From Billy Joel to Vampire Weekend, these Jewish musicians created NYC’s soundtrack

“Songs of New York: 100 Years of Imagining the City Through Music,” a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, celebrates a century of New York’s rich musical legacy. 

The interactive exhibition, which opened this month and is paired with iconic photography from the museum’s collection, spotlights the sounds of New York City from the 1920s until the present, “showcasing everything from be-bop to K-pop, across genres, boroughs, and musical movements,” according to the museum’s website, reflecting “on topics like the subway, apartments, nightlife, and neighborhoods.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a surfeit of Jewish musicians and songwriters are featured on the museum’s list of defining New York City songs. Jews, after all, have been at the forefront of many musical movements that originated in NYC, from the Jewish immigrants who worked in Tin Pan Alley — home of the Great American Songbook — all the way up to present-day Jewish icons of hip-hop, which of course originated 50-plus years ago among Black performers in the Bronx. 

Over the past century, New York’s multitude of music scenes have undoubtedly shaped the city’s cultural identity over the last century. From jazz to punk rock, folk music to show tunes, Jewish artists have left their fingerprints on practically all of them. 

And so, this intrepid reporter combed through the exhibit’s accompanying Spotify playlist in order to spotlight the archetypal New York City songs that were performed, written or composed by Jewish musicians.

Keep scrolling to see, in alphabetical order by artist, the Jewish highlights among a century of songs about New York City.

“Brooklyn-Queens” (1989)
3rd Bass

MC Serch, born Michael Berrin — who made up one-third of the interracial hip hop group, 3rd Bass — was raised in a Conservative Jewish family in an Orthodox neighborhood in Far Rockaway, Queens. In a 2018 VLADTV interview, he recalled how he was asked to perform the duties of a Shabbos goy for his Orthodox neighbors. “To ask another Jew to break Sabbath because you don’t see them as being Jewish enough, it’s crazy foul,” he said. “I didn’t know until later that’s lashon hara, that’s crazy.”

“New York City (You’re a Woman)” (1971)
Al Kooper

Al Kooper, born Alan Kuperschmidt, was born in Brooklyn and raised by his Jewish family in Queens. Inducted into Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in 2023, Kooper’s musical resumé includes laying down the organ on Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” ostensibly discovering and producing Lynyrd Skynyrd, and working as a musician and producer with “a veritable who’s who of rock music,” the Forward writes. On this particular song, Kooper expresses anger toward his attachment to an unforgiving city: “New York City / You’re a woman / Cold-hearted b— ought to be your name / Oh, you ain’t never loved nobody / Yet I’m drawn to you like a moth to flame.”

“No Sleep Till Brooklyn” (1986)
“B-Boy Bouillabaisse: Hello Brooklyn” (1989)
“An Open Letter to NYC” (2004)
Beastie Boys

Three New Yorkers — Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz, Michael “Mike D” Diamond and the late Adam “MCA” Yauch — all with Jewish backgrounds, the Beastie Boys were hip hop’s first Jewish superstars. In 2023, they were honored with the renaming of a Lower East Side street to “Beastie Boys Square,” at the corner where the shop featured on their second album,“Paul’s Boutique,” once stood. The Lower East Side is a fitting neighborhood to immortalize the Jewish artists who rapped the lyrics, “So, we give thanks for providing a home / Through your gates at Ellis Island we passed in droves.” 

“Everybody Loves You Now” (1971)
“52nd Street” (1978)
“Big Man on Mulberry Street” (1986)
Billy Joel

Legendary musician Billy Joel was born to Jewish parents, though he’s said his family wasn’t observant. The Long Islander — whose Madison Square Garden residency ended last year after a decade-long run —  said in an interview that “Big Man on Mulberry Street” is a “portrait of a nebbish who thinks he’s cool,” using the Yiddish term for a person who is timid or ineffectual.

“Brooklyn Bound” (2002)
The Black Keys

Dan Auerbach, one-half of American rock duo The Black Keys, has Polish Jewish ancestry on his father’s side; his great uncle was a Holocaust camp survivor and his grandmother escaped just before the Nazis closed the borders. “Her entire family was murdered,” he said in a 2011 interview with The Guardian. “All those stories were a big part of my growing up,” Auerbach said. “You realise how lucky we are. It certainly makes you work harder.”

“Danceaway” (1982)
Blondie

Blondie guitarist and Brooklyn native Chris Stein, who made up half of the celebrity glamor couple with lead singer Debbie Harry, has an unusual first name for a Jew. “I remember guys saying when I was growing up: ‘Oh, that’s a weird name for a Jewish boy!’” Stein said in a 2011 Jewish Chronicle interview. “My parents didn’t want me to be subjected to a lot of antisemitism.”

“Hard Times in New York Town” (1961)
“Talkin’ New York” (1962)
“Positively 4th Street” (1965)
Bob Dylan

He may have gone through a Christian phase, but Bob Dylan — the Minnesota-born folk and rock legend who made his name in Greenwich Village — has had plenty of Jewish moments, including holding his son’s (not Jakob’s) bar mitzvah at the Western Wall, playing “Hava Nagila” at a Chabad telethon and holding a seder with Marlon Brando.

“Broadway” (1980)
The Clash

Dubbed “The Only Band That Matters” (by, allegedly, a former CBS/Epic Records copywriter named Gary Lucas), London punk rock band The Clash featured two Jewish members at the time they recorded this jazzy, NYC-focused track: lead singer Joe Strummer and guitarist Mick Jones. 

“Avenue A” (2001)
The Dictators

“Avenue A” is a song that laments the effects of gentrification: “Yeah, it’s all over when you see a Range Rover / And to my bodega, I say hasta luega.” Formed in New York City in 1973, The Dictators were an early punk band who later gained a cult following — and, the Times of Israel wrote in 2021, they were “entirely Jewish, working-class, and native sons of the Bronx.” Lead guitarist Ross “The Boss” Friedman, bass guitarist Andy Shernoff and vocalist Handsome Dick Manitoba (real name Richard Blum) are all Jewish. “We’re in the tradition of great Jewish humorists like Mel Brooks or Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld,” Shernoff told the Forward in a 2021 interview, “and I’m leaving out another 10 billion Jewish comics.”

“On Broadway” (1964)
The Drifters

Performed by The Drifters and released in 1963, “On Broadway” was  written by prolific Jewish husband-and-wife duo Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, in collaboration with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — both Jewish as well.

“Manhattan” (1956)
Ella Fitzgerald

The Broadway songwriting duo of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote “Manhattan” in 1925. Both were born into Jewish families, in Queens and Harlem, respectively, and have a number of classics in the Great American Songbook. The song playfully details some of the delights of New York City, such as the subway’s stench: “The subway charms us so / When balmy breezes blow / To and fro.”

“Harlem on My Mind” (1933)
Ethel Waters

First performed by Ethel Waters in 1933, “Harlem on My Mind” was written by Irving Berlin (born Israel Isidore Berlin), the renowned composer and songwriter whose music — including “God Bless America” — makes up part of the Great American Songbook. The son of a cantor and born in imperial Russia, Berlin arrived in the United States at age five. 

“Brooklyn Bridge” (1947)
“Theme from New York, New York” (1979)
Frank Sinatra

No, Frank Sinatra wasn’t Jewish, but you can start spreading the news that the iconic NYC anthem — originally performed by Liza Minelli in the 1977 musical film, “New York, New York,” and covered by Sinatra in ’79 — was composed and written by a highly successful Jewish songwriting duo: John Kander and Fred Ebb. Kander and Ebb wrote several other songs for Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York,” and scored musicals including “Cabaret” — now on Broadway — and “Chicago.” Meanwhile, “Brooklyn Bridge” was written by the Jewish duo of Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne — the same pair who wrote “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!”

“Third Week in the Chelsea” (1971)
Jefferson Airplane

Jefferson Airplane, a pioneering band of psychedelic rock that was formed in the Bay Area, featured four members with Jewish backgrounds: bass guitarist Jack Casady, whose father was Jewish; lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, who was credited for writing “Third Week in the Chelsea” after the band spent — you guessed it — three weeks in the Chelsea Hotel; and Spencer Dryden and Martin Balin, who’d recently left the band before the recording of this album. Kaukonen spoke with JTA about the band and his Jewishness back in 2015: “I don’t live in a Jewish context most of the time because that’s not how my world works, but whenever it happens, I feel like I’ve come home.”

“I Saw a Hippie Girl on 8th Ave” (2003)
“Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” (2005)
Jeffrey Lewis

Jeffrey Lewis grew up Jewish on the Lower East Side, and is often regarded as part of the city’s “anti-folk’ movement (a title that he finds “cool,” even if nobody, including Lewis himself, actually knows what that means). The aspect of NYC that has most engaged his imagination, the New York Times wrote in 2011, is “the intersection of bohemianism and leftist politics that shaped his parents’ generation.” 

“Corner Store” (1990)
“Velvet Underground” (1992)
Jonathan Richman

Raised in a Jewish family in Natick, Massachusetts, Jonathan Richman — who founded proto-punk band The Modern Lovers in 1970 — heard The Velvet Underground’s first record and decided to give it a go as a musician in New York. Here, he befriended the band before eventually moving back to Boston (though not before taking a trip to Europe and Israel). Nonetheless, his time in NYC stuck with Richman, and his reverence for The Velvet Underground, and the city that defined them, did too: “They were wild like the USA / A mystery band in a New York way / Rock and roll, but not like the rest / And to me, America at its best,” he sings on his song, “Velvet Underground.”

“New York Tendaberry” (1969)
Laura Nyro

“Sidewalk and pigeon / You look like a city / But you feel like religion / To me,” Laura Nyro belts out at this poignant song’s climax. The daughter of a Jewish bookkeeper and an Italian-American father who played the jazz trumpet, Nyro passed away at just 49 years old; she was posthumously inducted to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

“I Like Me Better” (2018)
Lauv

Electropop artist Lauv, whose real name is Ari Leff, was born to a Latvian mother and an American Jewish father. “I’m like, fake Jewish,” he said in a 2019 interview. “My dad’s Jewish, so that makes me not technically Jewish, right?” While traditional Jewish law says that Jewish identity is passed via the mother, many Jews modern Jews recognize patrilineal descent. Leff, for his part, has said he celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas growing up. 

“New York, New York” (from “On the Town”) (1949)
Leonard Bernstein

Not to be confused with Sinatra/Kander and Ebb’s “New York, New York,” Leonard Bernstein — the iconic conductor and composer raised by Russian/Ukrainian Jewish immigrants — composed this piece for the 1944 musical, “On the Town.” Its lyrics were written by Jewish songwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

“Chelsea Hotel #2” (1974)
Leonard Cohen

Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Montreal, Leonard Cohen’s illustrious catalogue of music and poetry is infused with tons of references to Judaism. This song? Well, it’s really just about a sexual encounter he had with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel. But it puts a song in my head every time I walk by there.

“New York Telephone Conversation” (1972)
“Walk on the Wild Side” (1972)
“High in the City” (1984)
“Dirty Blvd.” (1989)
“NYC Man” (1996)
Lou Reed

No surprise here: Lou Reed — whose father changed his last name from Rabinowitz after immigrating to the U.S. from Russia — was a mega-influential NYC figure, both as a solo artist and as singer and principal songwriter of The Velvet Underground. With a mix of “journalistic observation and deeply felt emotion,” Reed “[created] a soundtrack to the city that resonates decades after Times Square has been hosed down and scrubbed clean,” Michiko Kakutani wrote after his death. While his New Yorkness was undeniable, his Jewishness was “paradoxical,” the Times of Israel wrote in 2013: He’d reportedly told journalist Lester Bangs that he didn’t know any Jewish people. “But, on another occasion, asked whether he was Jewish, he was said to have responded, ‘Of course, aren’t all the best people?’”

“Summer in the City” (1966)
The Lovin’ Spoonful

Lead guitarist and co-founding Lovin’ Spoonful member Zal (Zalman) Yanofsky, a Canadian Jew who came up in the Greenwich Village folk scene, was unusual in a number of ways. For one, he never anglicized his Jewish-sounding name. He was also rather unpredictable: He almost ruined an after-party in London by “pelting John Lennon with olives.” Within three years of the band’s formation he was out, eventually becoming a restaurateur in Kingston, Ontario. But he was still around when they wrote and released this hit — which, if you’ve spent a humid summer day in NYC, you can confirm the severity of lyrics like: “All around, people looking half-dead / Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.” 

“Double Dutch” (1983)
Malcolm McLaren

Englisman Malcolm McLaren managed punk rock bands like New York Dolls and Sex Pistols before releasing music as a solo artist,including “Double Dutch,” a chart hit from his debut album, which features the names of a number of NYC double dutch troupes. McClaren was also the grandson of Sephardic Jewish diamond dealers.  

“Times Square” (1983)
Marianne Faithfull

When British pop star Marianne Faithfull released “Times Square” in 1983, she sang of a place far grimier than what we know today: “Take a walk around Times Square / With a pistol in my suitcase / And my eyes on the TV.” Thirty years later, Faithfull, who died at 78 in January, explored her Jewish ancestry — her mother and grandmother survived the Holocaust in Vienna after fleeing Berlin — in an episode of BBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are?”

“42nd Street” (1964)
Mel Tormé

“Little nifties from the 50s, innocent and sweet / Sexy ladies from the 80s, who are indiscreet,” go the lyrics of “42nd Street,” originally written by Jewish lyricist Al Dubin for the 1933 film of the same name. The song took on a new level of popularity after Mel Tormé, the Jewish Chicagoan who composed “The Christmas Song” (because of course he did), covered it in 1963. Tormé wrote in his autobiography, “It Wasn’t All Velvet,” that he was surrounded by music from a young age — his father, a Jewish immigrant from Brest (now in Belarus), “knew reams of songs from the old country and sang them in that clear cantorial voice of his.” 

“New York Boy” (1969)
“Chelsea Morning” (1971)
Neil Diamond

They may sing his biggest hit at Boston Red Sox games, but make no mistake: Neil Diamond “is a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” the New York Times wrote in 1972, “who knows how to make it across the big bridge.” The grandson of four Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, Diamond worked in his father’s dry goods store and studied pre-med at New York University on a fencing scholarship, before ultimately pursuing a music career.

“Subway Train” (1973)
“Trash” (1973)
“(There’s Gonna Be A) Showdown” (1974)
New York Dolls

One of the first bands of the early punk rock scene, New York Dolls featured a Jewish rhythm guitarist who went by Sylvain Sylvain (full name Sylvain Sylvain Mizrahi). Born in Cairo, Egypt to a Syrian Jewish family, Mizrahi co-wrote some of the band’s standout tracks, including “Trash,” which paints a charming image of NYC with lyrics like: “Trash, won’t pick it up, take them lights away / Trash, won’t pick it up, don’t take your life away / Trash, won’t pick it up, don’t try to take my knife away.” 

“Moment 4 Life” (2010)
Nicki Minaj (feat. Drake)

The New York-ness on this track really comes from Nicki Minaj (“Young Money raised me, grew up out in Baisley / Southside Jamaica, Queens, and it’s crazy / ‘Cause I’m still hood, Hollywood couldn’t change me”), but Drake, the Jewish rapper from Toronto, is along for the ride. 

“53rd and 3rd” (1976)
“Rockaway Beach” (1977)
The Ramones

The Ramones formed in 1974 in Forest Hills, Queens, and were formative in establishing the punk rock movement. Lead singer Joey Ramone (born Jeffrey Ross Hyman) — a “mensch,” in the words of bandmate Marky Ramone — was born to a Jewish family in Queens, while drummer Tommy Ramone (born Tamás Erdelyi) was born in Budapest to professional photographers who had survived the Holocaust. “It’s not hard, not far to reach / We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach,” go the lyrics of “Rockaway Beach,” about the borough’s sandy summertime playground.

“Summer in the City” (2006)
Regina Spektor

Not to be confused with The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City,” this song by Regina Spektor — the Russian-born singer-songwriter whose Jewish parents were musicians — depicts somebody wandering through the city, desperately missing an ex-lover: “Summer in the city / I’m so lonely, lonely, lonely / So I went to a protest just to rub up against strangers.” Spektor has spoken at length about her Jewishness, antisemitism and her experience immigrating with her family from Russia to New York.

“Do You Miss New York?” (1993)
Rosemary Clooney

The opening and title track of Rosemary Clooney’s 1993 album, “Do You Miss New York?”, this song was written and composed by Jewish jazz musician Dave Frishberg, who moved from Minnesota to NYC in 1957. In a 1991 interview with NPR, Frishberg said he was around music a lot growing up, and that his father was “a singer … in the Jewish temple.” 

“New York’s My Home” (1956)
Sammy Davis Jr.

Sammy Davis Jr., the Harlem-born cultural icon who called himself “the only Black, Puerto Rican, one-eyed, Jewish entertainer in the world,” famously converted to Judaism in 1960, four years after recording this song — though as early as 1953, he’d been wearing a mezuzah around his neck after receiving it from Eddie Cantor. 

“New York USA” (1964)
Serge Gainsbourg

Serge Gainsbourg (born Lucien Ginsburg), the singer-songwriter and music icon of France, was the son of Jewish migrants who fled Russia after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Born in 1928, Gainsbourg grew up in Nazi-occupied France; in 1975 he released the song “Yellow Star.” In it, he sings, alluding ironically to the badge as a prize, “I’ve won the yellow star.”

“Bleecker Street” (1964)
“The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” (1966)
“The Only Living Boy in New York” (1970)
Simon & Garfunkel

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, who grew up in the Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, are about as iconic of a New York duo as it gets. And, for those who haven’t tried, “Only Living Boy in New York” is the perfect listen for a solitary stroll through the city. Alternatively, head to Roosevelt Island and say “Hello lamppost, what’cha knowing” to a lamppost that once stood on the Queensboro Bridge, and may very well be the one referred to in “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)”!

“Daddy Don’t Live in that New York City No More” (1975)
Steely Dan

Donald Fagen, lead singer, keyboardist and co-songwriter of rock band Steely Dan, came by his musical chops honestly: His mother had been a singer at Borscht Belt resorts in the Catskills, where many Jewish New Yorkers vacationed over the summer. By the time they’d recorded this track, Fagen and bandmate Walter Becker had relocated to Los Angeles, but the image they painted of a gritty 1970s NYC was vivid nonetheless.

“New York City Cops” (2001)
The Strokes

A leading group of the early-2000s garage rock revival, The Strokes feature not one, but two Jewish guitarists: Nick Valensi, whose father was a Tunisian Jew and whose mother converted, and Albert Hammond Jr., who converted to Judaism shortly after the release of their debut album, “Is This It,” so that Valensi wouldn’t be the band’s only Jewish member. In this track, The Strokes write about the NYPD in response to the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo by four plainclothes officers: “New York City cops, but they ain’t too smart.”

“New York City” (1975)
T. Rex

On this track, Marc Bolan, founder of English rock band T. Rex and a pioneer of glam rock, asks an important question that’s been on all of our minds: “Did you ever see a woman / Coming out of New York City / With a frog in her hand?” In 2021, music critic Dan Epstein argued that T. Rex’s “Electric Warrior,” with all songs written by Bolan, is “not just one of the greatest records ever made by a Jewish rocker; it’s one of the greatest rock albums ever made by anyone.” 

“M79” (2008)
Vampire Weekend

“M79,” co-written by indie band Vampire Weekend’s primary songwriter and lead singer, Ezra Koenig, depicts a crosstown bus journey between the Upper West and Upper East Side. Koenig lived as a small child on the Upper West Side before his Jewish family moved to New Jersey, but he returned to the area to attend Columbia University — a setting that the band frequently references, most notably with the song “Campus” — where he met his eventual bandmates. 

“6th Avenue Heartache” (1996)
The Wallflowers

You may know Jakob Dylan as lead singer of The Wallflowers, which has since become the singer-songwriter’s solo project. You may also know him as the son of Bob Dylan. And while Bob Dylan’s Judaism has seemingly gone through ebbs and flows, Jakob was indeed bar mitzvahed. As for the next generation, his non-Jewish wife, screenwriter Paige Dylan, told Tablet, “I finally talked Jakob into letting us send one of the kids to Hebrew preschool and he was like our little Jewish star.”

“Yeah! New York” (2003)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, an indie rock band formed in NYC in 2000, features drummer Brian Chase, who grew up in a Reform Jewish household. He later began playing drums for a collective called The Sway Machinery, and told the Jerusalem Post in 2009 that he was excited to partake in their style which “[fuses] the cantorial tradition with a more modern aesthetic.”