Yet even this move proved unpalatable to Atlantic Records president Jerry Wexler, so the song wound up sung straight by Jay and the Americans, an all-Jewish vocal group. Finding this approach too controversial for 1963 pop radio, Leiber remade the lyric as a paean to unlimited possibility in America, “land of opportunity.” His twist was that the song would be performed by the great African-American vocal group, the Drifters, thereby transforming it into a subtle deconstruction of American Dream mythology. Like Golden, Weill employed the expression “Only in America” ironically to expose the fake promise of equality as it pertained to Black Americans. The title was borrowed from the 1958 best-seller by the Charlotte, North Carolina, Jewish journalist Harry Golden, which lampooned both Southern segregation and Northern liberal hypocrisy. In this case, the lines were all written by American Jews - musically, by the stellar Brill Building composers Barry Mann and Mike Stoller and lyrically, by their respective songwriting partners Cynthia Weill and Jerry Leiber. Sometimes you have to read between the lines to detect the Jewish traces in American popular music. A fantasy? For sure, but it’s made more affecting when we discover that “She was a Jewish girl I fell in love with her.” Ariel offered by the standards of the day an adoring and appreciative, if objectified, image of Jewish femininity. Ariel is a post-Sixties hippie and a free spirit while he dresses up in his best blue jeans, she wears “a peasant blouse with nothing underneath.” He greets her with “Hi” and she responds with, “Yeah, I guess I am.” Following a bout of the munchies, the evening climaxes, literally, as they make love in front of the TV “to bombs bursting in air” (in the days when stations signed off at night with the “Star Spangled Banner”). Dean Friedman details a date between the singer and a girl he spotted one day at the Paramus Park shopping mall, “collecting quarters in a paper cup” for the socialist radio station WBAI. And the rest more than lives up to this promising start. “Way on the other side of the Hudson, deep in the bosom of suburbia….” To launch a pop song with that scene-setting description is pure genius. We could easily have populated the entire list with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen songs, so many of which touch on Jewishness that entire books have been written about them, so we tried to limit those entries in the spirit of inclusiveness. We then culled the replies down to a somewhat manageable list of 150, with annotations and links. We got back from them an astonishing list of 300 songs in all, as diverse as the contributors themselves, not all of whom are Jewish – at least we don’t think so we didn’t ask. We then sent out invitations to a couple dozen writers, musicians, and writer/musicians, asking them to share their lists and thoughts about their favorite rock songs that address Jewish culture, ideas, themes, history, or religion. You can find the whole list and accompanying essays here.Īfter Rolling Stone magazine published its list of the 500 Greatest Albums last September, we started asking ourselves what are the greatest Jewish songs of the rock era? We began drawing up lists of our own, but soon realized that were we to be serious about it, this was a task that required input from a larger cohort. Inspired in part by all the Jewish artists on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs, the Forward decided it was time to rank the best Jewish pop songs of all time.
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