Bob Dylan, His Jewish Roots And The Reinvention Of An American Icon
(ANALYSIS) The year was 1965, and on July 25th of that year, folk icon Bob Dylan stepped onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, plugged in a Fender Stratocaster and famously changed the course of folk and rock history. In stark contrast to his acoustic, troubadour-style anthems like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” his aggressively electrified performance of “Maggie’s Farm” shocked and alienated many of his folk purist fans.
But in reinventing himself, did Robert Allen Zimmerman — Dylan’s birth name — grandson of Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, also betray his Jewish heritage? What exactly was that heritage, and how did it shape his music, his worldview, his rise to fame and his identity? British author Harry Freedman, a chronicler of Jewish culture and history, explores these questions in his probing and informative book, “Bob Dylan: Jewish Roots, American Soil.”
Born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, Dylan was the son of Abe Zimmerman, an appliance and furniture salesman, and Beatrice “Beatty” Zimmerman (née Stone), a department store clerk. When Dylan was six, the family moved to the nearby mining town of Hibbing, where the Zimmermans were part of a small Jewish community of just 280 people. Despite their small numbers, the family was well connected through Jewish organizations like B’nai B’rith and Hadassah — so much so that 400 guests attended 13-year-old Robert’s bar mitzvah.
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With aspirations “forged in the immigrant experience,” Dylan’s parents — the children of immigrants themselves — hoped their son would pursue a stable, reliable career. They encouraged him to join the family appliance business or, in stereotypical fashion, to become a doctor or lawyer. Otherwise, his mother warned, he’d “be dead before he started earning any money as a poet or a musician.”
Dylan, weaned on the sounds of Hank Williams, Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, was already captivated by popular music. He enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he lived in a Jewish fraternity, but dropped out after a few months in search of purpose and a sound. He found both among the folk musicians of the 1940s and ’50s. Along the way, he changed his name — one he reportedly disliked — to “Bob Dylan,” which he thought sounded “original, idiosyncratic, and intelligent.”
Yet changing his name didn’t mean Dylan abandoned his Jewish roots. On the contrary, through his immersion in folk music, he tapped into them. The folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s was progressive, left-leaning and anti-establishment. Unsurprisingly, a “disproportionate number” of its musicians were Jewish — drawn to the movement’s traditional values, creative spirit, political ideals and outsider status.
While the movement’s leading lights, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, were not Jewish, both embraced Judaism’s ethos of social justice. As a result, they collaborated with many influential Jewish figures in the folk world. Guthrie recorded extensively with Moses Asch of Folkways Records, while Seeger — who co-founded The Weavers — shared a deep “affinity with Jewish and Hebrew music” through his father, Charles. The elder Seeger, in turn, was influenced by composer Aaron Copland, “a direct heir to the Jewish radical tradition” and a founding member of the Communist-aligned Composer’s Collective in 1932.
Despite commercial hits like Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and The Weavers’ “If I Had a Hammer” (popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary), folk music remained mostly underground. That’s where Dylan discovered it when he arrived in New York City in January 1961 — baby-faced at just 19. Intent on shedding his “not particularly cool Jewish and middle-class origins,” he sought out Guthrie, then dying from Huntington’s disease in a Queens hospital.
To honor that first meeting, Dylan wrote his first original composition, “Song to Woody,” and began adopting his idol’s persona — sometimes with embellished details. He later claimed to have arrived in New York by freight train; in reality, he drove from Minnesota with friends in a 1957 Chevrolet Impala.
Even as he reshaped his personal mythology, Dylan never turned away from the pressing realities of his time — Vietnam and civil rights — which he addressed with force in songs like “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” In doing so, he aligned himself with Jewish activists fighting for social justice, including the many rabbis who spoke out against segregation and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. “Culturally and ethnically,” Freedman writes, “Dylan’s heritage was far closer to these religious activists than to Woody Guthrie.”
Though Dylan seemed to pay “little attention to his Jewishness,” as Freedman notes, his lyrics are filled with biblical references. Delilah, Jezebel and John the Baptist appear in “Tombstone Blues,” while Noah, Cain and Abel, and the Good Samaritan populate “Desolation Row.” Then there’s the famously frenetic opening of “Highway 61 Revisited”: “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’”
One of Dylan’s most poignant scriptural allusions comes in “With God on Our Side” — a searing critique of religion and nationalism as justifications for war. He pointedly asks whether Judas Iscariot, in betraying Jesus, “had God on his side.” Freedman is sympathetic to Dylan when the name “Judas” — a classic antisemitic slur—was hurled at him during a 1966 London concert. Ironically, the fan was reportedly more upset about the poor sound quality than Dylan’s electrification. Still, the moment shook Dylan enough that he famously snarled back, “You’re a liar.”
The struggle for identity and the need to reinvent oneself are central to the Jewish immigrant story in America, Freedman reminds us. Though Dylan was not an immigrant, like so many Jews before him, he arrived in New York “an unknown and with nothing” — and proceeded to remake himself, again and again, much like a rolling stone.
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist, specializing in religion, culture and history.