Leonard Cohen - IDF Entertainer

So in keeping with the theme of my last post, I thought I'd continue posting about American musicians who spent significant time in Israel. This week's entry: Leonard Cohen.

Not to shock any readers, but Leonard Cohen is Jewish (although now he's also a Buddhist as I understand it). Indeed, Cohen attended the Herzliyah High School in Montreal. I mention this as a prelude to Cohen's trip to Israel in October, 1973. Cohen, apparently coming off of a bad break-up, decided to clear his mind by coming to Israel as it was beginning what it thought was a battle for its life - the Yom Kippur War. Accounts differ, as Cohen himself writes that he arrived days before the war began on October 6 - Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, literally "the day of atonement" - while Israeli folkpop singer, Oshik Levi says that Cohen came on October 7, the second day of the war. In any case, Cohen intended to work on a kibbutz but was soon convinced by Levi that he could best contribute to the Israeli cause by performing for troops in the Sinai peninsula. Per Ira Nadel's bio of Cohen, these were his reasons:

When he arrived, [Cohen]told the press that he flew to Israel to entertain troops during the conflict and “to make my atonement." He added that in the past he sided with the Arabs in their demands that Israel return territory taken by it in the 1967 war, but now he supported the Jewish state.

Cohen accepted Levi's proposition and found himself sent to ad-hoc performances in the field of battle, not USO-type events far from the frontlines. From Levi's account of his time with Cohen:

During that period of time, that artists would just wander around and each was given a place to go to and you wouldn’t have a clue who is taking you where, only the officer that approaches you and says you have to come... .You would arrive to this hole in the darkness and you see 8 soldiers around a 175 mm cannon, and you are supposed to stand there and sing and entertain. In the middle of the song the officer would say: "hold on a second.” They would lift the cannon, charge it and shoot, and then you would go on with the performance , etc.… It was a terrible war and the sites were difficult to see.
Leonard Cohen proceeded with us for 3 months, day after day, 4-5 and sometimes 8 performances a day, and in every place we arrived at, he wanted to be drafted. At one time he wanted to be a paratrooper, at another time in the marines, and another time he wanted to be a pilot. We would sleep in sleeping bags on the floor because there was no room, and Leonard, who didn’t want to feel like a star, refused when I tried to arrange a place for him at the culture room.

Cohen's own account of his time as an IDF entertainer is a bit more cynical, and includes haunting stories such as this:

They [Cohen and the other Israeli musicians] were flown by helicopter across the Suez to a former Egyptian air base, where they performed in a concrete hangar. Cohen was startled to find there a leftover Egyptian calendar and a can of mashed potatoes that had a label which read, “A Gift from the People of Canada”. A helicopter arrived with wounded men, and Cohen began to weep as he stared at the bandaged soldiers. When someone told him that the troops were Egyptian, his relief disturbed him. But when an Israeli soldier gave him some Egyptian money found on a dead soldier, he could not take it and buried it in the sand.

During the course of his time as an IDF entertainer, Cohen wrote "Lover, Lover, Lover" which I'll leave you to interpret with the context in which it was written.



Suffice it to say that Israelis have a soft spot in their heart for Leonard Cohen. Cohen came back to perform in the country a number of times, including Tel Aviv as the last stop on his 2009 tour, a concert that had to be held in a stadium because of overflow problems. My own father, a Yom Kippur War veteran, loves Leonard Cohen, even if he was not in one of the lucky units that got to see Cohen perform for them in the middle of a cold, dark desert night. Indeed, it is the rare Israeli who doesn't know some snippet of "Hallelujah" or even "First We Take Manhattan" even if they can't speak English that well.

I leave you with a clip of Cohen performing for Israelis in 1973 in what I presume is not a military base, but rather some kind of civilian gig. Perhaps this was filmed after the major operations of the war ended in the end of October. Enjoy!



(In case people are wondering what the Israeli audience is chanting before Cohen starts singing, it's "Heveynu Shalom Aleichem," a traditional hymn that means "We bring peace to all of you.")