#FIGHTFOR15
Universal Studios Orlando Raises Wages To $15, Putting Pressure On Other Theme Parks

Bruce Haring 

DEADLINE

55/29/2021

© AP

Minimum pay rates for workers at the Universal Studios Orlando theme park will rise to $15 an hour next month, the company has confirmed. That puts pressure on rival attractions in the increasing struggle to find workers in the post-pandemic revival.

Universal Orlando is the first Florida theme park to raise wages. The company called it the largest single wage increase ever made by its theme park, and it is the first major attraction in Central Florida to offer $15 an hour to starting workers.

The pay hikes will begin June 27 for more than 18,000 employees, which includes full-time and part-time hourly jobs, as well as entry-level salaried positions,

Some employees above the $15 rate could also get paid more, depending on service time with the company.

“This is about taking care of both our current team members and those who will be joining our team,” Universal spokesman Tom Schroder said in a statement. “In addition, we are actively recruiting new team members and we are working hard to be the best employer in the marketplace when it comes to wages, benefits and work environment.”

Universal hopes to fill 2,000 summer jobs. The new wage level is a bump from the previous $13 an hour starting pay. Universal is now constructing its third theme park near the Orange County Convention Center. It is targeting 2023 to open.

Walt Disney World plans on raising its pay rates to $15 an hour by October.

The moves come as theme parks, restaurants and other businesses are increasingly finding it difficult to find an adequate number of workers for lower-wage jobs.

In Florida, the state will end the $300 per week federal unemployment supplemental payments starting June 26. It joins at least 22 other states in ending the federal add-on to state compensation.

Ohio’s Cedar Point amusement park earlier this week took things one step further, offering starting pay of $20 per hour. The theme park has reduced its opening days because of worker shortages.

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Ontario poet laureate Randell Adjei 

on George Floyd's legacy

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Randell Adjei performs his first public piece as Ontario’s new poet laureate, reflecting on the legacy of George Floyd, one year after his murder by a Minneapolis police officer.

cbc.ca

CANADA'S SHAME

Why so many children died at Indian Residential Schools

Tristin Hopper 

POSTMEDIA

29/05/2021

© Provided by National Post Historical photo of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, once the largest facility in the Canadian Indian Residential School system. Already known to have been the site of 51 student deaths, recent radar surveys have found evidence of 215 unmarked graves.

This week saw the discovery of something outside Kamloops, B.C., rarely seen in North America, much less in any corner of the developed world: Unmarked and previously forgotten graves, all belonging to children who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School

In a Thursday statement , Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation said that a preliminary survey using ground penetrating radar had found evidence of 215 graves. Opened in 1893, Kamloops Indian Residential School had once been the largest residential school in Canada. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has officially confirmed 51 deaths at the school , but the radar survey points to a mass of previously unrecorded fatalities.

Casimir called the discovery an “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented at the Kamloops Indian Residential School,” adding that her nation is now working with the Royal B.C. Museum to seek out records of the 215

National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation A 1931 photo of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

As a child, Chief Harvey McLeod of the Upper Nicola Band attended Kamloops Indian Residential School stud. He told CTV this week that when schoolmates disappeared, they were simply never spoken of again. “I just remember that they were here one day and they were gone the next,” he said.

One of the most painful tasks of Canada’s seven-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an attempt to quantify the sheer number of Indigenous children who died at an Indian Residential School.

The commission ultimately determined that at least 3,200 children died while a student at a Residential School; one in every 50 students enrolled during the program’s nearly 120-year existence. That’s a death rate comparable to the number of Canadian POWs who died in the custody of Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

The result is that many of Canada’s most notorious residential schools sit amid sprawling cemeteries of unmarked children’s graves.

The Battleford Industrial School in Saskatchewan has 72 graves that lay forgotten until rediscovered by archaeology students in the 1970s. In 2001, heavy rains outside High River, Alta., exposed the coffins of 34 children who had died at nearby Dunbow Residential School. In 2019, archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar found the crudely dug graves of as many as 15 children surrounding the former site of Saskatchewan’s Muskowekwan Residential School.

 Handout/Katherine Nichols A cemetery north of the former Brandon Indian Residential School. Eleven children are known to be buried here.

More than 2,800 names are logged on a memorial register maintained by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. The chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Justice Murray Sinclair, has said the true number of deaths could be as high as 6,000 .

But a true figure will never be known for the simple fact that death records – if they were kept at all – were often lacking even basic personal information. “In many cases, school principals simply reported on the number of children who had died in a school, with few or no supporting details,” reads the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission .

© FindaGrave.com A memorial erected in 2001 to commemorate the previously forgotten graves of children who died at the Dunbow Industrial School in Alberta.

One third of children who died at a residential school did not have their names recorded by school administrators. One quarter were marked as deceased without even their gender being noted. Among the 2,800 names on the official memorial register are children known to recorded history only as “Alice,” “Mckay” or “Elsie.”

Bodies of children were not returned to families, and parents rarely learned the circumstances of a child’s death. Often, the only death notification would be to send the child’s name to the Indian Agent at his or her home community

.

© Archives Deschâtelets Residential school students at a cemetery in Northern Quebec in November 3, 1946.

“It’s staggering to think that families would not have known what happened to a child that was sent off to the residential schools,” Ontario Chief Coroner Andrew McCallum said in 2012 as his office began an inquest into unrecorded residential school deaths.

In 1938, after one mother near Cornwall, Ont., learned of her son’s death at residential school due to meningitis, she was denied a request to return his body home for burial. “It is not the practice of the Department to send bodies of Indians by rail excepting under very exceptional circumstances,” read a response from the Department of Indian Affairs, adding that it was “an expenditure which the Department does not feel warranted in authorizing.”

The main killer was disease, particularly tuberculosis. Given their cramped conditions and negligent health practices, residential schools were hotbeds for the spread of TB.

The deadliest years for Indian Residential Schools were from the 1870s to the 1920s. In the first six years after its 1884 opening, for instance, the Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School saw the deaths of more than 40 per cent of its students. Sacred Heart Residential School in Southern Alberta had an annual student death rate of one in 20.

NOT JUST CULTURAL BUT VERY REAL GENOCIDE

© National Truth and Reconciliation Commission Graphic showing the death rate at Canadian Indian Residential Schools. Right up until the 1950s, the schools were seeing a rate of fatalities well beyond anything seen among the non-Indigenous community.

But despite occasional efforts at reform, even as late as the 1940s the death rates within residential schools were up to five times higher than among Canadian children as a whole.

The deadly reputations of residential schools were well-known to officials at the time. Kuper Island Residential School, located near Chemainus, B.C., saw the deaths of nearly one third of its student population in the years following its opening in 1889. “The Indians are inclined to boycott this school on account of so many deaths,” wrote a school inspector in 1922.

© National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Kuper Island Residential School. The school would come to be nicknamed “Alcatraz” for its remote location and appalling conditions. At least 121 are known to have died there, including two sisters who drowned while attempting to escape.

Exacerbating the death rate was the absence of even the most rudimentary medical care. Survivors described classmates becoming increasingly listless with TB until they were quietly removed by authorities.

James Gladstone, who would later become the first Status Indian appointed to the Senate of Canada, in his memoirs described a fellow student who died after school administrators failed to find him medical care for stepping on a nail. “I looked after Joe for two days until he died. I was the only one he would listen to during his delirium,” wrote Gladstone.

Accidents were the next big killer. Firetrap construction and the non-existence of basic safety standards frequently hit residential schools with mass-casualty incidents that, in any other context, would have been national news. A 1927 fire at Saskatchewan’s Beauval Indian Residential School killed 19 students. Only three years after that, 12 students died in a fire at Cross Lake Indian Residential School in Manitoba

.

From a Calgary Herald report of the 1927 fire at Beauval Indian Residential School.

Despite this, “for much of their history, Canadian residential schools operated beyond the reach of fire regulations,” wrote the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

But probably the most resonant of residential school deaths was the number of children who froze or drowned while attempting to run away. Several dozen children would die this way, with schools routinely making no attempt to find them and failing to report their disappearances for days.

One particularly notorious incident occurred on New Year’s Day, 1937, when a group of four boys ranging in age from 7 to 9 ran away from Fraser Lake Indian Residential School intending to reunite with their families at the Naldeh reserve seven miles away.

The school didn’t bother to assemble a search party until the boys had been missing for more than 24 hours. When they did, they found all four frozen to death less than a mile from home.


• Email: thopper@postmedia.com | Twitter: TristinHopper

 

Harris is 1st woman to make Naval Academy commencement speech: 'Our world is fragile'

Vice President Kamala Harris made history once again on Friday as the first woman to deliver the keynote commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy, telling graduates the country faces a "significant turning point."

A WOMAN OF COLOUR AS WELL AS OF INDO SOUTH ASIAN ORIGIN

"Midshipmen, we are now entering the next era. A new age. A new epoch, with its own challenges, and with its own opportunities," Harris began, speaking at the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, Maryland.

"The global pandemic, you see, of course, has accelerated our world into a new era," she said. "If we weren't clear before, we know now: Our world is interconnected. Our world is interdependent. Our world is fragile."

© Julio Cortez/AP Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the graduation and commission ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., May 28, 2021.

In her nearly 20-minute speech, Harris addressed challenges facing the nation and its service members, citing cybersecurity threats and climate change, as well as COVID-19.

"A deadly pandemic can spread throughout the globe in just a matter of months. A gang of hackers can disrupt the fuel supply of a whole seaboard. One country's carbon emissions can threaten the sustainability of the whole Earth," she said.

© Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Vice President Kamala Harris gestures as she delivers remarks at the graduation and commissioning ceremony for the U.S. Naval Academy's Class of 2021 at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., May 28, 2021.

"The challenge before us now is how to mount a modern defense to these modern threats," she continued.

"The ransomware attack by criminal hackers earlier this month -- well, that was a warning shot," she said. "In fact, there have been many warning shots. So we must defend our nation against these threats."A day after Microsoft said Russian hackers had again targeted a U.S. government agency, Harris referred to the recent Colonial Pipeline cyberattack as an example of new threats ahead.

It has been only 46 years since Congress required service academies to admit women in their ranks -- and Harris took the opportunity to highlight the growing number of female officers even as she tied that to the Biden agenda.

"Just ask any Marine today, would she rather carry 20 pounds of batteries or solar panels, and I am positive, she will tell you a solar panel -- and so would he," she said to applause.

© Susan Walsh/AP Vice President Kamala Harris displays her U.S. Naval Academy jacket at the graduation and commission ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., May 28, 2021. 

MORE: Vice President Kamala Harris: We must 'speak truth' about history of racism in America

Harris, the first Black woman to be elected vice president, gave a shoutout to a new midshipman making history of her own -- the first Black woman in the school's almost 175-year history to serve as brigade commander, who oversaw roughly 4,000 students this year.

"My ceremonial office was once occupied by the Secretary of the Navy, and displayed there, I have placed the shoulder boards of your brigade commander, Midshipman Sydney Barber," Harris said to roaring applause.

© Brian Witte/AP Midshipman Sydney Barber, who served as the first Black female Brigade commander at the U.S.Naval Academy this year, poses for a photo while gathering with other graduating midshipmen, May 28, 2021 in Annapolis, Md.

Harris concluded by sharing that she stopped by the United States Naval Academy Cemetery ahead of her speech to pay respects to her former colleague in the Senate -- "a great and courageous American" -- GOP Sen. John McCain.

"Most people don't know, he wanted to be buried next to his best friend, who he met on the yard, Admiral Chuck Larsen. That is the ultimate example of what I mean, in it together," she said.

"You are the next links in the chain," she said.

© Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Vice President Kamala Harris puts her hand to her heart during the graduation and commissioning ceremony for the U.S. Naval Academy's Class of 2021, at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., May 28, 2021.

Presidents and vice presidents deliver graduation speeches at the nation's five military service academies each year on a rotating basis.

President Joe Biden delivered the commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy last week, telling graduates to "go out and be the future."

© Shutterstock Midshipmen stand at attention during a Blue Angels fly over prior to Vice President Kamala Harris delivering an address for the U.S. Naval Academy graduation and commissioning ceremony in Annapolis, Md., May 28, 2021.

Biden spoke at the U.S. Naval Academy in 2015, as did former President Donald Trump in 2018, when he said, "We are not going to apologize for America."

MORE: Trump delivers commencement at Naval Academy, declares 'America is back'

After holding its first-ever virtual ceremony for the first time last year due to the pandemic, the academy brought back the Blue Angels flyover tradition to kick off the socially distanced event -- timed with the unofficial start of summer.

CANADA
Nearly 75 per cent of federal prisoners have been vaccinated against COVID-19

John Paul Tasker 

CBC 

28/5/2021

© Lars Hagberg/Canadian Press Correctional Service Canada (CSC) has vaccinated 74.9 per cent of all federal prisoners as of May 24.

The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) has administered COVID-19 vaccine shots to nearly 75 per cent of all federal prisoners — a vaccination rate that is much higher than the rate for the general population.

The federal government has been leading vaccine procurement efforts on behalf of the provinces and territories — but it also has held back a number of shots for its own purposes.

While health care is generally provincial jurisdiction, Ottawa alone is responsible for two groups: active Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel and federal inmates.

Of the 25 million COVID-19 doses that have been delivered to Canada, 157,080 have been reserved for the "federal allocation," which also includes shots earmarked for the Public Health Agency of Canada and Global Affairs Canada.

The number of prisoners who have been vaccinated is high but, according to statistics released to CBC News by the Department of National Defence (DND), the number of CAF personnel who've had at least one dose is even higher.

More than 90 per cent of all eligible CAF members, including regular force and full-time reservists who serve more than 180 days a year, have had one dose and 20 per cent of them are fully vaccinated — a second dose vaccination rate that is nearly four times higher than what has been reported among the general population.

Less than 55 per cent of the broader Canadian population has had a first dose, while roughly 5 per cent are fully vaccinated.

Some CAF members have been at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19; personnel have been deployed to hard-hit long-term care homes in Ontario and Quebec and others have been sent to short-staffed intensive care units.

A DND spokesperson said the exact number of CAF personnel who have had first or second doses could not be released for "operational security reasons" but they did say more than 70 per cent of the 115,000 Moderna doses allocated to the armed forces have been administered.

"CAF members continue to show their dedication in the fight against COVID-19 in Canada by voluntarily being vaccinated to help stop the spread of this deadly virus," the spokesperson said.

More than 10,000 shots administered in prisons

According to data provided by CSC, 9,613 prisoners have received at least one dose of the Moderna vaccine, with 1,266 having been fully vaccinated with two doses.

The vaccine coverage rates are significantly higher among white (80.2 per cent) and Indigenous inmates (75.9 per cent) than they are among other racial groups.

Fewer than 60 per cent of non-Indigenous people of colour in federal prison have had a shot, according to the CSC data, which is current as of May 24.

Incarcerated women are slightly more likely to have been vaccinated; 77.6 per cent of prisoners at female sites have had a shot, compared to 74.7 per cent among those at male institutions.

Women in federal penitentiaries in the Pacific region (B.C. and Yukon), however, reported the lowest prisoner vaccination rates nationwide, with fewer than 63 per cent having had a shot compared to 85 per cent of female prisoners in Quebec.

While the Atlantic provinces have so far posted some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country — federal data show fewer than 60 per cent of adults in those four provinces have had a first dose — 76 per cent of CSC prisoners in the region have had a shot.

Justin Piché is a professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa and a director at the Carceral Studies Research Collective.

Since the early days of the pandemic, Piché and other prisoners' rights advocates have been calling on the federal government to reduce the inmate population to stop the spread of COVID-19 behind bars.

'No political will'

There have been more than 2,100 cases reported in CSC facilities — 1,530 prisoners and 607 staff — since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. While numbers vary greatly, as many as 14,000 prisoners are in custody nationwide at any given time.

Piché said Ottawa has largely ignored demands to release some offenders to reduce crowding — "There was no political will," he said — and instead chose to focus on an aggressive vaccination campaign that now appears to be working reasonably well.

(The number of federal inmates has dropped by some 13 per cent over the last year but Piché attributes that decline to court delays that have resulted in fewer people sentenced.)

"The federal government has done far too little during the course of this pandemic to reduce the number of prisoners living in the biggest congregate settings in the country. Instead, they made the choice that vaccinations were the way to quell the heat they were getting from advocates," he said.

"Even though they got some flack from Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole for offering vaccines to prisoners, that heat was probably less than what they would've gotten if mass releases had happened."

© Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole was highly critical of the government's plan to accelerate immunizations in prisons.

Late last year, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) recommended prisoners be among the first groups to get vaccinated because they live in relatively cramped conditions where it may be easier to contract the virus.

Ottawa followed that advice when it began part of the prison vaccination program in early January.

O'Toole subsequently criticized the plan to vaccinate 600 elderly prisoners, saying it was unfair to give criminals vaccines before other groups. "Not one criminal should be vaccinated ahead of any vulnerable Canadian or front line health worker," he said in a Jan. 5 tweet.

A spokesperson for Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs, the party's public safety critic, did not respond to a request for comment on the robust CSC vaccination rates.

Piché said reducing COVID-19 transmission in prisons is important to the broader community because CSC workers can act as vectors, spreading the virus in the cities and towns that surround these institutions. And prisoners who are released after serving their sentences pose a risk as well.

"What happens behind the walls doesn't stay there. There are ramifications for all of us. It's not just about incarcerated people. It's about everyone," he said.

"It's great that CSC has gotten first doses to so many prisoners but we know that the first dose isn't enough to curb it altogether. They need those second doses. We need to address the vaccine hesitancy that some of them still have."

He attributes the comparatively high vaccination rates to CSC efforts to disseminate information about the safety and efficacy of shots to family members of prisoners.

CSC also works with Indigenous elders and liaison officers to offer culturally sensitive programming to First Nations, Metis and Inuit prisoners.

As for the lower vaccination rates among visible minorities, Piché said it's likely attributable to racialized groups being more distrustful of the health care system, given the legacy of racism in this field. "Something is definitely amiss here," Piché said.

A spokesperson for CSC said staff "continue to engage with anyone who has refused a vaccine," reminding them of the benefits of getting immunized.

Shots are still available for those who have skipped getting a shot and new admissions will also have a chance to be vaccinated, the spokesperson said.

Fauci Backs Investigation into Wuhan Lab Leak, But Stands by Animal Host Theory

Jenni Fink 

NEWSWEEK

5/28/2021


Because knowing the origin of COVID-19 could help prevent future outbreaks, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America's top infectious disease expert, said he supported investigating multiple theories as to where the virus came from, and that includes speculation it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Once considered a fringe theory that appeared to put undue criticism on Chinese scientists, the possibility that a lab in Wuhan was the starting point for the pandemic is gaining traction. President Joe Biden asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their investigative efforts and the group has not eliminated the lab from a list of possible origin points.

Fauci came under criticism recently for telling National Geographic in May 2020 that the lab leak theory was a "circular argument" and the nature of the virus points to it being naturally occurring. He told SiriusXM's The Joe Madison Show he stands by the belief that it's "much more likely" that COVID-19 was natural and not the result of the Wuhan lab.

"But we can't say that for 100 percent certain," Fauci added. "For that reason, this hypothesis that it might have leaked out of a lab is something that you want to see if you can investigate that in a fair, unbiased, scientifically sound way."

Since the start of the pandemic, people have raised concerns about the world's ability to trust information coming out of China and its ability to be transparent about the outbreak. Censoring medical professionals who raised the alarm early on only magnified concerns and while the Wuhan Institute of Virology has said none of its staff have been infected, which would mean the outbreak couldn't have started in the lab, some aren't willing to take the lab at its word.

Fauci separated Chinese scientists from the government and told Madison that in his experience working with scientists in China they've been "of good faith."

China vehemently denies that it's been anything less than transparent and that the Wuhan lab was the source of the pandemic, often pointing to a report a team of researchers published in March. The report, co-authored by 25 scientists who visited China earlier this year as part of a World Health Organization-led mission, found the virus being naturally occurring was the most likely scenario and the lab leak theory was the least likely.

However, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, identified shortfalls in their ability to conduct their research and advocated for additional investigations. While the team was leaning toward the belief that the virus jumped from an animal to a human, Ghebreyesus said they didn't make a definitive conclusion about the source of the pandemic.

Some scientists feel the world may never know the true source of the pandemic, but identifying how it began could be beneficial in preventing future outbreaks. If an animal is the source of the outbreak, it would be advisable to invest financially in tracking people who work in close proximity to animals to identify pathogens with pandemic potential before they spread.

"We should be doing better surveillance in animal populations that pose a risk of being the origin of a new pathogen. Our next crisis is already on the planet, but the pathogen has yet to make the jump," Jon Andrus, professor of global health at George Washington University, previously told Newsweek.

Fauci stressed to Madison that it's important there are "lessons learned" from the current pandemic, including how it began.

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How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’ A Forward investigation in 9 verses




How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’ A Forward investigation in 9 verses

PJ Grisar May 23, 2021

Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky/Getty I...

I
Our story, like its subject, starts in several places.

The balmy parapets of Jerusalem, where David gives into temptation. The third-row pew of a Montreal synagogue, where the shul president’s son learns about the Bible’s most calamitous affair. A movie theater in Mohegan Lake, N.Y., where a 10-year-old Jewish boy watches a movie called “Shrek” and hears plaintive piano while an ogre surveys his ransacked swamp, catching a glimpse of his reflected face in shattered glass as these words play:

I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?

I was that 10-year-old kid, hearing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” for the first time, and wondering what it had to do with the giant green guy I’d been watching for the past hour.

Like most people, I haven’t been able to escape the song, an infectious melody with cryptic verses and a simple chorus of a sacred word and too many covers to name. In some ways, as the poet sang, it doesn’t matter which you heard. Not because all versions were created equal, but because in two decades the song has become so pervasive as to signify nothing and everything.

A case in point: Just a few months after the Republican National Convention featured two unauthorized versions of “Hallelujah” set to fireworks, gospel singer Yolanda Adams performed a version approved by Cohen’s estate on the eve of President Biden’s inauguration, as part of a memorial to 400,000 dead of COVID-19. Both uses, played mere feet from each other on the National Mall, seemed to hit the wrong note.

The song is too accepting of fallibility to champion Trump. It’s too sexual to mourn the dead. It’s too Jewish to work as a Christian-inflected hymn. But like the story of David, the tune means so much to so many, that it’s hard to pin down a single interpretation. Online, debates about its meaning take on a Talmudic intensity.

I wanted to understand the song — what Cohen meant by it, and if that meaning was lost to other musicians. I needed to know Cohen’s spiritual biography. I had to find out how the song worked in synagogues or at klezmer festivals, in Hebrew and in Yiddish. I wanted to know what the song meant in the modern state of Israel and what it had to do with the Bible figures it winks at. In short, I needed to know if the song, perhaps the most misunderstood popular work of the last 40 years, was truly Jewish and what, if anything, that means for its status as a global anthem. Does its popularity mean that Jewish thought has gone mainstream, or, as the critics trumpet, that many interpreters simply don’t get what the song’s really saying?

To try to figure it all out, I talked with the man who wrote the book on “Hallelujah.” I chatted with Cohen’s rabbi, his cantor and his manager. I spoke with songwriters who adapted it for Jewish venues and faith leaders who use it as liturgy.

I found in “Hallelujah” a song that draws from Kabbalah, the Psalms and Hasidic thought. It is a manifesto of a man whose life was spent appealing to, and wrestling with, the absolute, and touching the mundane with the divine. It is the living text of a new Psalmist, who birthed a melodic prayer used in synagogues — but who never meant for it to be heard in those sacred spaces. “Hallelujah,” with its layered contradictions, is a mark of Cohen’s spiritual consistency, and finally, his work as a Jew hoping to comprehend a holy, broken world. But before it became all that, it was yet another struggle to find the right words.

II
A Baffled King Composes “Hallelujah”

Alan Light first started thinking about “Hallelujah” when he heard it as part of Kol Nidre services at Beit Simchat Torah, a progressive synagogue in midtown Manhattan. When I asked if the song was Jewish, Light, author of 2012’s “The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah,’” resisted a simple answer.

“This song has permeated the world and people’s lives and their own experiences in such a way that pretending this song is about this specific thing — we’re not there anymore,” he said.

How the song rose, from an obscure, synth-heavy track on Cohen’s 1984 album “Various Positions,” proves “Hallelujah” can’t be confined to any one meaning or definitive version. As outlined in Light’s book, soon to be a documentary film, its journey was a group effort: an act of collage in which Cohen’s original was soon surpassed by other, sparer interpretations.

To begin with, “Various Positions” was a tough sell. Columbia refused to even release it, leaving the job to independent label Passport. Few reviews of the album mentioned the first song on the second side: a strange, pseudo-gospel composition with a decidedly gospel-sounding title.

Bob Dylan was the first to recognize the song’s promise, playing “Hallelujah” on two occasions on the 1988 leg of his “Never-Ending Tour.” Some time before that, the Prophet of Hibbing and the Prince of Bummers from Montreal were having coffee in Paris. Dylan asked how long it took Cohen to write it. Cohen lied and said two years — in actuality, it took around five.

While there are four verses in the cut on “Various Positions,” Cohen wrote about 80 for the song, originally titled “The Other Hallelujah.” Describing his process, Cohen once conjured an agonized picture of a supplicant before his muse. He was in his underwear at the Royalton Hotel, banging his head on the floor, saying “I can’t finish this song.”

And he was never done fine-tuning it. The lyrics suggest Cohen’s hesitation when putting the song together. Instead of narrative unity, there are fragments of scene and sentiment, all connected by the word “Hallelujah,” which comprises the chorus and the final word in each verse. The word is a Hebrew compound of “Hallelu” (praise) and “Ja” (God), in a command form. In the Bible, it’s most frequently found in the Psalms attributed to David.

The song begins with David, the “baffled king.” But Cohen’s pronouns are slippery and his subject changes. The first verse mentions David’s playing, which placates the Lord — either the tempestuous King Saul or God — and a “you” who doesn’t care for music. In the second stanza, the “you” appears to be David, seeing a woman bathing on the roof, as he did Bathsheba. But then, in the second half of the line, the “you” appears to allude to Samson, tied to a kitchen chair as Delilah cuts his hair.

The biblical archetypes suggest tragic sexual encounters — or, in the case of David, Cohen’s own affair with a married woman. But the song then departs from biblical imagery, moving on to accusations of blasphemy, introducing the idea of a “holy or the broken hallelujah.” Finally the speaker laments his inability to please that ever-shifting “you” — then, ultimately, shrugs it off.

Cohen had second thoughts about the song’s biblical references, leaving them out in concert and using unrecorded verses in their stead. But for all of his tinkering, he ended his live versions like this: “Even though it all went wrong/I’ll stand before the lord of song/with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.” The words, an exaltation in surrender to the world in all its contradictions, were key to the song’s message.

“It’s a rather joyous song,” Cohen said on the release of “Various Positions,” and, he argued often, a secular one. He wanted to push the words of praise back to Earth, “to indicate that Hallelujah can come out of things that have nothing to do with religion.”

But when the Velvet Underground’s John Cale was preparing to sing the song for “I’m Your Fan,” a 1991 album of covers made by notable Cohen admirers, he rejected some of the unused lyrics because they seemed too religious — or at least too Jewish.

“Some of them, I couldn’t sing myself,” Cale told the Boston Globe of the countless alternate verses Cohen faxed him. “Some of them are about Yahweh, about religion, and reflecting Leonard’s background.”

It’s tempting, but probably a mistake, to use this remark as evidence of the song’s Jewishness. For all the variations of “Hallelujah,” those other words were never recorded, and it was Cale’s new, intimate arrangement that would make the song an anthem.

III
A Cold, Broken and Tragic “Hallelujah”

In the early ‘90s, Jeff Buckley, son of folk singer Tim Buckley, was cat-sitting for a friend in Park Slope. One day he discovered “I’m Your Fan” in her record collection and heard Cale’s “Hallelujah.” Scored to urgent piano, it was an unfussy lover’s lament, with dark meditations on solitude, good and bad sex and the bitter lessons of a doomed relationship. With alternate verses supplied by Cohen, and no cheesy choir, this version sounded nothing like the original — but then, Buckley, like so many others, had never heard the original. Music history might well be different if he had.

The just-emerging Buckley started playing the song at gigs, ending as Cale did, not with the joyous “nothing on my tongue,” but with “It’s not a cry you can hear at night/it’s not somebody who’s seen the light — it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah!”

The song’s meaning shifted. It had a sexier edge and a more tortured conclusion with a new brand of vulnerability. Cale’s world-weary delivery and Cohen’s arch humor (“You said I took the name in vain/I don’t even know the name/And if I did, well really, what’s it to ya?”) were gone, replaced by what Buckley called the “hallelujah of an orgasm.” That eroticism was trapped forever on Buckley’s album “Grace,” where the track begins with an exhausted exhale.

Light says the difference in the versions was inevitable: Cohen recorded the original when he was 50; Buckley was 27 — and wouldn’t make it past 30.

After Buckley drowned on May 29, 1997, his “Hallelujah” accrued the air of the sacrosanct. The song was further tethered to tragedy a few years later, when it became the unlikely backing track for 9/11. As Light’s book recounts, VH1 played Buckley’s “Hallelujah” under a hastily-assembled tribute video made of on-the-ground footage of New York after the attacks. The footage played constantly that September of 2001.

Soon the song appeared in montages of crisis and uncertainty on network TV shows, boosted by the appearance of Cale’s version in “Shrek,” a national calamity and Sony’s eagerness to license it. Next it showed up in singing competitions and, owing in part to its religious-sounding refrain, weddings and funerals. It’s now in the repertoire of every kid on YouTube and every busker with a street corner, each with different variations and, with each reorganization, a different takeaway. Paul Simon told Light that Cohen’s song had supplanted “Bridge Over Troubled Water” as a multi-use standard. Despite the objections of many tired listeners, nothing yet has toppled “Hallelujah.”

Last year, a doctor in Cincinnati sang it to COVID patients as they left the hospital. When Italy was on lockdown, the song was heard from the balconies. “It still fulfills these people,” Light said.

It’s hard, and perhaps cruel, to quibble with those who find their own deep, adaptable meaning in the song. We are squarely in the realm of death of the author. But how Cohen lived, and chose to die, tells us where the song came from, and what Cohen wanted it to say.

IV
READ THE REST HERE
How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’ – The Forward

KD LANG DOING HALLELUJAH

RIP

BEGAN WITH CBC RADIO THEN TV

Canadian actor Paul Soles, Voice of Spider-Man in 1960s Animated Series, Dies at 90

HE WAS A GREAT VOICE ACTOR

Reid Nakamura 

 28/5/2021

Paul Soles, the voice actor who starred in the original animated "Spider-Man" series in the 1960s, has died at the age of 90.

© TheWrap paul soles spider-man

The news was announced by Soles' manager, Angela Wright of Edna Talent Management, in a Facebook post Friday. "Paul Soles was truly a Canadian treasure," Wright wrote. "He lived a long life with so many adventures along the way. RIP."

According to an obituary in Canada's The Globe and Mail, Soles died in Toronto on Wednesday, May 26. No cause of death was listed.

A JEWISH CANADIAN SPIDEY
Soles voiced the title character in ABC's animated "Spider-Man" series, which ran for three seasons on ABC and in syndication between 1967 and 1970. Soles starred alongside Bernard Cowan, Paul Kligman and Peg Dixon.

He also voiced Hermey the misfit elf in Rankin/Bass' stop-motion "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" special in 1964. His other voice acting credits include "Rocket Robin Hood," "King of the Beasts," "The Marvel Super Heroes" and "The King Kong Show."

In 1978, Soles hosted the short-lived late-night talk show "Canada After Dark" for CBC Television. He also served as a longtime co-host on the network's newsmagazine series "Take 30," alongside Anna Cameron, Adrienne Clarkson, Mary Lou Finlay and Hana Gartner.

WIKIPEDIA NEEDS UPDATING

Paul Soles - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Soles

Paul Robert Soles (born 11 August 1930) is a Canadian character actor, voice actor and television personality. He led the voice cast in such series such as The Marvel Super Heroes (1966), voiced the title character in Spider-Man (1967), and portrayed Hermey in the 1964 television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; Soles is one of the last surviving participants of the special's voice cast. Soles …

• Acting roles
• Voice work
• Television hosting
• Documentary producer
• Family
• External links

Soles is widely known as the voice of Hermey the misfit elf in Rankin/Bass' Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from 1964. He went on to voice Bruce Banner the alter ego of the Hulk and his friend Rick Jones in the 1966 Incredible Hulk animated series from The Marvel Super Heroes program. He also voiced fellow Marvel superhero Spider-Man in the original animated television series

Wikipedia · Text under CC-BY-SA license

GLOBE AND MAIL OBITUARY

Paul Robert SOLES
1930 2021

PAUL ROBERT SOLES Born in Toronto, August 11, 1930, to Arthur L. Soles and his wife Lillian (née Goodfellow) they of Polish/Lithuanian Jewish ancestry. 

Died in Toronto May 26, 2021. 

Predeceased by his younger brother Bill and sister-in-law Marg, he leaves his baby sister Ruth-Ellen, nieces Liane and Alison, Heather and Sandra, nephews Richard, Allan and Brian, wife Jean (née Allan), son Jonathan and daughter-in-heart Jarah. 

He will be remembered as a charming, magnanimous, principled man, a creative and versatile performer and a proud Canadian.

 It was the titans of radio who first fired his imagination and he set out to emulate them from an early age. Committed to the highest standards throughout his 70 year career he remained the consummate professional wholly dedicated to his craft, but by nature he tended undeniably towards mirth. 'He who laughs, lasts' was an oft repeated aphorism.

 He delighted in cracking people up on air and off and was a terrific joke-teller, an impressive mimic, accent man, public speaker, story-reader, announcer, host, emcee, compare. Warm and gentle with an easy going manner he enjoyed the company of others as much as his own. Thoughtful and inventive he possessed a quiet strength and a deep well of emotion. 

A talented and hard-working person he often cited good fortune as the sole reason for his success, but the truth is he loved what he did and it showed. A champion debater and Army Cadet RSM at Vaughan Road Collegiate he dropped out of UWO after third year, following stints at CHLO and CKEY, to work full-time at CFPL radio, transitioning to TV at its inception in 1953. 

Commissioned as a Pilot Officer in the RCAF Auxilliary at Station Crumlin he spent 1956-57 running the radio station at 3 Wing, Zweibrücken, Germany and travelled with the Flyers hockey team as their play-by-play man.

 1962 he returned to Toronto, married a first generation Scottish-Canadian girl from southwestern Ontario, began a 16-year run on CBC's 'Take-30' and started a family. 

er cherished turns during the CBC-TV years were the 1966 Goon Show-like summer replacement sketch comedy series Charlie Had One and This is The Law, 1971-1976. Best known today for portraying Hermey the Elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Peter Parker and his crime-fighting alter ego in the 1967 cartoon Spider-Man he worked extensively in every medium, his favourites being radio drama and live theatre.

 His career took him all over the world but he happily spent the bulk of it in Canada, treading the boards of virtually every major theatre in the land. 

He performed on and off Broadway and headlined theatrical tours across Canada and the US. Among his many memorable dramatic performances three stand out: the lead in the Canadian premiere in 1987 of 'I'm Not Rappaport'; the first Jewish Canadian to play Shylock in the 2001 production of 'The Merchant of Venice' at the Stratford Festival and the Dora-nominated role in the 2005 two-hander 'Trying'.

 A multiple award nominee he won three: best supporting actor, Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1960 Dominion Drama Festival; best supporting actor in a dramatic series, Terminal City, 2001 Genies; best actor in a digital series, My 90-Year Old Roommate, 2017 Canadian Screen Awards. 

Beyond work and family he had three life-long passions: sports cars, music and flying. A racing nut he drove the winning foreign entry in the American International Rally (1959) speaking only German and passing himself off as a factory driver from Mercedes in a zero-mileage model W120. 

A bigtime jazz fan, particularly of the big-bands, he was a fixture at clubs on both sides of the border and he forged friendships with a number of performers.

 An aviation enthusiast and pilot he owned two RCAF primary trainers, first a Fleet 16-B Finch open cockpit biplane acquired to barnstorm across the continent as part of The Great Belvedere Air Dash of 1973 and later a DeHavilland DHC-1 Chipmunk. He was a performing member of the Great War Flying Museum (Brampton), an air show participant for 20 years and a perennial volunteer for the Canadian International Air Show. 

He did not go gentle retaining to the end his ability to uplift. When asked "how are you doing?" he replied "I make a living". 

A celebration of life will be held at a date TBD. 

In lieu of flowers please donate to an organization dedicated to theatre, comedy or jazz or to one that supports such artists. 

Remembrances and condolences would be welcome online at legacy.com/obituaries/theglobeandmail.