This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of your favorite dead Jewish Canadian releasing his debut album: Songs of Leonard Cohen. This is the best thing to happen to Leonard Cohen this week, since mostly his legacy has had to suffer gentiles trying to twist “Hallelujah” into a Christmas song.

Of course, Cohen didn’t keep his Biblical references solely Jewish. In fact, examining this album can feel very… Christian. The man would one day write a song inspired by Unetane Tokef, but in the very first song of his very first album, he mentions Jesus by name, and we move from there. Joseph (from the New Testament) comes a couple of songs later. He somehow has an entire song about some sort of experience with nuns. He mentions saints and crucifixes, and nothing of tzadikim or mezuzot.

Of course, nothing is purely surface with Cohen. Take the song with the nun-like figures— “Sisters of Mercy.” “We weren’t lovers like that,” he insists. But there’s a sensuality with which he approaches them— and everything else, for that matter— that elevates reverence into the erotic. Would a Christian artist treat the literally untouchable with the same intimacy? Maybe. But Cohen certainly goes for it.

Also, let’s take a look back at the Jesus reference in the first song, “Suzanne.” This Christ figure is “almost human,” and hermit-like— a lonely man of faith. The last we see of him, “He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.” For Christians, Jesus rises. For Cohen, he sinks. There’s no hint to be had of the resurrection.

And then, there’s the song that was originally cut from the original album, but concludes the 2007 re-release. The song is “Blessed is the Memory,” which is a Jewish phrase if there ever was one. The song is one of loss, with references to war— perhaps a Shoah comparison is too literal, but its imagery of trains, and snow, and weeping photographs are certainly evocative. The loss it describes “of everybody’s child” is at once both intensely personal and universal— a Jewish response to tragedy.

So for the most part, Cohen’s debut album is crypto-Jewish compared to his later works. But the poignancy, the artistry, and the uncanny feeling that someone has finally put your own feelings into work were present from the start.

“Blessed is the memory” of Leonard Cohen may be on the nose, but go back and listen to the debut album, and just try not to pray.

Image by Takahiro Kyono via Flickr.

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I wrote this poem last November, after Leonard Cohen had passed away (his yahrtzeit is later this month), and I was constantly listening to his music. I was also heartbroken, because the person I call here the Kabbalist’s son had finally walked out of my life on Sukkot just a few weeks earlier. I’ve never felt as unsheltered as I did then. Sukkot wasn’t primarily on my mind when I wrote the poem, but its underlying motives of giving and losing shelter, fleeting joy, and the convergence of transience and permanence echo some of the holiday’s themes. 

I loved the Kabbalist’s son, who came to me in starry nights

immersed in the secret wisdom of his ancestors.

In the shadow of the candle light

I heard them singing in the Temple,

I saw them swaying by the river,

their silhouettes transposed from ancient lands

onto my crimson painted bedroom walls.

His beauty smiled in the deepest crevice of my loneliness.

I drank his words. His pale skin was my firmament,

his name in every blessing.

For just one moment out of time

his touch repaired forever and again my world.

He came to me past the tents of his brothers and sisters

who had forsaken him.

He came without allotment or inheritance

but with his share of splendor and eternity.

I fed him tea and peanut butter, I mended his suit

while he washed and scrubbed his body,

water dripping down the tiles and from his clothes.

I shared his dreams when he slept near me,

for one moment out of time.

I saw him dancing with joyous black-clad men,

I heard him crying on the doorstep of a foreclosed home.

His sweetness was broken, his kindness impure.  

There was nothing I could do. He told me:

I have no love to give you.

The stars turned into snowflakes,

the snow turned into rain.

Last year’s man is gone and with him,

the Kabbalist’s son.

Julia Knobloch’s poetry has appeared in Moment Magazine, Rascal, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. She works for the Union for Reform Judaism and lives in Brooklyn.

Image via PxHere

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Because 2016 continues in some ways to be a dumpster fire of a year, yesterday we lost singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.

Famously, Cohen wrote constantly about Jewish themes in his work, from “Who By Fire” inspired by Unetaneh Tokef, and “Hallelujah” containing Biblical imagery pertaining to King David (such naches from the most over-covered song of all time).

Cohen, who was 82, had been speaking frankly lately about his own mortality, and he left us with a life and career fully culminated. In his final album, You Want it Darker, he even quotes the Kaddish. But this isn’t the first time we’ve heard traditional prayer from Cohen.

Cohen’s final performance in Israel was in 2009, a concert in Ramat Gan. Proceeds went to bereaved families on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and as the concert closed, Cohen addressed them, offering them comfort, and then a prayer.

The last name was no coincidence, of course, Cohen himself was a Kohen, and he stretched his hands out towards the audience in the traditional gesture and made the priestly blessing. It translates as:

The Lord bless you and protect you. The Lord deal kindly and graciously with you. The Lord bestow His favor upon you and grant you peace.

Like a benevolent folk rock zeyde, Cohen leaves us at a tough time for many of us, but with a reservoir of comfort that we really need. We have his astounding career and body of work, and you can receive your blessing of peace from him below:

Image by Takahiro Kyono via Flickr.

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Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2016.  He now joins the ranks of American authors Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway, also recipients of this honor. He is welcome into the fellowship of the Jewish Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Patrick Modiano (on his father’s side).

On Aish.com, Ilan Preskovsky offered Dylan an unqualified “Mazal tov,” and reminded readers that Bob was “born to a fairly observant Jewish family,” and “had a decidedly Jewish upbringing.” (Preskovsky seems to forgive Dylan for the unfortunate detour into evangelical Christianity.) This encomium, like all those in the Jewish press, mentions the simple and haunting “Forever Young” as having its origin in the Biblical priestly blessing. However, perhaps it is time to begin honoring Bob Dylan with the very Jewish virtue of age.

Dylan is now a member of a different and venerable club, of old Jewish men who have become iconic figures of cultural and personal longevity. (He should live to be a hundred and twenty!)

In a recent David Remnick profile in The New Yorker of Dylan’s almost landsman Leonard Cohen, another prophetic songwriter from just slightly farther north, Dylan analyzes the brilliance of his Canadian friend.  Cohen, Dylan explains, is not principally a chronicler of depressing experiences, but an author of lyrical dialogues in the mode of Irving Berlin.  Berlin, born Israel Beilin in 1888, by the time of his death at the age of 101, had written several of the greatest anthems of popular music by holding the listener’s attention, “as if he’s holding a conversation and telling you something, but him doing all the talking, but the listener keeps listening.”  Dylan describes Cohen as engaged in the ongoing dialogue in which he himself has participated with listeners for more than fifty years, the same one featuring Berlin’s melancholy question, “What’ll I do with just a photograph/to tell my troubles to/When I’m alone/with only dreams of you/that won’t come true/What’ll I do?”

Then there is Ira Gershwin, (Israel Gershowitz, 1896-1983) whose brief partnership with his brother George ended with his sad poem to a musician who indeed, dying at the age of thirty-nine, was “forever young.” (“The Rockies may tumble/Gibraltar may crumble/they’re only made of clay/but, our love is here to stay”).

How about Yip Harburg (Isadore Hochberg, 1896-1981)?  His meditation on the elusive nature of dreams, accompanied by the minor key notes of Harold Arlen, (Hyman Arluck), reflects the sadness of the Jewish immigrant experience as well as the human inability to ever reach the symbol that rewarded Noah after the flood, “Somewhere over the rainbow/skies are blue/and the dreams that you dare to dream/Really do come true.”

There are many Dylan lyrics which allude to Jewish experiences, from Abraham’s defiant challenge to God in “Highway 61 Revisited” to the perennial quest for freedom in “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a song which captured in some part the struggles of the Civil Rights movement in which he participated.

Yet somehow, “Forever Young,” a reassuring patriarchal prayer, encloses in its brief verses the true experience of a Jewish parent, or any parent, trying to extend wisdom to a child. Because we don’t want that child, or grandchild, to stay “forever young.” We want him or her to eventually be old, stable, and secure.

We know that our child will pass through the bitterness of “Positively Fourth Street,” the chaos of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and the romanticism of “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Like Jacob climbing the ladder and attaining a new adult identity, we want him or her to know the truth, the light, and courage listed as essential in Dylan’s song.  

Image: Xavier Badosa via Flickr

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Accompanied by Paul Shaffer, Sandler’s parody included references to bed bugs, Anthony Weiner, and Bloomberg’s soda ban, while staying remarkably truthful to the song’s structure: “The puke on your stoops every Sunday morn, Times Square losing all its porn, Original Ray’s Pizza closing to ya. But Hallelujah, Sandy screw ya, we’ll get through ya.”

Liel Leibovitz, who spent the last two years writing a book about Leonard Cohen, argues in The Scroll that Sandler’s version—raunchy and humorous as it may have been—actually restored a sense of soulfulness and authenticity to Cohen’s masterpiece that had been lost in the countless, mindless covers we’ve been subjected to over the years. Leibovitz writes:

To most Cohen aficionados, Sandler’s performance was, at best, an act of mindless vulgarity, or, if you wanted to take a less charitable view, sacrilege. I understand why the critics, including many of my dearest friends, feel that way. To hear Cohen’s elevated words about the yearnings of the spirit and the flesh reduced to jokes about Mark Sanchez fumbling into someone’s butt is enough to send even the kindest soul into paroxysms of rage. But the condemners, I believe, are missing the point: Sandler wasn’t covering Cohen’s song as much as he was covering the cascade of covers of “Hallelujah,” virtually all of which had robbed the song of its might in much more vulgar ways.

So does this mean we won’t have to hear Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song” at every Hanukkah party we go to anymore?

In Defense of Sandler’s “Hallelujah” [The Scroll]

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We got Grossman’s top five Shatner moments of all time:

5. Shatner Introduces George Lucas: Whoever got the idea that William Shatner should appear at a gala for that overrated hack George Lucas was a genius. Classic light ego and charm, and a fun rendition of “My Way” at the end. And if you go full out nerd, you might even see this bit as an apology for the rough treatment he gave conventions back in 1986 on Saturday Night Live. The nicest type of trolling.

4. Rollins Meets Shatner: If there’s one person I trust on matter of personal taste, it’s Henry Rollins. So I was very pleased with his recounting of how he and Bill Shatner got to be friends, and how genuinely overjoyed Shatner was to be making original music. Make sure to check out part two, where Bill and Henry get scallops. This sounds like the greatest reality TV show of all time.

3. Bernie Taupin Introduces “Rocket Man:” Too many things to love in this one to mention. The touches of 70’s style that the 1978 Science Fiction Convention shelled out for. The deadness in the eyes of Bernie Taupin as he is forced by quick paycheck to announce how happy he is to hear this, the wannabe tough guy pose. Shatner’s just cashing in at this point, but figures he can be just cool enough for these nerds.

2. Shatner and Ben Folds on Conan: Before Has Been, before anyone knew that this could be a success. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising what a great screen presence Shatner has here, but this was post-Star Trek and pre-Boston Legal, no one knew what to expect from him, it certainly wasn’t this. You can tell from the lame attempts at jokes in the interview afterwards that he’s still not completely in his comfort zone.

1. As opposed to here, at the height of his musical prowess: Shatner and Folds had a very light tour in support of Has Been, and it’s infuriating that this is the only clip I’ve been able to find. “It Hasn’t Happened Yet” isn’t even the best song off Has Been, but Shatner and his backing band squeeze out every iota of emotional power into the spoken word piece about the trying nature of fame.

(image credit: Taylor Hill/Getty Images)

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Good for the Jews are maybe the single most important contribution that the Jewish people have made to American music since the time we realized there was money to be made by selling the music of other cultures and writing songs for other people.  That’s why we were so shocked that they granted us this in-depth interview.

Tell me about Good for the Jews groupies.  Is it true that they’re the wildest groupies in music?

I’ll tell you just as soon as I meet one. Jewish women are too smart to sleep with a musician — I might get more play if I were a salesman at Saks. You know how an Orthodox man can’t touch a woman who isn’t a member of his family? Neither can I, evidently.

Imagine the confessional poetry of Barbra Streisand mixed with the vocal splendor of Leonard Cohen.

Do you write these questions all by yourself? Or does someone have to help you?

Is it true that you started writing for Playboy because Hugh Hefner was a fan of Good for the Jews?

I started writing for Playboy because I thought I might get to interview Rachel Weisz, or at least Susanna Hoffs. Instead, they assigned me interviews with John Mayer and Sanjay Gupta. God laughs.

If you want to learn more about my relationship with your mom, you’ll have to ask her.

How is this helping to sell tickets for our January 11 show at City Winery with The Klezmatics and Joshua Nelson in NYC?

Next is lunch. I’m starving.

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