On May 21, Israeli Jews celebrated 50 years of Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem with a light show on the Old City walls, and the highlight was a rendition of the late Leonard Cohen’s most popular song, Hallelujah. You can see most of it on my shaky video here:
The Jerusalem celebration was feverishly religious-nationalist, and treated the 1967 war as a great triumph, with a lot of Jewish imagery. Hebrew standards were also played: Jerusalem of Gold and Hatikvah.
I love Leonard Cohen’s music, but I found the use of Cohen’s song as an anthem to exclusivism disturbing. Of course an artist doesn’t control the uses of his work, especially a dead artist, but songs acquire political resonance for a reason; and Cohen would surely have approved.
When Cohen died last year, at 82, he was saluted by Israel’s prime minister and president for sticking by Israel with his famous serenade to Ariel Sharon and other soldiers during the 1973 war.
Cohen knew “to accompany the state of Israel in the battlefields and in times of growth,” Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said. Cohen at times offered his work as a salute to Jewish Israel, and he was “revered” in the country. It shows. I’m going to have a harder time listening to Bird on a Wire now.
I am so very disappointed to learn of his involvement. I will no longer enjoy his song, Dance me to the end of love, which is one of my favorites.
Hard to believe how shallow he was, not have known of the suffering of the Palestinians.
I also love Leonard Cohen’s music. We have to separate the artist from what s/he produces. There are many great works, poetry/music/art yet the artists/poets/musicians were often reactionary, even racist and fascist.
T S Elliot’s the Wastelands is a case in point. Dylan went to the right. Salvador Dalli, Jack London.
A piece of art/music etc. once it has been completed is fixed. It is the product of unknown impulses, often to the artist. We should not subscribe to the stalinist concept of art!
I’ve set myself a task: to write new words to Yerushalayim Shel Zahav. I can’t sing it , but the tune is too good to lose (and Naomi Shemer didn’t exactly write it, she adapted it from a Basque folk tune).
Why so surprised? We already knew at the time that the guy was a committed Zionist. His 1973 military stint was well publicized. Even though I never had any use for his kind of music, by the mid-seventies his militant Zionism was well-known well outside the circle of people who listen to this type of songs.
I guess if you insist that an artist must be a moral paragon, you wouldn’t read, look at or listen to very many people at all.
Just among the classical composers: Gesualdo – murderer; Wagner – anti-Semite; Janacek – wife-beater; Johann Strauss the elder – just plain nasty.
That said, I went off Cohen quite a lot after reading a biography of him a couple of years ago. Now, I know the biographer may have been biased, and even unfair (think of the hatchet jobs Albert Goldman did on John Lennon and Elvis Presley), but the way he treated Marianne Ihlen seems to have been appalling.