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RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL: BOB DYLAN + MARLON BRANDO AT PASSOVER SEDER
This was published last year in the LA Jewish Journal and this year some
other papers are running it. It is such a weird juxtaposition of
people----Dylan, Brando. Louis Kemp, of Kemp Seafoods, the author, is not
lying about being Bob Dylan's childhood friend--he is mentioned in all
Dylan bios
By Louie Kemp
You might remember him as Don Vito Corleone, Stanley Kowalski or the eerie Col. Walter E. Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now," but I remember Marlon Brando as a mensch and a personal friend of the Jewish people when they needed it most.
I got to know Marlon about 30 years ago through a mutual friend. His son, Christian, came to work for me in fisheries I owned in Alaska and Minnesota. Marlon impressed me as a dedicated parent. He would often call me up to check up on his boy with all the tenacity and loving concern of a Jewish mother: Was he eating enough? Did he get to work on time? Was he hanging out with the right people?
Christian was a great kid. He worked hard, had a good attitude and earned the respect of all his co-workers.
In the mid-1970s, when I would visit Los Angeles from my home in Minnesota, Marlon and I would get together. I was starting to become increasingly involved in my religion and he would tell me with great pride and satisfaction about his support for Israel even before it became a state. Marlon explained that in 1946, two years before Israel achieved statehood, he desperately believed that the survivors of the Holocaust deserved to have their own land where they could live free from oppression and the anti-Semitic tyranny of the outside world.
True to form, Marlon put his money where his mouth was and donated all of his proceeds from the play, "A Flag Is Born," to the Irgun, a Zionist political group dedicated to rescuing European Jewry and the establishment of Israel as an independent sovereign nation. He continued his donations and charitable work over the entire two-year run of the play as it went from Broadway to touring destinations around the United States.
"A people that have fought so hard to survive need and deserve their own land," he told me. " I did all that I could and actively supported Israel's statehood anyway I was able."
Marlon also told me with great emotion that his success in theater and movies was largely due to the Jewish people in New York who befriended and taught him. He warmly mentioned Stella Adler, the legendary acting coach who both taught Marlon his craft and housed him with her family while he was getting on his feet as an actor. He was also especially proud of the fact that he could converse in Yiddish, having learned it while living with her family.
One of my visits to Los Angeles coincided with Passover. I was not yet Orthodox and made plans to attend a seder at a local synagogue with my sister. Marlon called me that very day and invited me out to dinner. I graciously declined, explaining that it was Passover and I was going to a seder. Marlon became audibly excited over the phone and said, "Passover — I've always wanted to attend a seder. Can I come with?" He had made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I told him it could be arranged and called the synagogue adding one more to our list.
A short time later, Marlon called me back and asked if he could bring a friend. I said, yes, by all means, never thinking to ask his friend's name. I called the shul again. They were a little less patient this time and begrudgingly told me that they could squeeze one more person in, but this was absolutely the last one as they were now officially sold out.
Still later that day, I received a phone call from a childhood friend of mine who had become a well-known singer/songwriter. Being Jewish himself, and hearing I was going to a seder, he asked if he and his wife could go along. The shul was unhappy to receive my most recent request, but somehow I softened the heart of the receptionist and she agreed to let my people go — to the seder.
I will never forget the sight of our table in the synagogue, Marlon Brando was to my left and sitting next to him was his guest. This was during the height of Marlon's involvement with Native American causes and he had brought with him noted Indian activist Dennis Banks of Wounded Knee fame. Banks was dressed in full Indian regalia: buckskin tassles on his clothes and long braids hanging down from a headband, which sported a feather. My childhood friend Bob Dylan sat to my right joined by his wife, my sister Sharon and other friends.
At first the seder progressed normally without anyone in the temple noticing anything out of the ordinary. After about 45 minutes, the rabbi figured out that ours was not your average seder table. "Mr. Brando, would you please do us the honor of reading the next passage from the haggadah," he said. Marlon said, "It would be my pleasure."
He smiled broadly, stood up and delivered the passage from the haggadah as if he were reading Shakespeare on Broadway. Mouths fell open and eyes focused on the speaker with an intensity any rabbi would covet. When he was done I think people actually paused, wondering if they should applaud.
Somewhat later the rabbi approached another member of our table.
"Mr. Dylan, would you do us the honor of singing us a song?" The rabbi pulled out an acoustic guitar. I thought he would politely decline. Much to my surprise Bob said yes and performed an impromptu rendition of "Blowin' in the Wind" to the stunned shul of about 300 seder guests. The incongruity of a seder, with Marlon Brando reading the haggadah followed by a Bob Dylan serenade, would have made for a good Fellini movie. Needless to say, everyone was both shocked and thrilled by this unusual Hollywood-style Passover miracle. The entire shul came by to shake both Marlon and Bob's hands and they actually paused and spent time with everyone.
Just a couple of years ago, Marlon called me up in Minnesota, out of the blue. We had kept in touch through the trials and tribulations he was going through with his family. "Louie Kemp," he said, "I've been thinking about you. Twenty years ago you took me to a seder. I want you to know that I still think about it to this very day. In fact, I was thinking about it today and that's why I called you."
He continued to thank me and tell me of the special spiritual impact it had on him and how much he identified with a people freeing themselves from bondage and uniting to celebrate and remember that freedom.
He told me he was sending his three youngest children to a Jewish day school in Los Angeles. When I asked him why, he said, "Louie, don't you know that the Jewish schools are the best?" I could almost hear him smiling over the phone.
After the publication of an interview in Playboy magazine in January 1979, Brando was accused of anti-Semitism in regard to his opinion on double-standards set by Jews in Hollywood: "You've seen every single race besmirched, but you never saw an [unfavorable] image of the kike because the Jews were ever so watchful for that—and rightly so. They never allowed it to be shown on screen. The Jews have done so much for the world that, I suppose, you get extra disappointed because they didn't pay attention to that."
Brando made similar allegations on Larry King Live in April 1996, saying "Hollywood is run by Jews; it is owned by Jews, and they should have a greater sensitivity about the issue of — of people who are suffering. Because they've exploited — we have seen the — we have seen the Nigger and Greasebal, we've seen the Chink, we've seen the slit-eyed dangerous Jap, we have seen the wily Filipino, we've seen everything but we never saw the Kike. Because they knew perfectly well, that that is where you draw the wagons around." King replied, "When you say — when you say something like that you are playing right in, though, to anti-Semitic people who say the Jews are — " at which point Brando interrupted, "No, no, because I will be the first one who will appraise the Jews honestly and say 'Thank God for the Jews.'"
Abraham Foxman, head of the ADL, responded by indicating that Brando "should know that what he said is utterly false, extremely offensive and plays into the hands of anti-Semites and bigots. His comments raise the centuries-old canard of Jewish control and conspiracy, and his use of an anti-Semitic epithet is hurtful to Jews everywhere."
Brando's children Christian and Cheyene lead disastrous lives and had horrid deaths.
Bob Dylan, was born, Robert Allen Zimmerman (Jewish name: Zushe ben Avraham).. He was born on May 24. 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised there and in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range west of Lake Superior . Research by Dylan's biographers has shown that his paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to the United States after the anti-Semitic pogroms of 1905. Dylan himself has written (in his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles ) that his paternal grandmother's maiden name was Kyrgyz and her family originated from Istanbul, although she grew up in the Kağızman district of Kars in Eastern Turkey. He also wrote that his paternal grandfather was from Trabzon on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. His mother's grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in America in 1902.
His parents, Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone, were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community. Zimmerman lived in Duluth until age seven. When his father was stricken with polio, the family returned to nearby Hibbing, where Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood. Abram was recalled by one of Bob's childhood friends as strict and unwelcoming, whereas his mother was remembered as warm and friendly.
Three years after this seder, Bob Dylan left his Judaism and became a Christian.
Bob Dylan has finally confirmed in an interview what he's been saying in his music for 18 months: He's a born-again Christian. Dylan said he accepted Jesus Christ in his heart in 1978 after "a vision and feeling" during which the room moved: "There was a presence in the room that couldn't have been anybody but Jesus."
Dylan's embrace of Christianity was unpopular with some of his fans and fellow musicians. Shortly before his December 1980 shooting, John Lennon recorded "Serve Yourself" in response to Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody".By 1981, while Dylan's Christian faith was obvious, his "iconoclastic temperament" had not changed, as Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times:
Mr. Dylan showed that neither age (he's now 40) nor his much-publicized conversion to born-again Christianity has altered his essentially iconoclastic temperament.
In the new Millennium, Dylan appears to have re embraced his Judaism. He has seemingly supported the Chabad Lubavitch movement and participated in many Jewish rituals. More recently, it has been reported that Dylan has "shown up" a few times at various High Holiday services at various Chabad synagogues. He attended a Woodbury, New York synagogue in 2005, and attended Congregation Beth Tefillah, in Atlanta Georgia on September 22 , 2007 (Yom Kippur), where he was called to the Torah for the sixth aliyah.
The wife of Dylan, present at the above seder, was Sara. She was born Shirley Noznisky of Wilmington DE, at the divorced two years after the 1975 seder in 1977.
As the Sages in our Hagaddah teach us, there is a big difference between attending a seder and actually 'being' at once. We are to experience and to relate to the slavery our people felt under Pharaoh and revel in our liberation. We are to experience and understand that our liberation was by G!D's Hand. Moses is not mentioned in the Hagaddah. We are to use our liberation to do G!D's will and to ask Him daily to negate our own will. If not, we just lock ourselves up into a bondage of self, with our egos being the new Pharaoh. Our lives drift, searching for the 'truth' and 'happiness' from one wife to another, one religious cult to another, one drug to another, and we denigrate others because we are unhappy with ourselves.
When we pick up the yoke of G!D who requires very little of us: loving kindness, righteousness and humility, all other of life's yokes fall from us. True happiness comes when we realize that G!D is in charge of our lives an that the greatest joy we get is when we do love and service for others, expecting nothing back in return, and accepting nothing back in return, and doing it as anonymously as possible.
Have a sweet Passover!
Shalom,
Rabbi Arthur Segal
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