Liel Leibovitz on the Jewish Poetry of Leonard Cohen

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2017

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

How do poetry and song convey Jewish meaning? Does Jewish poetry have to be liturgical? At the turn of the century, Ahad Ha’am challenged the early Zionist movement to conceive of the Jewish nation as a home for the Jewish national spirit. Even in the diaspora, the Jewish imagination needs tending. Who were the most prominent Jewish poets of the North American diaspora in the latter half of the twentieth century?

The late singer Leonard Cohen might not come first to mind, but in this podcast, Tablet Magazine’s Liel Leibovitz explores the reasons he should. Perhaps no artist better answered the call of Jewish cultural renewal than Leonard Cohen. Born in Montreal to an Orthodox family, Cohen became one of the most important North American musicians of the 20th century. Throughout his long career, he consistently drew on Jewish themes in his music, seamlessly interweaving biblical stories and kabbalistic ideas into songs that spoke of love, loss, and longing.

Drawing on his biography of Cohen, A Broken Hallelujah, Leibovitz and Tikvah Senior Director Jonathan Silver read and discuss some of Cohen’s best songs, including “Story of Isaac,” “You Want It Darker,” and of course, “Hallelujah.” As they do so, it becomes clear that Cohen was, at heart, a poet who took Judaism seriously.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tikva podcast and great Jewish essays and ideas.
0:11.3	I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.
0:13.4	If you like listening to our podcast, I encourage you to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher and leave us a rating or a review.
0:20.0	If you want to learn more about our work at
0:21.3	Tikva, please visit our website at TikvaFund.org. At the dawn of the 20th century, Asher
0:26.8	Ginsburg, writing under the Nome de Plume Ahad Ha'am, challenged the stirring Zionist movement
0:32.4	to conceive of the Jewish nation as a home for the Jewish national spirit. The experience of European
0:38.7	emancipation had taught him that in order to exercise formal political rights, Jews would have to
0:44.7	try and assimilate, would have to suppress the distinctive genius, the spirit that had nourished
0:50.1	their longings, their imagination, that the Jews would have to quiet their own traditions,
0:55.0	intellectual and moral, that made them who they were.
0:57.0	Inner freedom was the cost of outer freedom.
1:00.0	European emancipation brought a new kind of servitude.
1:03.0	Does that insight speak to us more than a century later, living in a very different kind of regime?
1:08.0	In America, the Jews did not have the troubles of integrating into
1:11.0	someone else's nation state because here we found a state without a nation. Present at the
1:16.2	creation Jews have had a remarkably free home here. But here, in this freedom, in the midst of
1:21.0	this freedom, what is the state of our imagination? What are the costs of American freedom and its
1:25.5	own assimilationist tendencies? Who's paying attention to,
1:29.8	and nourishing the Jewish imagination? Who's cultivating the Jewish culture? Liel Leibovitz is.
1:35.8	Senior writer at Tablet Magazine, co-host of the Unorthodox Podcast, an author of A Broken Hallelujah,
1:42.0	Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the life of Leonard Cohen.
	...

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