Interviewed Jan. 30 on the KCRW-FM show “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” Russian-Jewish indie songstress Regina Spektor described President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for a ban on refugees entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries as “pure insanity.”
“I came here with refugee status. My heart really goes out to all the people that are, this Muslim ban, I think it is just, it feels like pure insanity to me, and I came here as a Russian-Jewish refugee from a country that doesn’t even exist anymore — the Soviet Union,” she said in an interview with “Morning Becomes Eclectic” host Jason Bentley. “But my parents were, at least at that moment in time, we weren’t fleeing because our physical lives were in danger; we were fleeing because there was anti-Semitism and no freedom of religion.”
She continued: “Seeing how much my parents had to give up, how hard it was for them to come to a place without any money and without knowing the language, all the things they had to do to get here, I can’t imagine now, especially as a mother, what it feels like to be a parent of a child and be fleeing for physical safety, for food, for shelter,” she said. “It hurts that things are being done on our behalf as a people that don’t seem to reflect our progressive nature.”
During the interview, she attributed her pessimism about the future of American life under President Trump to, in part, her Russian-Jewish roots.
“I think there is a part of me that’s very much hopeful and then there’s a part of me that’s maybe the Soviet-slash-endless-row-of-generations-of-Jews-who-barely-survived-and-that’s-why-I’m-here kind of part, and it’s very sort of, I don’t know, kind of, suspicious and confused and deflated,” she said.
The conversation began with Bentley asking Spektor about what it was like for Spektor to perform at the Jan. 21 Women’s March in Los Angeles. Spektor performed a cover of Jewish icon Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in front of a sea of people on a closed-down street in downtown Los Angeles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yJ9DRq8okA
“I wanted to find the right words to express the feeling I was having, so, of course, I went right to a human I really love so much and that’s Bob Dylan, and then I covered ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ I felt, I don’t know, it felt really right at that moment,” she told Bentley.
Spektor fled the Soviet Union at the age of 9 as one of 36,114 Jews who immigrated with the help of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the self-described “oldest international migration and refugee resettlement agency in the U.S … founded in 1881 originally to assist Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe.”
Spektor, who will perform April 8 in support of her latest album, “Remember Us to Life,” at the Dolby Theatre, was one of several celebrities to appear at women’s marches on Jan. 21 across the country.
The entirety of the 42-minute “Morning Becomes Eclectic” interview and performance with Spektor is available at kcrw.com.
