In 1964, Hamilton Camp described in a spookily prophetic song how civilization’s greatest tower is laid to waste, turned to dust by terror in a flash of fire, brought about by the ‘Pride of Man’. In this week’s SoTW, Jeff looks at the Twin Towers and Rosh HaShana and the Tower of Babel story and his own personal religious philosophy and tries to make some sense out of a very confusing world.

50 years ago the Woodstock festival took place in upstate New York. I was there. I got wet and muddy and cranky and went back home after one night to listen to some of the same artists on my headphones.

Why does free jazz/Chabad soprano saxophonist Daniel Zamir draw materials from an old Israeli song glorifying a watchman from the 1930s? Why is today’s Israeli jazz a natural, organic expression of early Zionist settlement? Why is Jeff calling a 21-year old drummer a genius? The answer to these and many more questions in Song of The Week.

Forty-two years ago, the day after the Kent State shootings, I walked onto my completely abandoned and unearthly silent campus, and experienced a musical hallucination of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’. In the minds of me and my friends and the entire Woodstock nation, it has become emblematic of that terrible time when American soldiers killed American citizens.