The Secret Jewish History of Tupac Shakur

Was Bad Boy Rapper Just a Nice Jewish Son?

Challah Out: The late Tupac Shakur was gunned down in 1996.

By Seth Rogovoy

Tupac Shakur, the notorious rapper whose career was cut short when he died in a hail of bullets at the age of 25 in 1996, may seem an unlikely candidate for memorialization in the form of a Broadway musical. Yet sure enough, “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” an $8 million production “inspired by” the work of the gangsta rapper which includes 21 of his songs, is currently playing the Palace Theatre in New York.

This is not some off-the-wall, crass attempt to cash in on the controversial legend of Shakur. Among the musical’s producers is Afeni Shakur, Tupac Shakur’s mother, a former member of the Black Panthers. Afeni Shakur is nothing if not protective of her son’s creative legacy; his brief but astounding career on the rap charts made him one of the best-selling recording artists of his time. In other words, she’s not doing it for the money.

There’s something else going on here, and it just may be that finally the stars have aligned to present Tupac Shakur — the man whose music former Vice President Dan Quayle said “has no place in our society”; a convicted felon who in a few years was in and out of prison and court for a variety of violent crimes; a man accused of being the perpetrator of several shootings who was himself gunned down in an infamous drive-by that has never been solved — as what he may really have been: a nice Jewish boy who loved his mother.

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in East Harlem on June 16, 1971, to parents who preached a violent form of black nationalism. Despite chronic poverty, Shakur’s mother made sure he always had access to a well-rounded education, especially in the performing arts.

From a young age, Shakur was drawn to the stage: He performed in a production of “A Raisin in the Sun” by Harlem’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble at the Apollo Theater at age 12. At age 15, his family moved to Baltimore, where he attended the Baltimore School for the Arts, studying acting, poetry, jazz and violin, performing in productions of Shakespeare, and playing the role of the Mouse King in the ballet “The Nutcracker.”

In other words, Quayle’s public enemy number one — the gangster-in-chief who threatened the very foundations of American civilization — got his show business start as a violin-toting, Shakespeare-quoting ballerina.

At age 17, Shakur and his family moved to the Bay Area. Here, Shakur, already an aspiring rapper, met the woman who would prove integral to his career and artistic development. Leila Steinberg was the daughter of a Mexican-Turkish activist mother and a Polish-Jewish criminal defense attorney who ran a spoken-word poetry workshop called the Microphone Sessions in Oakland, California. Steinberg was raised, as she put it, “surrounded by the workings of the justice system and took a front row seat at the personal tragedies and socio-economic pressures that turn so many at-risk youths into hardened felons.” In Shakur, she clearly saw the very embodiment of her life’s work: a real-world blend of urban street life, political activism, cultural literacy, and natural talent, with the charisma of a born star. The two hit it off, and Shakur moved in with Steinberg’s husband and two children, with Steinberg serving as a mentor and manager until the point where his career required more professional oversight. The two remained close friends until the end of Shakur’s short life.

Shakur released his debut album, “2Pacalypse Now,” in late 1991. It remained his most political and socially conscious album — the work of a nascent, would-be prophet — with songs mostly about and addressed to black America, unflinching portrayals of racism, police brutality, poverty and teen pregnancy (as in the infamous “Brenda’s Got a Baby”), but songs that didn’t let his listeners off the hook for their complicity in the dire situations he depicts. The album undoubtedly received its biggest boost when rock-critic-in-chief Quayle condemned it saying, “There’s no reason for a record like this to be released.”

Shakur only recorded four more albums over the next five years, but they were all multi-million sellers that made him the biggest name in hip-hop. He wore the cloak of a gangster or thug, but was really more a pavement prophet, rapping about the prison of ghetto life in “Trapped” and likening that life to one of slow genocide in “Words of Wisdom,” in which he calls on his people to “break the chains” that enslave them. One of his most brutal portrayals of poverty and the cycle of violence it breeds, “Troublesome 96,” even samples the melody of “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, perhaps a subtle call for a kind of urban Zionism to solve the social and political ills of black life in America.

But perhaps the most endearing and enduring moments of Shakur’s career occurred in 1994 when he recorded “Dear Mama,” a soft, sweet soul ballad, over which he intoned a tribute to his mother, Afeni Shakur. The narrator is reflective, looking back on a hardscrabble youth from a position of newfound comfort, and paying tribute to the maternal devotion that got him through the most difficult of times:

“Pour out some liquor and I reminisce, cause through the drama/ I can always depend on my mama… When I was sick as a little kid/ To keep me happy there’s no limit to the things you did/ And all my childhood memories/ Are full of all the sweet things you did for me… You are appreciated/ Dontcha know we love ya?”

The emotion and imagery Shakur uses in “Dear Mama” are resonant of a well-known early 20th-century song in which someone who grew up in poverty and scratched out a life of success looks back over a lifetime and pays tribute to the woman who made it all possible. I speak, of course, of “My Yiddishe Momme”:

“Of things I should be thankful for, I’ve had a goodly share/ And as I sit here in the comfort of a cozy chair/ My fancy takes me to a humble East Side tenement/ Three flights up in the rear,/ To where my childhood days were spent… / It wasn’t much like paradise but amid the dirt and all/ There sat the sweetest angel/ One that I fondly call/ A Yiddishe Momme.”

Widely considered Shakur’s greatest single hit (the song sold seven million copies at the time of release) and one of the greatest hip-hop songs ever, “Dear Mama” was one of 25 songs that in 2010 were added to the National Recording Registry — a list of sound recordings that “are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States.” That same year saw the very first Yiddish recording ever inducted into the registry, “Fon der Choope (From the Wedding)” by Abe Elenkrig’s Yidishe Orchestra. Somewhere, Shakur was smiling.

Seth Rogovoy has explored the hidden Jewish stories of the Rolling Stones, the Super Bowl halftime show, Cher, Paul McCartney and David Bowie in the pages of the Forward.

<The Forward>

On Her Majesty’s Semitic Service

The Untold Jewish History of the James Bond Flicks

By Seth Rogovoy

It’s hard to imagine anyone less Jewish — or more goyish — than James Bond: He of the shaken-not-stirred-martinis; he who serially beds the blond, buxom “Bond girls”; he who drives the latest, fastest, gadget-equipped sports car. He may be the hero, but he’s no mensch. The United Kingdom newspaper the Daily Mirror recently called the fictional secret agent (and sometimes it’s easy to forget that Bond is an invented character, not a real person) “a British icon as enduring as the Royal Family and the Rolling Stones.”

GETTY IMAGES

Quantum of Prejudice: Ian Fleming might be surprised by the Jews who have made James Bond an icon.

In fact, Bond was the literary creation of novelist Ian Fleming, a notorious right-winger who, like many Englishmen of his generation, wore his anti-Semitism on his sleeve. Fleming’s books, unlike the much more popular films they spawned, occasionally trade in vulgar and hateful Jewish stereotypes, and whenever a character does seem Jewish, he is always a villain.

Yet from its beginning a half-century ago, from the 1962 “Dr. No” up through the most recent entry in the series, “Skyfall” — the 23rd Bond film, which opens in the United States on November 9 — Jews have played an essentially creative role in the James Bond film series. “Skyfall” features a Jewish director (Sam Mendes), and an actor, Daniel Craig, who, while not Jewish himself, is well known for his portrayal of heroic Jews (including roles in “Defiance” and “Munich”) and who is married to the prominent British Jewish actress Rachel Weisz. (Besides which, my mother always said it was a dead giveaway that a celebrity is Jewish when he sports two first names, like Laurence Harvey or Jack Benny.) 

Even on a grander scale, a Jewish-inspired theme plays out in this gem business of a movie series, whose titles include “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever.” Fleming based the title character of “Goldfinger,” who is Bond’s nemesis, on Ernö Goldfinger, the real-life Hungarian-born Modernist architect and leftist who was a neighbor of Fleming’s in Hampstead. Fleming invested his Goldfinger, renamed Auric (meaning “gold” in Latin), with an obsession with power. The movie “Goldfinger” elides the character’s Jewish origins, which in Fleming’s original are the subject of some consideration. Ironically, German actor Gert Fröbe, who portrayed Goldfinger in the film, had been a member of the Nazi Party during World War II.

Hollywood being Hollywood, a place more friendly and conducive to Jewish participation than Fleming’s universe — fictional or otherwise — there have been plenty of Jewish contributions, or contributions by people who happen to be Jewish, to the James Bond corpus:

Ken Adam, aka Sir Kenneth Adam, OBE, was the production designer on all the classic 1960s and ’70s Bond films, from “Dr. No” in 1962 to “Moonraker” in 1979. Adam was born in Berlin in 1921; his father and uncles were successful high-fashion clothiers, prominent in the city since the late 19th century. Adam and his family left for England in 1934, after Nazi harassment forced them out of business. Adam was one of only two German nationals who flew planes for the wartime Royal Air Force; had the Germans captured him, he could have been executed as a traitor rather than kept as a prisoner of war.

Irvin Kershner, whose directorial credits include “The Empire Strikes Back” and the TV movie “Raid on Entebbe” (for which he received an Emmy nomination), and who played the role of Zebedee, the father of the apostles James and John, in Martin Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ,” helmed the 1983 Bond film, “Never Say Never Again,” which marked Sean Connery’s return to the title role and made Kershner the only person to direct both a “Star Wars” film and a James Bond film, two of Hollywood’s most successful franchises. (The Bond films are second only to the Harry Potter films in total revenue.)

Harry Saltzman, born Herschel Saltzman in Quebec, was the proverbial rebel who at age 15 ran away from home and joined the circus. During World War II he served with the Canadian army in France, where he met his future wife, Jacqui, a Romanian immigrant, and began his career as a talent scout. He wound up working as a producer for theater and then film in England in the mid-1950s, and afterreading Fleming’s “Goldfinger” in 1961, he optioned the film rights to the Bond stories.

Saltzman’s friend, screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz, introduced him to the American-born Albert R. Broccoli, who also wanted to make James Bond films. Together, Saltzman and Broccoli formed Eon Productions, the company that to this day — still owned by Broccoli’s heirs (Broccoli bought out Saltzman in 1975) — produces the official Bond movies. Mankowitz, a native of London’s East End, which was the heart of the Jewish community at the time, was an incredibly prolific and successful writer whose outlets included musical theater, novels and screenplays, one of which is the first draft of the first Bond film for Eon, “Dr. No.” Mankowitz allegedly asked that his name be removed from the credits, fearing that the film would be a flop and damage his reputation. Ironically, the release of security files in 2010 showed that Mankowitz was suspected by the MI5, the British security service, of being a Soviet spy.

The 1967 film version of “Casino Royale,” based on Fleming’s very first Bond novel, is one of the only ones not produced by Eon, although Mankowitz had a hand in writing the screenplay, as did fellow Jewish writers Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller and Billy Wilder (along with Terry Southern, John Huston and Val Guest). The spoof featured actors Woody Allen and Peter Sellers.

New York-born screenwriter Richard Maibaum, who already worked for Broccoli before the latter began producing the Bond series, wrote most of the classic Bond films. Maibaum began his writing career in New York as a playwright, and his work included the anti-lynching play “The Tree,” and “Birthright” — an anti-Nazi drama. Maibaum contributed to all but three of the Bond films, beginning with “Dr. No” and running through “License To Kill,” in 1989. More than anyone, perhaps even Fleming, Maibaum can be said to have created and sustained the mythical icon of Bond. Mensch or not, Bond has proved to be an enduring figure over the past 50 years, one whose image has been shaped, prodded and refined — in significant measure by Jews — far beyond anything Fleming might have imagined or, indeed, may have wanted.

Seth Rogovoy, an award-winning cultural critic, is the author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet” (Scribner, 2009).

Bob Dylan's 10 Most Jewish Songs

'Blowin' in the Wind' Made List, But Just Barely

By Seth Rogovoy

While Bob Dylan has, throughout his life and career, engaged in all sorts of mythologizing and playful biographical falsification, it has never been in the service of denying his heritage.

This son of a middle-class appliance salesman from the Upper Midwest, who grew up with a Yiddish-speaking grandmother down the hallway in an extended Jewish family that was at the nexus of Jewish life in Hibbing, Minn. — mom was president of the local Hadassah, and dad was president of B’nai B’rith — wound up making several trips to Israel in the late-1960s and ’70s (during one visit, he even began the application process for moving his family to a kibbutz). He sent his children to the same Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin that he attended for four or five summers as a teenager.

CHRIS WOOD/EXPRESS/GETTY IMAGES

It Takes a Lot To Laugh: Jewish ideas inform Dylan’s work.

By the time he arrived in New York City’s Greenwich Village 51 years ago, he intended to make a name for himself on the folk scene — and that name was Dylan, not Zimmerman (the name is German and not Jewish, anyway, although his forebears were from Russia), and Bob fashioned himself a latter-day Woody Guthrie (as it turns out, Guthrie himself had a whole secret Jewish side to his work, born of his close relationship with his mother-in-law, Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt).

So while Dylan didn’t exactly grow up to be Shlomo Carlebach, the happy, guitar-strumming Hasid, he never strayed too far from his roots, nor did he deny them. One of his earliest original numbers, in fact, was a parody of “Hava Nagilah,” then and now (thank you, Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman) probably the best-known Jewish song in the world. Throughout his career, his songs have been peppered with biblical allusions and paraphrases and informed by Jewish themes and concepts. How much of this is the result of a conscious effort on Dylan’s part to address these issues, and how much is simply the result of magpie tendencies that see him draw variously from Shakespeare, French symbolism, movie dialogue, blues clichés and even obscure Japanese yakuza novels? Well, only Dylan can answer that — and even then, probably not.

Still, based on the evidence of the songs themselves, Dylan was actually paying attention in the Hebrew classes leading up to his bar mitzvah, and also in his adult life, which has at times reportedly included private studies with various rabbis, often from the Chabad movement. A cursory review of songs from the past 50 years turns up many tunes that are inflected with varying degrees of Yiddishkeit.

1. “Talkin’ Hava Nagilah Blues” Fresh off the boat (okay, the car) from Minnesota, the 20-year-old Dylan made this novelty in which he struggles to pronounce the words before letting loose with a yodel, a staple of his Greenwich Village folk-club gigs.
2. “With God on Our Side” Years before “Schindler’s List,” Dylan takes to task “the Germans” for having “murdered 6 million… in the ovens they fried” in this 1963 protest song.
3. “New Morning” Nu, morning?
4. “All Along the Watchtower” The 1967 song, which continues to be a cornerstone of Dylan’s live performances to this day, may be best known in its Jimi Hendrix version, but its narrative and imagery are basically a rearrangement of material cribbed from Isaiah 21.
5. “Forever Young” Dylan poetically rewrites a father’s blessing over his children at the Sabbath table, invoking the story of Jacob (“May you build a ladder to the stars /And climb on every rung”) to connect it to his own youngest son, who would grow up to be a rock star, outselling even his father.
6. “Highway 61 Revisited” A midrashic retelling of the sacrifice of Isaac (“Oh, God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!’ / Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on”) by the son of Abe Zimmerman, who was born just a few miles from U.S. Highway 61.
7. “Gotta Serve Somebody” The Grammy Award-winning centerpiece of, and hit single from, his first so-called born again album could easily be seen as a tribute to Jewish mothers everywhere. (It also alludes to Joshua 24:14-15.)
8. “Neighborhood Bully” Dylan warms the cockles of the most rabid, right-wing Zionist, positing Jewish history and the State of Israel like some rock ’n’ roll Vladimir Jabotinsky.
9. “Everything Is Broken” Swamp-rock meets Lurianic Kabbalah.
10. “Blowin’ in the Wind” Perhaps his best-known anthem, the song that made him a household name, it is a litany of unanswered, unanswerable questions. What could be more Jewish?

Seth Rogovoy is the author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet” (Scribner, 2009).