![]() ![]() They put him upstairs above the cafe, which was the local hangout. He was an old man from Brooklyn who had a white beard and wore a black hat and black clothes. He showed up just in time for me to learn this stuff. He and his wife got off the bus in the middle of winter. Suddenly a rabbi showed up under strange circumstances for only a year. "The town didn't have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed. Dylan's Jewish education included summers at Camp Herzl and bar mitzvah training. If anything, the son of store-owner Abraham Zimmerman was fortunate to have wide family ties which insulated against the town's cool anti-Semitic undercurrent. But biographer Clinton Heylin says no: The disguises were built up not against his religion but against the insularity of his life in the small Minnesota town of Hibbing. Was this apparent self-hatred Dylan's attempt to efface his middle-class Jewish childhood in order to become "a real American"? He affected an Okie accent when he first came to New York, recounted a tall-tale autobiography about running off to join the circus and told nobody that his name was really Robert Zimmerman. The young Dylan's desire for a story more real, exciting, romantic, and gritty than true initially led him to deny, or at least hide, his Jewishness. ![]() And in America, the roots of the music is Christian. He also became a Christian-the one leader he followed-and never really looked back and renounced it-because, like many a hasid, he found God through the music. Both the book and the record were released in time to salute Dylan's 50th birthday in May, 1991 - a suitable occasion to reexamine his Jewish life since the days when he mocked the quintessential American Jewish tune.ĭylan has, if only from the ironic sideline, taken part in -and sung at- the deepest spiritual crises of his generation of American Jews: the drama of the civil rights struggle, the comforts and exoticism of the Jewish homeland, and the spiritual excitements of Lubavitch. This most recent period is well documented in Clinton Heylin's new biography, Dylan: Behind the Shades. "Talkin' Hava Negeilah Blues" appears for the first time on the new Bootleg Series compilation of "rare and unreleased recordings," an album that fills in many gaps in Dylan's musical career - particularly this past decade, when the trail-blazing rock star seemed to weave between fundamentalist Christianity an dHasidic Judaism. Dylan, with his inspired instinct for the authentic, was first to smell the phoniness. The mockery was was prescient: The left would not be strumming love songs about Israeli soldiers much longer. With the yodel and a finishing harmonica flourish, Dylan had outlined an epitaph for the Hebrew folk songs sung by folksingers like Theodore Bikel and the Weavers as part of a vaguely leftist, working- man's ethnic repertoire. ![]() He strums his guitar, and continues tunelessly: "Ha! Va! Ha-va! Ha-va-na! Hava Nagila. "Here's a foreign song I learned out in Utah," he twangs into the microphone. But already he's going after an establishment-a Jewish establishment, for that matter. The 20-year-old Dylan hasn't yet written the soundtrack to the sixties, been anointed prophet of his generation, converted to Christianity or dabbled with Lubavitch Hasidism. Greenwich Village, 1961: Bob Dylan takes the stage at Gerde's Folk City. Tangled Up in Jews Dylan: Tangled Up in Jews Copyright Larry Yudelson, 1991įirst published in the Washington Jewish Week ![]()
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