12/15/2023 0 Comments Jewish song bar mitzvah![]() ![]() I used to go up there every day to learn the stuff, either after school or after dinner. It was a rock-and-roll cafe where I used to hang out, too. 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. (Only decades after he exhausted all his other stories did Dylan offer a recounting of his bar mitzvah. “The town didn’t have a rabbi, and it was time for me to be bar mitzvahed. The last thing Dylan wanted others to know is that he was a nice Jewish boy. Most of these related to his transition from Robert Zimmerman to the character “Bob Dylan.” But among the myriad stories he told about his upbringing, none involved what careful historians would term to be the truth: that Robert Allen Zimmerman, son of store owner Abraham Zimmerman (Hebrew name: Shabsi Zissel), attended Hebrew school at Agudas Achim, an Orthodox synagogue, enjoyed summers at Zionist-oriented Herzl Camp in Webster, Wisconsin, and performed his bar mitzvah duties without incident. From the moment anyone outside Hibbing, Minnesota, thought to pay attention to him, Dylan had already concocted so many new identities for himself that even he did not bother to pay any attention to keeping them straight. Without intention, one assumes, Dylan’s art succeeds in placing the ambiguity of the various meanings of “Jewishness” into stark relief, because so much of his work has defined itself in opposition to his history, Jewish and otherwise. (Though today, only some of Donald Trump’s most rabid “alt-right” supporters would likely pick “race,” and would probably throw in “global conspiracy involving bankers, the media, and the Clinton campaign.) What is Jewishness, after all? Is it a religion? A tribe? A race? An ethnicity? A family? A memory? A group of people who share a history but not much else? One could argue, and many Jews have, that it is all of these things depending on the circumstance. The confusion derives no less from Dylan’s psyche - confused as it may be - than from the confusion at the heart of Jewishness itself. Which is why the newest Nobel laureate for literature is not just a source of pride for Jews around the world he is also a source of confusion. His music pierces listeners’ hearts, minds, and souls - should such a thing actually exist - and most of all the clichés that get us through the day. Though he often takes the scenic route, Bob Dylan gets to the heart of things.
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