YudelLineRemembering that penultimately they came for the JewsBob Dylan, Tangled Up in Jews Archive | 
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YudelLineRemembering that penultimately they came for the JewsBob Dylan, Tangled Up in Jews Archive |
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Excellent web site (albeit no explicit Jewish content): Dylan Hears a Who!
Something is happening but you don't know what it is, do you, Dr. Seuss?
Early poems by Bob Dylan are up for auction in New York next month.Yiddish phrases? In early Dylan poetry? Gevalt! Who knew? Certainly not those of us who read his Chronicles memoir. While we wait for excerpts from this Dylan juvenalia to leak out, submissions of imagined early Dylan poetry with Yiddish lines are invited.The writings date back to around 1960, when Robert Zimmerman first used the pseudonym 'Bob Dylan'.
A spokesman for auction house Christies said: "While some of the poems are rooted in his daily university life and reference his Jewish heritage with Yiddish phrases, the wit and irony pervasive in his later songwriting are already evident."
The poems are expected to raise $70,000, according to BBC News.
Philip Smith writes:
While attending Jewish Day School in South Africa, I can remember reading a Hebrew poem in class with the lyrics "Dam Al HaEylim" which I think translates to "blood on the tracks". It was apparently a fairly well-known poem by a well-known author (Sh'Y Agnon?), in a book of classic Hebrew/Israeli literature - an anthology which had a tree on the front cover.Does this ring any bells?
First the good news: The Poughkeepsie Journal reports that
Music icon Bob Dylan spent four days at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie last week, privately rehearsing and writing music for an album he is set to record this week in Manhattan.Now the bad news: Dylan's last album was released September 11, 2001. Even worse: That wasn't the first time that Dylan's creativity coincided with Middle Eastern events. I've got the scoop right here.
From the latest print issue of Moment, a letter to the editor:
I read with interest the article about Bob Dylan AKA Robert Zimmerman ("The unauthorized Spiiritual biography," August 2005) especially the part about his experiences at Herzl camp. In the summer of 1957, I was a camp counselor at Herzl. On the first day, we welcomed the campers who arrived almost exclusively by bus or car. An unusual event was the arrival of several campers on two motorcycles from Hibbing, Minnesota. One of the motorcycle campers was Robert Zimmerman, guitar slung over his shoulder, and as I recollect, the other was Louis Kemp, who wrote a recent article in Moment about his celebrity Seder with Marlon Brando. Already known as a rebel, rumor had it that Robert Zimmerman had received his motorcycle as a parental gift for agreeing to attend Herzl camp!
Robert, joined occasionally by a few other campers, spent most of his time singing and plyaing his guitar and not participating in most organized camp activies. According to my recollection it was especially hard to get him to participate in athletics. Despite being a teenager and camp rebel, he was an intelligent and friendly kid who was well-like dby his fellow campers and counselors. He remained friendly with my brother David, who also attended camp that summer, and occasionally through the years, stopped in at his bookstore, The Hungry Mind, on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. My enduring memory of Bob Dylan from that summer is of a young man sitting on the roof of one of the cabins, strumming on a guitar and singing loudly with his characteristic high-pitched nasal twang.
Joel Unowsky, Gaithersburg, MD
Bob Dylan made it shul again this Yom Kippur, In the town known as Oyster Bay, Long Island.... well, actually, in the town of Woodbury, Long Island, in the Chabad of Oyster Bay.
My non-rabbinical source for this cites as eyewitnesses his father's friend, and his accountant. What's not to believe?
I attended a retrospective on the early work of Philip Roth at the Museum of Jewish Heritage last week, and couldn't help but notice that he and another iconoclastic Jewish boy were being given the canonical treatment in the same week.
I don’t imagine residents of Dylan’s native Hibbing, Minn., pack lectures about the singer to revel in — and cavil about — the “Hibbingness” of his work. But at Wednesday’s panel discussion, it seemed as if half the audience had crossed the Holland Tunnel to attend. When [biographer Ross] Miller referred to Roth as a “provincial boy” and Newark as a “provincial town,” you could hear the grumbles and hisses.
"you often put Bob down in his presence...by telling him that his parents never taught him manners...then you turned to Mrs. Evans and remarked 'This is the jerk Bob Zimmerman Dylan, the one Suze likes'...when i called you from Rome last week that Bob (once again) hinted to me about marriage...all you raved about was that there were plenty of good catholic boys....
Ralph the Sacred River combines Dylanology and Torah study:
I've been reading A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of "Blood on the Tracks" by Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard. This book tells you everything you could ever want to know about the making of that classic record, all the way down to the brand name of the mike used on the kick drum in the Minnesota sessions (Shure M57).What truly intrigued me, however, was the appearance on page 102 of the puncta extraordinaria of Genesis 33:4....
By Rabbi Don Cashman, P'nai Sholom, Albany, NY. Download the PDF
Grogger sounds ring out in the Purim night
Enter the rabbi through the synagogue door
He wears a costume, and a crazy hat
Carrying a bottle, and something moreHere is the story of the Esther Scroll
A fun holiday, a joy to behold
Especially when you do it here
Where the same old Megillah you won’t rehear
we take fun seriousleee(ooo –ahh 2X – watch for fiddle solo)
All the Jewish rabbis wearing tallitot
Are free to drink tequila and sit and gloat
While Christian clergy prepare to promote
Their solemn holiday, I don’t mean SukkotHere is the story of the Esther scroll
A crazy holiday with no self-control
Especially at B’nai Sholom
Where the same old megilah takes new life
in the cold Albany night
Bob Dylan's spring concert schedule has been updated through April.
22 April Fri Mashantucket, Connecticut Foxwoods Resort Casino
24 April Sun Atlantic City, New Jersey
25-30 April Mon-Sat New York, New York Beacon Theatre
The Upper West Side certainly offers lots of access to hametz-free takeout, if he's so inclined.
Speaking of the Upper West Side, Peter Himmelman spoke there on behalf of Edah a while back, and to head off the inevitable questions about his father-in-law, he said something like this:
Seders with my wife's family are always special. In the middle, my father-in-law will grab a guitar that's lying around, jump up on the table, and start singing:Lay, Lady Lay.Lay across my big flat bread.
I've been very slowly reading Dylan's Chronicles memoir. Slowly because it's so delicious. I've read a good number of the biographies, but this is an encounter with the interesting Dylan, the one who famously had an open Bible on a shtender in his Woodstock house and, according to Chronicles, spent days at the New York Public Library reading old newspapers from the Civil War.
Here's a worthwhile review from PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly by a senior editor for the Religion News Service:
CHRONICLES is also instructive for critics and theologians like Ricks and Gilmour, whose interpretations of Dylan's work, while often fascinating, informative, and suggestive, are sometimes overdetermined. Dylan writes, for example, of trying to "fix" the last line of "Ring Them Bells" -- "breaking down the distance between right and wrong." Ricks stresses Dylan's use of the word "distance" rather than "difference" between right and wrong. "This makes all the difference in the world and in the other world," he writes.
But Dylan writes that "while the line fit, it didn't verify what I felt. Right or wrong, like it fits in the Wanda Jackson song, or right from wrong, like the Billy Tate song, that makes sense, but not right and wrong. The concept didn't exist in my subconscious mind. I'd always been confused about that kind of stuff, didn't see any moral ideal played out there. The concept of being morally right or morally wrong seems to be wired to the wrong frequency."
Reading CHRONICLES is a little bit like listening to a Dylan album. There are always stunning moments, puzzling moments, and some clinkers. The book is studded with wonderful lines that defy easy explication. Of Roy Orbison he writes: "He sang like a professional criminal." You know it's a compliment, but what exactly does it mean?
Voz do Deserto comments (in Portugues) on Dylan's religion. Babelfish translation follows.
In who Bob Dylan will believe? They leave to dispute me next to the Warlike Nuno the religion of the Bob Dylan (since I did not arrive the agreement with the JMF concerning its intention of vote). The singer certainly did not come back to record albums "evanglicos" as the Slow Train Coming but he did not abandon all of the reportrio of this phase (to see here, for example). More. The information that the Nuno also offers on the artist frequentando a New York synagogue is pointed as a funeral of a familiar one, as it, Jewish of blood. Little interests me if Dylan is or not one born again christian as I am. But if more valley is for gaining the bicycle that is prepared to pedalar.
Bob Dylan showed up for Yom Kippur services yesterday morning at Adath Israel in St Paul, MN, an Orthodox congregation with a strong Chabad tilt.
He received the third aliyah, says a source, and returned in the evening for the concluding Neilah service.
Whether he joined in the traditional Chabad singing of "Napoleon's March", and whether he was dressed in rags for the melody, has not yet been ascertained.
It certainly promises to be a year of blessing for Bob fans, no matter which side of the religious question they come down. Bob's autobiographical Chronicles comes out next month, and there is talk of a new album. More immediately, there's some serious Bob as the cover story of this week's Newsweek.
Via Expecting Rain comes this obituary from The Daily Tribune of Hibbing, Minnesota
Myrtle M. Jurenes, 92, HIBBING -- Funeral services for Myrtle M. Jurenes, 92, Hibbing, will be held at 11:30 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 23, 2004 in the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, Hibbing. The Rev. Clem Gustin O.S.C. will celebrate The Mass of Christian Burial.
I do not attempt to maintain that Bob Dylan shares my views on anything. One of the many reasons I admire Bob Dylan is that he has resisted the temptations and entreaties that have surely swamped him through the years, to throw his weight into a partisan political context.At a gig in Tempe AZ in 1979, he has been quoted as saying from the stage: "I don't think I've ever said anything that's been a lie. Never told you to vote for nobody. Never told you to follow nobody."
Correct (if not grammatical), and considerable credit is due to him for that fact.
Grow-A-Brain,
the "Original Real Estate Blog" of "The Great Team" realtors in Anaheim Hills, California, has now started finding Dylan links. Not necessarily new, but since they include the pictured ticket stub, they make the YudelLine cut.
The Washington Times, writing on Pop psalmists, includes this wonderful quote by Scott M. Marshall, author of "Restless Pilgrim":
Obviously, Dylan's words aren't part of the canon, but Dylan is a Jewish poet and that puts him in the same family as those who penned the actual biblical Psalms.
The rhymes they are a'changin': Yoram Aharon of Hod-HaSharon has prepared an excellent page of Hebrew translations for Dylan lyrices.
And yes, they're suitable for singing to the original melody. Yasher koach, Yoram!
It's a new tour for Bob Dylan, and a chance for we Dylanologists to look at the new season's set list to ascertain roadmaps to his soul.
So, with two concerts under his belt (Friday and Saturday night) here's the report: First, no Christian spirituals as the opening number (unlike some other recent tours); in fact, no covers at all.
Secondly, his 13th song -- the penultimate pre-encore number -- has been one of his nondemoninational religious classics: I Believe in You on Friday night, and Every Grain of Sand on Saturday.
As always, Bob Links is the place to go follow the bard.
This Web site typifies the way the Internet brings us encyclopedic information on the narrowest of topics.Thanks for the truly encyclopedic daily Expecting Rain Dylan news site for the heads-up.
At the core of Dylan's music is a solitary individual in search of truth, love and fulfillment, and he endears himself to the listener in a precisely religious way. More than a protest singer or a bluesman or a minstrel or a preacher or a prophet, Dylan has always been a pilgrim, disaffected and disillusioned but still seeking. It is a stance and a journey that brings many other pilgrims on many other quests to connect with him emotionally, from presidential candidates to Jesuit novices. Dylan may be a Jew, he may be a Christian, he may be agnostic, he may be an atheist, but his musical career has always signaled a constant search for the transcendent, what his scriptural sources call God.
Amen, brother!
"Turns out Neuman has another odd Dylan connection: "My dad tutored Bob Dylan for his bar mitzvah." Rabbi Isaac Neuman, a Holocaust survivor, helped 12-year-old Bobby Zimmerman (Dylan's real name) study Hebrew back in Duluth, Minn., in the mid-1950s. Bobby's mother drove him from their home in Hibbing for the lessons, Mark Neuman explains.Another of Rabbi Neuman's students, this time in Cincinnati, also became famous: Jerry Rubin, the late Yippie-leader-turned-marketer. "The rabbi recalls that he kicked him out of class on the first day," says Neuman. Who knew!
No surprise that this contradicts Dylan's own, far more romantic story of a wandering rabbi who got of the bus in Hibbing in time to tutor the Zimmerman boy....
