, the Beatles producer, when the band was recording Baby You’re a Rich Man, Lennon persisted in singing “Baby you’re a rich Jew.” John was observed walking around his hotel suite with his finger to his lip, mustache style, pretending that he was Adolf Hitler, and he would occasionally offer a Nazi salute to the crowd. In one particularly famous instance, he offered the Seig Heil! in front of thousands of people from the balcony of the Liverpool Town Hall before the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night.
Lennon believed in a world without borders in which peace, love, and universal atheism would prevail. This utopian, anti-capitalist philosophy was perhaps best expressed in his song Imagine, which became a worldwide peace anthem of idealist, if misguided, youth: “Imagine there’s no countries, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” As such, it is not surprising that Lennon was anti-Israel on both political and religious grounds and, predictably, even a cursory internet search will yield the usual gang of wacky Jew-haters, who will explain “How the Zionists Killed John Lennon.”
But not everyone agreed that Lennon was anti-Zionist: the hardline Muslim group Islam Defenders Front (FPI), arguing that contemporary pop music is “a Zionist conspiracy used to conceal their objectives of world domination,” cites in particular Lennon’s Imagine, which it characterizes as “Zionist music” because its message about a hypothetical state of the world carries a “pure Zionist message.”
Most people, even obsessive Beatles fans, do not know the remarkable tale of Akiva Nof, a songwriter who, while working as a freelance reporter for Voice of Israel, was invited by Lennon and Yoko Ono to join them in their famous “Peace Bed-In” at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel (1969). In a radio interview from the bed, Lennon sang “Hava Nagila;” declared “Hello, Israel” after performing a portion of I Want You (She’s so Heavy), a song from the not-yet released Abbey Road; and wished “peace to the people of Israel.” Amazingly, at Nof’s prodding, he and Yoko went on to sing – in Hebrew – a verse from Nof’s popular Oath for Jerusalem: “Jerusalem, we all swear, that we will never abandon you, from now until forever.” (There can be little doubt that Lennon had no idea what he was singing.)
Finally, my favorite Lennon story: the Beatles were scheduled to be guests at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel until the hotel received an anonymous call threatening to “kill the Jew Ringo” (who, of course, was not Jewish). The press refused to abandon the issue and, at an August 17, 1965 press conference in Toronto, Ringo was asked – for perhaps the thousandth time – if he was Jewish. With the characteristic straight face that he wore when mocking the press, Lennon dryly injected: “He’s having a bar mitzvah tomorrow.”
To be continued
