The Rock Star’s Jewish Star

HBO premiered its two-part documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” a feel-good, fan-favorite time capsule for anyone who came of musical age during the prime of Joel’s recording career, which spanned from 1973’s “Piano Man” to 1993’s “River of Dreams”—consisting of eleven LP vinyl albums. (Two other records bookended his body of work.)

The film is a valentine to Billy Joel’s New York City, the balladeer for whom the “lights go out on Broadway” without ever dimming the steadfastness of that “New York State of Mind.” Even after he stopped releasing records, Joel’s longtime association with New York’s venues endured—Carnegie Hall, Yankee and Shea stadiums, and a longtime residency at Madison Square Garden.

His most prodigious and acclaimed (five Grammy Awards) output occurred between 1977-83, a critical time in American culture, which his music reflected, and this documentary faithfully recalls. While best known for his romantic ballad “Just the Way You Are,” so many of his songs were in tune with an American melancholy of shuttered factories, broken barflies, forsaken steelworkers and fishermen, unfulfilled dreams, unrelieved pressures and a general post-Vietnam malaise.

So many of Joel’s songs were in tune with an American melancholy of shuttered factories, broken barflies, forsaken steelworkers and fishermen, unfulfilled dreams, unrelieved pressures and a general post-Vietnam malaise.

But we now have a better appreciation for why Joel understood human longing and disappointment better than most. The film contains a surprise revelation that undoubtedly stunned even his most ardent fans: Billy Joel was born Jewish in the Bronx, and his father was a Holocaust survivor!

Nothing about what we thought we knew led to such a conclusion. His ancestry and family’s connection to the Holocaust went unmentioned in Rolling Stone interviews. His nose appeared permanently broken from boxing Long Island toughs who teased him for carrying around classical sheet music. Fisticuffs and unaltered noses were atypical of Jewish boys in the 1960s.

He sang about Catholic girls wearing “crosses of gold” and waiting too long to lose their virginity. There was a mention of a Mama Leone and a job with Mr. Cacciatore in Little Italy. He barely survived multiple motorcycle and car accidents on Long Island when Jewish guys his age were setting up their dental practices in Great Neck.

This was the world of an Italian scrapper or greaser, not a Jewish piano prodigy.

But the documentary unearthed that his father was a classical pianist from Nuremberg, Germany who, after watching far too many Nazi rallies right outside his bedroom window, eventually fled to the United States. Most of his family was not as fortunate, however. Nearly all were killed in death camps. While Joel was a small boy, his father divorced his mother and returned to Europe, essentially abandoning his son and cutting off contact.

It wasn’t until Joel was an established artist that he tracked down his father, who was living in Vienna. He was surprised to learn that he now had a much younger half-brother. That sibling would eventually become a renowned conductor of classical music orchestras throughout Europe. Suddenly, Joel’s song “Vienna Waits for You” has new meaning.

Sydney Sweeney is not alone with great jeans.

Although it’s only a short segment of the entire documentary, Billy Joel’s Jewish backstory—all those murdered relatives he didn’t know about until he was already a grown man; the damaged Holocaust survivor for a father, an artist who felt lost in America and cruelly retreated to the cradle of Western culture to start his life anew—shaped Billy Joel’s ambivalent relationship with his father and complicated attachment to the Jewish people.

Billy Joel’s Jewish backstory—all those murdered relatives he didn’t know about until he was already a grown man; the damaged Holocaust survivor for a father, an artist who felt lost in America and cruelly retreated to the cradle of Western culture to start his life anew—shaped Billy Joel’s ambivalent relationship with his father and complicated attachment to the Jewish people.

No wonder he kept it all to himself. In 2017, soon after the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where an assortment of right-wing extremists, including neo-Nazis, marched and chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”, Billy Joel took the stage at Madison Square Garden wearing a yellow Star of David patch on his left sleeve and another one attached to the back of his jacket. He didn’t explain his deliberate wardrobe improvisation.

It was a silent preview of what we would all come to learn nearly a decade later.

I fortuitously had an earlier preview, however. Advance knowledge of something I shared with the Piano Man other than a love of pianos. In 1999, I was in Orlando, Florida during Yom HaShoah speaking at its Holocaust Museum. Afterward, at dinner with museum patrons, I was told that Billy Joel had just performed at a benefit for the museum.

I was surprised by the news. Why travel and perform in steamy Florida in May, without renumeration, for a cause that had nothing to do with him? Apparently, Billy Joel had a close friend who worked for Disney in Orlando and had a seat on the museum’s board. Oh, and one more thing: Joel’s father was a Holocaust survivor. The audience in Orlando was told nothing about it. I was instructed to keep my mouth shut.

I did. Now I realize that, at the time, Billy Joel was slowly beginning to come to terms with these family truths. And he was developing some kind of fragmented relationship with father and brother.

Joel is not alone in lifting the nylon curtain and lighting some of the darkness that contributed to his many years of silence. Another wordsmith and giant of Western culture, British playwright Tom Stoppard, received a Tony Award for Best Play in 2023 for “Leopoldstadt,” a fictional retelling of what happened to his family during the Holocaust. He, himself, was a survivor, but left no hint of that history in any of his earlier plays and screenplays—or in interviews and public statements.

“Leopoldstadt” got its name from a street in Vienna, the very same city of high culture responsible for taking hold of Billy Joel’s imagination. (Stoppard’s family was actually from Prague.)

Nowadays the Holocaust has been whitewashed and converted into identity politics talking points. On one level it is being denied as never having happened. At other times it is trivialized as “white privilege” rubbish. Woke teachers treat the Holocaust as an intersectional crime against all minorities—Jews need not apply. Worse still, the Holocaust is being turned against world Jewry itself, with Israel accused of conducting its own Holocaust in Gaza.

As cultural icons of the first order, these recent revelations from Stoppard and Joel are both wrenching and beguiling. And they could not have come at a more propitious moment.