This week, we celebrate the 80th birthday of Robert Allen Zimmerman, one of America’s most celebrated singer-songwriters. Many American Jews know that Zimmerman went on to change his name to Bob Dylan in a bid for palatability among mainstream American audiences, and perhaps many of us are conditioned to resent this — to view it as an act of internalized antisemitism or need for assimilation. I can’t argue with this critique, though I will say that Dylan was hardly alone in this, as American Jews changed their surnames by the thousands in the twentieth century for both professional and social...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
