Hava Nagila!!

This week, we have been focusing on the origins and evolution of what is arguably the most "Jewish" of all songs: Hava Nagila. The students have been watching "Hava Nagila (The Movie)" and creating timelines reflecting the song's ever changing life. It's pretty fascinating! Parents, ask your children what they know about Hava - they are becoming quite the experts!

Here are a few notable versions of the song:

Here is a wonderful version by Harry Belafonte (not Jewish) who made the song popular in 1959, and Danny Kaye (Jewish) on the Danny Kaye Show.

Connie Francis, an Italian American singer,  grew up in an Italian/Jewish neighborhood.  In 1960, she recorded an album of Jewish favorites, with Hava Nagila the first song on the album.  She would combine the songs Exodus (from the movie) and Hava Nagila in her live performances.  She would dedicate the song to "The great state and people of Israel, who are truly and inspiration to the whole free world."

Certainly the shortest, and one of the most controversial versions, Bob Dylan "butchered" Hava Nagila back in the early 60's. But I would argue that rather than a "terrible" version, it's a pretty great version.

Bob Dylan certainly knew the lyrics to Hava Nagila - he grew up in a Jewish home, where he would have danced the hora to Hava Nagila as a child and teenager in the 1940's and 50's. This "terrible" rendition of Hava Nagila is actually a very deliberate protest song. The Jewish community, like the rest of America, was undergoing an identity crisis in the 1960's, and Dylan was expressing the very Jewish ideal of questioning and "wrestling with" one's roots and identity. By this time, Hava Nagila had become an American "pop" song, performed by scores of musicians, and recorded by everyone from Connie Francis (Italian American) to Harry Belafonte (African America). It was no longer a "Jewish" song. Dylan seized the opportunity to both accept and reject what Hava Nagila was (originally a Hasidic niggun, then a Zionist anthem), and what it had become (an American "pop" song). Brilliant.