Rob Eshman

April 2, 2009

American Idols

By Rob Eshman

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Last Saturday night, I was at the Honda Center in Anaheim watching Billy Joel in concert. He was banging about the piano, singing his heart out, doing all those great songs about being young and horny and streetwise back in the old Italian neighborhood.

And then, seeing his face up close on the super-sized screen, it suddenly hit me: My God, Billy Joel is such an old Jew.

I’m witnessing this phenomenon everywhere I look in pop culture. At some point, they just can’t hide it any more, can they?

Billy Joel. Bob Dylan. Paul Simon. Gene Simmons. Paul Stanley. Carole King. Donald Fagen. Neil Sedaka. The men and women who made their fame and fortune as young American idols have all slid into AARP-land. I’m not the first to point out they just don’t leap onto the piano anymore without first taking a step up on the piano bench, and they don’t reach the high notes the way they used to — not for long anyway. But there’s something else that changes in them: Their true selves, their Jewish selves, inexorably emerge.

There is no amount of plastic surgery, hair transplants, misleading lyrics or name changes that can keep them from looking like that old relative you see every Passover, the one who always falls asleep sitting up on the couch while the grandkids are racing around looking for the afikomen.

“Did you know Billy Joel is Jewish?” I said to my friend Ed, who was with me at the concert.

He shook his head. “Italian.”

“Look at him,” I said.

He stared for a second, and I could see it hit him too.

Ed wrote the screenplay for “Men in Black,” and it occurred to me these Jews are just like the alien hiding among illegal immigrants in that movie’s opening sequence.

For a second the alien appears normal, but then Tommy Lee Jones makes his true Martian self appear.

I saw it at the Bob Dylan concert in Santa Barbara last summer. He was speeding through his oldies, looking like an unkempt version of your favorite uncle, and his high whine and moan sounded like one continuous “Oyyyyy.”

“Did you notice you say ‘Oy vey?’ a lot more?” someone asked radio icon Howard Stern on his Sirius satellite show last week.

At first Stern denied it. For years his shtick was to tell callers that he wasn’t really Jewish — “I’m only half Jewish,” he insisted over and over, though both of his parents sound like they were made from a Manischewitz mix.

Finally Howard admitted: the older he gets, the more the Yiddish in him comes out.

It happens to them all: the hype and ambition and klieg lights die away. The ancient shtetl genes beat back the miracles of science and the power of diet. Having banked their millions, these icons edge more toward what they really are — what their parents and their parents’ parents really were — and away from what they pretended to be. They find their Jewish voices.

The phenomenon has so many quirky manifestations: Neil Sedaka recorded an all-Yiddish album a couple of years ago. I run into Paul Stanley in shul — the man from KISS, who I last saw 30 years ago in white makeup and S&M garb. I do a double take, and we exchange a “Good Shabbos.”

I see Carole King at a Jewish fundraiser and sit beside her piano as she plays and sings. At his concert earlier this year, Billy Joel complains about schlepping through L.A. traffic — “schlep” is not an Italian verb — then does a two minute lead-in to “Piano Man” that is the kind of concerto his brother, the great classical pianist Alexander Joel, would have played, the kind his father, a refugee from Nazi Germany, would have grown up hearing.

One by one they find their Jewish voice.

One by one, we all do.

Judaism understands this process. It’s right there in the Passover seder, in the characters of the Four Sons. The Wise Son asks what every law of Passover means. The Simple Son asks, “What does any of this mean?” The Wicked Son asks, “What’s this all mean to you?” And there’s also the Son Who Doesn’t Even Know to Ask.

Those Four Sons are, of course, contained within each one of us, depending on the story we’re hearing, depending on the stage of our life. Those who strive for fame and acceptance may start by denying who they are. But once they have it all, the search for something deeper kicks in, and with it the questions: What does it mean? Why are you doing this? What do I even ask?

It’s not linear — Billy Joel will not end life as a Bobover Chasid — but I wish the self-appointed gatekeepers of Judaism, those who constantly drone on about how assimilation is poised to destroy Judaism as we know it — just as it has been poised to do for about 4,000 years or so — would stop and appreciate how powerful this faith, this culture is. Judaism is not something that just comes from outside, from pedantry and persuasion; it cries out from within, it wants to come out.

In his new book “How to Read the Bible,” scholar James L. Kugel points to how even the Bible itself, in the Exodus story, understands this. The Children of Israel escape from Pharaoh’s army, and make it safely to the other side of the Red Sea. There they stop with Moses, their leader, and all together they sing a new song, “Shirat HaYam,” “The Song of the Sea.”

But, Kugel points out, how do they know the words? Even if you assume Moses gets the lyrics and melody straight from God, how did all the Israelites get them too?

The Bible has no answer. But I think I have a clue: It’s a song we are born with, a voice within.

Happy Passover.

A version of this article appeared in print.

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