A new generation of music lovers got turned on to mid-century pop star Connie Francis’ oeuvre in recent months when her 1962 song “Pretty Little Baby” went viral on TikTok.

Now, Francis’ death on Wednesday at 87 has drawn attention to another little-known element of her discography: her 1960 album of Jewish music, including songs in Yiddish and Hebrew.

Francis, whose real name was Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1940s, when the city was home to a large Jewish population (including Phillip Roth, four years her senior). “If you weren’t Jewish, you needed a password to get in,” she once told an interviewer, the Forward reported in 2018.

Francis wound up deploying the Jewish culture and language she picked up in her childhood neighborhood as she emerged as a vocal star in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She performed at Borscht Belt resorts during their heyday, then recorded an album of Jewish music as part of an effort to make herself as widely known as possible in the early 1960s.

“Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites,” released in 1960, contained renditions of “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” the Yiddish classic “Oifen Pripetchik” and “Hava Nagila,” reflecting a wave of popular interest in the Jewish folk song.

Francis’ performances of the Jewish classics enamored her to a certain generation of Jewish Americans. Alan Feiler, the editor in chief of Baltimore Jewish Living, wrote following her death that his father-in-law had praised her Yiddish accent.

“In his own way, I think my father-in-law – the son of Eastern European immigrants — saw Francis’ collection of Jewish classics as an affirmation of how far the Jewish community had come in America,” Feiler wrote. “It seemed to indicate validation and acceptance in the New World.”

Francis died Wednesday, according to her publicist, who announced her death on Facebook. Married four times, she is survived by a son.

 

More than 200 students at Cheltenham High School in suburban Philadelphia have petitioned for the school’s alumni hall of fame to eject Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who graduated from the school in 1967.

Officers of the school’s alumni association are meeting with school district officials on Friday to consider the petition, according to a report in The New York Times, which said the association’s secretary privately said the group was inclined “to keep Netanyahu up, but maybe with an update in his biography.” Netanyahu was added to the hall of fame in 1999, during his first stint as prime minister.

The petition, submitted last month by roughly 15% of students, cited Netanyahu’s criminal indictment and arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, the newspaper reported. Netanyahu denies the criminal charges against him and Israel rejects the allegation that it has committed war crimes in Gaza, where it has been battling Hamas since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Half a year into the Israel-Hamas war that began in October 2023, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace might have been riding high.

Attention and support for the three-decade-old group was way up. New chapters were forming, and the group’s social media following had tripled, ringing in at 1.3 million on Instagram alone. Suddenly, there were 32,000 dues-paying members – many of whom willing to attend events and protests to broadcast their opposition to Zionism and support for the Palestinian cause. People were writing articles about getting involved in pro-Palestinian activism after encountering JVP protests on the street.

Yet Stephanie Fox, JVP’s top official since 2020, wasn’t satisfied. “We’ve had an unprecedented show of our values, our principles,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time. “And it still hasn’t translated to the very baseline of a ceasefire and a negotiated exchange of hostages and prisoners.” 

That’s still true more than a year later. Despite another temporary ceasefire, the war is ongoing. And JVP is changing its structure and strategy.

Under a new arrangement, the Berkeley, California-based organization will now be able to dedicate more of its resources to lobbying for specific policies and supporting or opposing candidates for elected office. The change signals a belief that influencing dynamics in the Middle East will require more than protests and grassroots organizing. 

“There is unprecedented, mass support for Palestinians. Our movement has already grown larger, and more quickly, than many of us thought possible. But it’s clear we have not begun to tap our full potential,” JVP wrote in an explanation of the shift, which was first reported on by Jewish insider. “The U.S. government has not budged from its commitment to sponsor Israel’s genocide. Public polling and public displays of opposition alone will not shift U.S. policy. Our movement must contend for real power.”

JVP is urging its members — donors who give at least $18 a year — to shift their membership from the group’s original nonprofit to a newer entity that isn’t bound by the same legal restrictions on partisan activity. The tradeoff: Donations to the new organization are not tax-deductible. 

 The strategy shift, which has been in the works for some time, comes amid increasing signs that opposition to Israel is no longer a deal-breaker in the Democratic political sphere in the United States. In New York City, the Democratic mayoral candidate is a longtime proponent of the movement to boycott Israel who won the primary last month despite declining to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada,” associated with the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that Jewish Voice for Peace has organized and participated in.

An added benefit of the strategy shift for JVP is that it does not depend on legions of foot soldiers. 

Atalia Omer, an Israeli-American scholar at the University of Notre Dame who studies Jewish anti-Zionist organizing and participates in it herself, told JTA last year that she was observing a mounting crisis within the movement a year after Oct. 7.

“People are right now in despair. There is a sense of: How much more mobilization can we do?” she said, adding, “The situation remains urgent, but it’s very hard to sustain emergency mobilization for a full year.”

Now, JVP will be focusing its efforts on electoral campaigning, an arena where money is at least as important as bodies.The period following Oct. 7 brought an unprecedented fundraising bonanza for JVP. The group had been raising between $3 million and $4 million annually before Hamas attacked Israel. Its most recent tax filing, covering June 2023 to July 2024, discloses about $11 million in contributions.

The strategy shift is unlikely to dampen the considerable antipathy that JVP elicits from most mainstream Jewish leaders and organizations, which are reeling from Mamdani’s electoral success in New York City.

The group’s many critics say JVP enables a fringe of American Jews to act as tokens in a pro-Palestinian movement that ultimately seeks to harm the Jewish people by destroying the country created as a refuge for Jews facing persecution. (The group has up to now taken no official stance on what should happen in the region, saying that Palestinians should set the agenda.)

The Anti-Defamation League, which argues that anti-Zionism is a threat equal to antisemitism, for example, calls JVP “radical,” says its ideas “can help give rise to antisemitism” and declares that it “does not represent the mainstream Jewish community.” 

Concern that JVP claims to speak for American Jews has spurred the formation of a new group called the Jewish Majority, led by AIPAC veteran Jonathan Schulman. The group’s website says it is dedicated to “fighting extremists.”

“Fringe groups weaponize the Jewish identity of some of their members to call for policy recommendations that are rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community,” the page says. 

The group releases polling to make its case, including a recent survey billed as evidence that most American Jews reject JVP and its tactics. 

Some of JVP’s critics have questioned the degree to which it is driven by Jews. Unlike some other Jewish groups that are sharply critical of Israel, non-Jews are invited to join as members, and some chapters have non-Jewish leaders. 

A string of gaffes and surprising choices — backwards Hebrew lettering at a California seder, a rejection of Hebrew as “traumatizing” in a 2021 guide — have fueled such critiques. But JVP’s leaders and adherents reject the criticism. 

“I think a lot of people would just like to disappear the fact that there are so many Jews that we represent,” said Fox, who said she could not say what proportion of the group’s members are Jewish because it does not ask. “It would be very convenient if they could just say that we’re not Jews. But there’s an uncomfortable reality that we are.”

This war is not the first time that the group has experienced outsized growth — and been frustrated by its impact. During Israel’s war with Hamas a decade ago, which lasted 50 days and resulted in the deaths of more than 2,000 Gazans, as well as about 70 Israelis, new members flocked to JVP, the group’s then-executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson noted at a September event launching a book she wrote about her activism.

That experience positioned JVP to act quickly when it became clear on Oct. 7 that another such moment had begun. There was already a playbook for action, a loyal membership and an understanding that aggressive action would yield new adherents. 

“If you dial back to October and see JVP’s response, they were ready,” Rabbi Andrue Kahn, who now leads an organization aimed at advancing opposition to Zionism within the Reform movement of Judaism, said last year. “It was masterful, the way that they immediately drove forward. … It was big and fast.”

Yet Vilkomerson, who is no longer involved in the organization’s leadership, was already saying at her book event that the explosive growth was not sufficient to challenge the entrenched ideas and structures of power that JVP seeks to undo. (In a sign of one peril facing the movement, her book, “Solidarity is the Political Version of Love,” drew criticism online from some pro-Palestinian voices because its author is a white woman with personal ties to Israelis.)

“The growth of the movement,” Vilkomerson said, “which is in some ways beautiful is also not enough.”

Michael “The Grinder” Mizrachi, an Israeli-American poker champion who has made a name for himself as one of the most prolific players in the game’s history, won the main event title at the World Series of Poker Wednesday.

Mizrachi, a Jewish Florida native, won his eighth World Series of Poker bracelet at the showdown Wednesday, tying him for the fifth most of all time and marking his first win in the competition’s main event. He also took home the $10 million first prize.

“I had a lot of faith. My favorite hand’s 44, I’m 44 years old. This was all meant to be,” Mizrachi told ESPN. “This is the best day of my life.”

For Mizrachi, whose father was born in Israel after his family fled Iraq, representing his Israeli heritage took center stage during his WSOP victory.

During the main event, Mizrachi wore a dog tag around his neck symbolizing his solidarity with the Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas, and also displayed a tattoo of the Israeli flag on his arm.

During the celebration of Mizrachi’s first main event win, members of the Poker Hall of Fame also announced he would be its newest member, according to ESPN, adding him to a long list of Jewish inductees including New York native Erik Seidel and Holocaust survivor Henry Orenstein.

Mizrachi’s victory at WSOP also comes on the tails of another historic win at the prestigious $50,000 Poker Players Championship earlier in the summer where he won his fourth bracelet, the most of all time. At that event following his win, Mizrachi requested that the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah,” be played in place of the American anthem.

After winning a WSOP bracelet in July 2024, Mizrachi’s brother, Robert, another poker champion, also requested that the event play “Hatikvah,” according to an interview with the Jewish Journal.

“This year, with everything going on, and all of the heartbreak, as well as the antisemitism, I wanted to represent, to show the world that I stand for Israel,” Robert Mizrachi said at the time.

The number of antisemitic assaults and acts of vandalism on college campuses fell sharply in the last school year, according to Hillel International.

And the pro-Palestinian encampments that ignited fear among many Jewish college students in early 2024 effectively disappeared in the year since, with just nine encampments taking place in the last school year, the Jewish campus group said in its annual tally of antisemitic incidents, released Thursday.

But Hillel International said antisemitic incidents were still on the rise on college campuses overall, citing an increase in online harassment and bullying reported by Jewish students.

The organization said the trend might reflect more aggressive action on the part of universities to intervene on behalf of Jewish students and their advocates.

“What we saw this past year was there was a penalty for antisemitism at many universities, and so what it did is it took a lot of these incidents that would have happened on campus, and it moved them online,” Jon Falk, Hillel’s vice president of Israel engagement and confronting antisemitism, said in an interview.

The finding comes at a complicated moment for the push to combat antisemitism on college campuses, with the Trump administration taking up the cause in ways that have divided Jewish observers. While many have expressed relief that schools are being encouraged — and in some cases coerced — to adopt policies to stem antisemitism, some are also concerned that the effort is also compromising free expression on campuses.

Adam Lehman, the president and CEO of Hillel International, said he believed that changes to improve the climate for Jewish students on college campuses were paying off.

“Over the past year, many universities have made significant changes to better clarify and enforce their policies and codes of conduct, supported by our work with them to achieve these improvements,” said Lehman in a statement. “When universities step up and enforce their rules, Jewish students and all students benefit from a safer, more inclusive campus environment.”

Even if some forms of antisemitism on campus seem to be in decline, the overall picture remains starkly different from before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, which is ongoing, according to Hillel’s data.

Last year, the group recorded 2,334 antisemitic incidents on campuses, an increase of more than 500 recorded incidents compared to the 2023-2024 school year, which saw 1,853 incidents. But during the 2022-2023 school year, Hillel recorded just 289 antisemitic incidents.

The group says it tallies incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism, assault and hate speech, as well as incidents recovered from social media, emails, articles and publications.

To collect the data, Hillel cross-references college and university bias reporting portals; reports from students; the Campus Antisemitism Legal Line; and ReportCampusHate.org, a joint project of Hillel, the Anti-Defamation League and the Secure Community Network, which coordinates security for Jewish institutions nationwide.

Hillel staff on campuses work to identify and verify each antisemitic incident that is reported, and the resulting data set uses a “technical system so that we make sure that we get every single incident,” Falk said.

“I care deeply that every incident is counted,” he added. “I think that’s what the Jewish people have been doing for centuries. We care about counting, and we want to count correctly, and so that’s what we’re doing every day.”

At a time when campuses are wracked by tension over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, some of the incidents that Hillel counted as antisemitic reflect ongoing complexities around determining what kinds of Israel criticism constitute antisemitism. The organization said incidents of antisemitic articles and publications had increased by 50% since the 2023-2024 school year, rising from 40 to 61 incidents. It offered as examples an article in Mondoweiss, a left-wing online publication, by a UC Davis graduate student advocating for a boycott of an exchange program with an Israeli university; a pro-Palestinian parody of Northwestern University’s student newspaper; and an op-ed by a Jewish student in The Bowdoin (College) Orient criticizing Zionist Jews and the war in Gaza.

“Antisemitic articles and publications negatively impact the climate for Jewish students on campus,” Falk said by email in response to an inquiry about why the articles counted in the tally. “Each article/publication incident met Hillel’s criteria for an antisemitic incident by containing at least one element of antisemitic language.”

The Hillel data covers a period that included a string of recent attacks on Jewish groups and leaders, including the firebombing of Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home in April, the murders of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington, D.C., in May and the deadly firebombing of a group demonstrating for the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza last month.

The day after each attack, Falk said that Hillel recorded a “spike” in antisemitic incidents on campuses.

“The next day, we would see a spike, both when it comes to social media and when it comes to targeting students,” he said. “I don’t think folks truly understand the impact of incidents that happen outside of the campus space, and how they could impact the campus environment.”

WASHINGTON — Jesus is rising, again, at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.

Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, is returning to its former place of prominence a massive painting of Jesus that was removed two years ago following a request from Jewish midshipmen and others.

The restoration drew attention on Wednesday in Congress, where Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat, grilled Duffy over why he authorized the return of the 10-foot by 19-foot painting, “Christ on the Water,” also known as “Jesus and Lifeboat,” to a large administrative room at the academy on Long Island.

The room is used for multiple purposes including mandatory disciplinary hearings.

“What kind of message do you think that sends the cadets who may not be Christian, may not be religious, or might be part of a Christian sect that objects to the kind of portrait that you’ve placed in that position of prominence?” Huffman asked Duffy at a hearing of Congress’ Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The academy is under the purview of the Department of Transportation.

Duffy said he rescued the painting, depicting Jesus hovering over a lifeboat full of stranded sailors, from the basement of the building, which he claimed was prone to flooding. The painting was undergoing restoration pending its return, Duffy said.

Huffman noted that the basement room where the painting had been moved was the chapel, part of a compromise after a complaint filed in 2023 by 18 academy midshipmen, including five Jews. There are approximately 950 cadets at the academy.

Duffy said the painting should not offend Jews or non-Christians. “We all accept everyone’s religion,” he said. He noted that the painting had, prior to the 2023 complaint and the subsequent compromise, hung in the room, named for Elliot M. See, for decades.

When the painting was first installed in 1947, the See room served as the academy’s chapel. The painting remained in the room after the campus chapel moved elsewhere in 1961.

The midshipmen who filed the complaint in 2023 said that the dominance of Jesus in the room exacerbated what already was a fraught experience of defending oneself against allegations of breach of the honor code.

Duffy, a devout Roman Catholic and formerly a star of multiple reality TV series, in April addressed the academy and asked “Could we bring Jesus up from the basement?” eliciting cheers. He announced its planned return in May, amid a wave of moves within the Trump administration to elevate Christianity in Washington.

“We are moving Jesus out of the basement,” he said in a release then.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the advocacy group that brokered the 2023 compromise, said it would sue to once again remove the painting from the See room.

“MRFF is already hard at work in an effort to file a federal lawsuit, forcing the removal of that painting once again to a location at the Academy, which is constitutionally permissible as to time, place and manner,” the foundation’s president, Mikey Weinstein, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Addressing Duffy, Weinstein said, “We look SO forward to seeing you in court.”

Weinstein obtained the text of the proposed text for a plaque to be placed beneath the painting once it is restored. The text, which Weinstein shared with JTA, appears to nod in its final sentence to non-Christian sensibilities.

“This painting has taken on historical significance and become a part of the Academy’s community, imparting varying meanings for different members of the Academy’s community,” it says.

Weinstein mocked the vagueness of the plaque’s phrasing. “We especially look forward to taking your deposition,” he said, addressing Duffy, “and directly examining you on the witness stand during the trial where you can expand and extrapolate on the ‘varying meanings’ of a gigantic painting, showing Jesus Christ to the exclusion of any other God or non-God deity figure in support of sailors in distress at sea.”

A uniquely American Passover tradition could become a thing of the past, after President Donald Trump announced that he had successfully pressed Coca-Cola to change the formulation of its signature drink in the United States.

“I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform, on Wednesday. “I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them — You’ll see. It’s just better!”

Such a change would obviate Coca-Cola’s special runs for Passover — and the fervent searches that some kosher-keeping Jews undertake to secure the scarce “yellow-cap” bottles of Coke that result.

For the last four decades, Coke in the United States has been made with corn syrup, a sweetener that is reviled by many health advocates, including those who are part of the pro-Trump “MAHA” movement. But corn is not considered kosher for Passover according to Ashkenazi tradition, that practiced by the vast majority of kosher-keeping American Jews.

So every year, the company has produced a kosher-for-Passover run of Coke made with cane sugar lest kosher-keeping Jews have to forgo the soda for the eight-day holiday.

The kosher-for-Passover bottles, which are prominently labeled as such but also come with distinctive yellow caps, become a hot commodity in some communities each spring. Not only kosher-keeping Jews but also those with a taste for the corn syrup-free sodas manufactured abroad hunt down the yellow-cap bottles in regions where they are distributed, typically those with large Orthodox Jewish populations.

In recent years, with the rise of TikTok, the appeal of yellow-cap Coke has gone viral. Last year, influencers urged their followers to stock up on the kosher-for-Passover Cokes and traded tips about where to find the scarce bottles.

If Coca-Cola begins using the same corn syrup-free formulation all year long, special runs will no longer be needed for Passover.

The company did not immediately confirm the change that Trump announced but posted an oblique statement on its website. “We appreciate President Trump’s enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand,” it said. “More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca‑Cola product range will be shared soon.”

The company also replied to some social media posts about Trump’s announcement to rebut the idea that cane-sugar Coke tastes better or is healthier.

While the anti-corn syrup push could ease conditions for kosher-keeping Jews, some of the MAHA movement’s other ambitions could introduce complications. Changes to milk testing earlier this year briefly ignited concerns about whether the FDA’s practices would still fall in line with a key determination of Jewish law, while an effort to end the use of synthetic food dyes could result in the wider use of dyes that are not kosher. Under pressure from the Trump administration, many U.S. ice cream producers announced on Monday that they would phase out synthetic food dyes by 2028.

The interim president of Syria, Ahmed al-Shaara, accused Israel on Thursday of attempting to sow “chaos and destruction” following the Israeli army’s intervention in his country’s sectarian violence.

Much remains murky about the situation that has flared this week in the Sweida province of Syria. But it is clear that one result may be a retreat from the warming of relations between Israel and Syria that leaders of both countries were recently indicating could be on the way.

The conflict has centered on Sweida, a province near the Israeli border that is home to large numbers of the Druze religious minority. The Syrian army entered the region in recent days, ostensibly to quell violence between the Druze and Bedouin tribes there that has likely caused hundreds of Druze to be killed or injured.

The move triggered panic among the local Druze, who are skeptical about the commitment of Shaara, a former Islamist leader, to religious minorities. It also ignited a response from Israel, which has vowed to protect the Druze and also has an interest in preventing Shaara from amassing his forces close to the Israeli border.

On Wednesday, the Israeli army bombed Shaara’s positions in Damascus for the second time in months, following a May strike Israel said was intended to signal its commitment to protecting the Druze. (The bombing caused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial to be suspended on Wednesday.)

Also on Wednesday, hundreds of Israeli Druze crossed the border into Syria to see members of their families from which they had been separated since 1967. Netanyahu exhorted the Israeli Druze to remain inside Israel while the Israeli army operated inside Syria on their behalf.

“I have a single request of you: you are Israeli citizens. Do not cross the border. You are risking your lives; you could be murdered, you could be taken hostage, and you are impeding the efforts of the IDF,” Netanyahu said in a statement late Wednesday. “Therefore I ask of you: return to your homes and let the IDF take action.”

Shaara blamed Israel for the violence, saying in an address on Thursday, “The Israeli entity resorted to a wide-scale targeting of civilian and government facilities.” He said the situation was easing with the intervention of U.S., Arab and Turkish mediators.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said on Wednesday that he believed Israel’s bombing of Damascus was the result of “likely a misunderstanding” and that he hoped the bloodshed would soon cease.

There were signs on Thursday that Syrian forces were exiting Sweida, while Israeli Druze were amassing again at the border with the hopes of reaching their families in Syria.

Walter Zev Feldman, 76, is an authority on Ottoman Turkish music, Yiddish dance and klezmer music. An accomplished musician and a respected academic who has taught at elite universities, Feldman was a key player in the 1970s klezmer revival — and, in fact, it was Feldman who popularized the term “klezmer” to describe the traditional instrumental music of East European Jews.

“Klezmer was still an obscure term of the Yiddish lexicon,” Feldman writes in his new memoir, “From the Bronx to the Bosphorus: Klezmer and Other Displaced Musics of New York.”

That was in 1978, when he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to produce a historic concert featuring clarinetist and bandleader Dave Tarras. The concert, titled “Jewish Klezmer Music,” took place in the East Village, at Casa Galicia — today’s Webster Hall — and it was the first klezmer music concert in NYC in some 25 years.

Feldman’s new book is both an ethnomusicological treatise and an account of his role in the  klezmer revival, in which musicians from adjacent folk traditions played both traditional Jewish instrumental music and melded it with everything from rock to bluegrass. The book describes the musical journey Feldman, who is known as Zev, began as a high school student who enjoyed exploring a range of Middle Eastern music. From there, he eventually got his Ph.D. in Central Asian Literature from Columbia University; later, he collaborated with celebrated klezmer clarinetist Andy Statman, which resulted in an album and several concerts.

Today, klezmer music is played in almost every major American city by local bands, and all over Europe as well. Perhaps the best known modern klezmer revival band, the Grammy Award-winning Klezmatics, is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary.

While klezmer music plays a key role in “From the Bronx to the Bosphorus,” the book’s overarching theme is multicultural. Ultimately, Feldman’s exploration of the musical diasporas in New York City showed him how the traditional music of Greece, Albania, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Turkey and Armenia are interconnected.

Feldman, who was born and raised in the Bronx by Jewish immigrant parents, was drawn to music — and international music, in particular — at a young age. His particular interest in Greek and Turkish music may have been inherited from his father, who loved the sounds of the region.   Meshilim Feldman grew up in the shtetl of Edinets, which was in Bessarabia (now Moldova) when it was ruled by the Turks. The village had “a musical symbiosis linking Ashkenazic Jews, local Roma, Moldovans, Turks, Tatars and Greeks,” as Feldman writes.

“It’s hard to explain, but I was drawn to this Turkish-Greek environment, as well as to the Yiddish,” Feldman told the New York Jewish Week in a recent interview in his book-filled home on the Upper West Side. “There was a clear sense that the aesthetic of the Greeks, of the Armenians, too, of the Turks, to some extent, fit with our Yiddish aesthetic better than many of the neighboring peoples.”

While he was a teenager in the 1960s, Feldman started going to the Chelsea section of Manhattan, where a strip of Eighth Avenue below West 30th Street was known as Greek Town. Greek night clubs featured belly dancers accompanied by what he describes in the book as  “mostly mediocre” music played at an “earsplitting volume.” Soon enough, Feldman was playing his darabukka, a ceramic drum more commonly known as a dumbek, at these clubs; he had taken up the instrument after frequenting a Middle Eastern music venue in the East Village.

“From the Bronx to the Bosphorus” reveals Feldman’s openness to other cultures, which began as a student at the co-ed Akiba Hebrew Academy, which eventually merged with two other schools to become Riverdale’s SAR Academy. There, a classmate invited him to check out services at the neighborhood’s Sephardic Jewish Center.

“The melodies of this synagogue were utterly strange to me,” Feldman writes. “Many chants seemed to hang somewhere in space, never returning to what I could hear as a final tone… This Sabbath service afforded me several hours to accustom myself to the exotic musical surroundings. I sensed something bright and optimistic — the gratitude and dignity of strong and satisfied people giving thanks to a power that governed their lives and helped them to thrive.”

Later, as a student at Music and Art High School, another classmate suggested he check out the art at St. Spyridon Greek Orthodox Church in Washington Heights. Feldman, a visual arts student, was impressed with the church’s art, but was equally taken by the music there.

“This was the finest cantorial singing I had yet heard in person,” Feldman writes. He became a frequent visitor to St. Spyridon and went as far as joining the church’s midnight Easter procession, carrying a little candle.

Feldman also belonged to the Zionist socialist youth group Hashomer Hatzair. He and some friends from the group went to Club Khayyam, a Middle Eastern music venue in the East Village, where he connected with a musician from Iran who played a hammered dulcimer known as a santur.

“The first time I heard Persian music, it just blew me away,” Feldman said.

Among the colorful characters that Feldman collaborated with over the years: a Jewish belly dancer in Aspen, Colorado, whom he accompanied while smoking opium and hashish throughout the winter of 1975; a Jew from Dagestan named Zebulon who had the ability to dance on two toes; and Antranik Aroustamian, a virtuoso on an ancient fiddle known as a kemanche. Aroustamian had performed for both Joseph Stalin and the Shah of Iran before emigrating to the United States. In 1976, Feldman accompanied Aroustamian in a concert for the Shah’s sister at the Iranian Embassy in Washington, D.C.

The last two chapters of the book are devoted to Statman and Tarras.

After meeting at a concert in which Statman dazzled the audience with his bluegrass mandolin chops, Feldman and Statman started playing tunes from the British Isles, the Balkans and Greece. Feldman, on the hammer dulcimer known as a cimbalom, accompanied Statman’s mandolin. The duo appeared at a 1977 concert at Columbia University with a Greek folk music ensemble called Paliparea and apparently created quite a frenzy.

Later, in October, 1978, Feldman and Statman were on hand as Tarras performed as part of a trio of old-timers at Casa Galicia. Some 400 people had to be turned away from the groundbreaking event. After the concert the trio continued to perform for throngs of people who took to the ballroom floor to dance.

“That floor was just bouncing underneath people,” recalled Ethel Raim, who co-wrote the application for the NEA grant with Feldman. “People would come in and say, ‘Oh, he [Tarras] played at our parents’ wedding,’ or ‘He played at our wedding.’”

Jewish wedding musicians in Eastern Europe were known as klezmorim, and played dance music and ballads, usually without vocals, on fiddles, the cimbalon, the occasional wooden flute and, by the early 1800s, the clarinet. The music fell out of fashion among the Jewish immigrants eager to assimilate after arriving in America, and the Holocaust silenced the culture in Yiddish-speaking Europe.

Though there had been some fledgling interest in klezmer music in the U.S. by the time of the Casa Galicia concert — a band called The Klezmorim started playing in Berkeley, California, about three years prior, and The Chutzpah Yiddish Orchestra was playing in Los Angeles in 1977, according to member Michael Alpert — Feldman writes the Tarras concert should be seen as the beginning of the klezmer revival.

“We need to remember that the klezmer profession had been hereditary,” Feldman explained in an email. “In the U.S. members of klezmer lineages settled in New York and in Philadelphia. Rarely anywhere else; certainly not in California. So the kind of personal learning through initiation that I describe both for myself and for Statman did not occur in the West. Hence the revitalization occurred first in New York and spread from there.”

In the ensuing years, klezmer bands started popping up all over the country, including the Klezmer Conservatory Band, the Mazeltones and Margot Leverett & the Klezmer Mountain Boys. Feldman writes that he and Statman were surprised by the “astonishing rapidity” of klezmer’s growth during this period. Feldman viewed the genre’s increased popularity as a positive development, though he disparages the vocalists who incorporated Yiddish theater songs and other sources into their repertoire.

“For Andy and I, that was already treyf,” he said. “It was not really klezmer music. It’s a subversion of what the meaning of a klezmer was.”

Statman, for his part, considers Feldman “a Renaissance man.” The celebrated clarinetist called Feldman “a very sensitive musician, with a great understanding of how music should be played, regardless of the style.”

Feldman’s formal academic career, which stretched more than 30 years, included stints at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and NYU Abu Dhabi, appears to have come to an end. These days, Feldman is an academic advisor to the Klezmer Institute, a non-profit that coordinates crowd-sourced efforts to share more than 800 klezmer tunes culled from musical manuscripts obtained from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. Feldman continues to teach Yiddish dance, which he’ll be doing at Yiddish Summer Weimar in Germany later this summer.

He and his wife, the ethnomusicologist Judit Frigyesi, divide their time between New York and Budapest.

The chapter on the klezmer revival in Feldman’s book concludes with an anecdote on one of the most memorable Jewish weddings he and Statman played. At a synagogue in the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan one of the guests approached Feldman and exclaimed, “I haven’t heard such freylekhs [lively dance tunes] since I came to this country!”

The man had been a partisan who fought the Nazis. After telling Feldman how they had killed the Germans, the man said the partisans would run back to the forest and dance freylekhs.

“Hearing this tale,” Feldman writes, “my own catharsis and liberation were complete!”

Dozens of Israelis have been arrested in recent months on suspicion of spying for Iran, prompting the Israeli government to launch a PR campaign designed to dissuade collusion.

Titled “Easy Money, Heavy Price,” the campaign will include ads on radio, websites and social media meant to convince Israelis that spying for the country’s sworn enemy is not worth the costs.

The campaign launches weeks after Israel waged an aggressive military campaign against Iran’s nuclear sites and was battered by hundreds of Iranian missiles before reaching a ceasefire agreement after 12 days.

It also follows a string of recent news reports of Israelis who have been arrested for conducting espionage activities on Iran’s behalf. The activities have included photographing military and sensitive sites, moving purported weapons within the country and laying the groundwork for assassination plots, according to the reports.

At least one man who was arrested had physically traveled to Iran to meet with his handlers, who wanted him to assassinate a former prime minister, Naftali Bennett, the Economist reported in February.

The plots have largely preyed on economically vulnerable Israelis with relatively weak social ties. In one high-profile case, police arrested two young men in Tiberias on June 15, according to the Times of Israel. The two were each promised $60,000 to assassinate a top Israeli scientist.

Some watchdogs say the country’s political divisions may also be undercutting pressure not to commit treason against Israel.

“No wonder that in such a chaotic reality, more and more Israelis have less and less inhibitions and are ready to break the taboo that you don’t betray your country,” a scholar of Israel studies told the Economist.

The PR campaign comes from Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate along with the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. It aims to “raise awareness of the phenomenon of Israeli citizens cooperating with Iran, carrying out security missions for Iran inside Israel, and thus colluding with the enemy during war,” according to a release from the Israeli government’s press office.

Shin Bet said the phenomenon appeared to be driven “most often out of greed for money.” The campaign will warn the public that severe security offenses carry a penalty of up to 15 years of imprisonment.

Over the past year, Shin Bet and the Israeli police have found more than 25 instances of Israelis being recruited by Iran to carry out various missions, and more than 35 Israelis have been indicted on severe charges, according to the press office. Officials have said elsewhere that they believe that potentially hundreds of Israelis have been working on behalf of Iran, in an effort that Iran accelerated within the past couple of years.