Midtown Stomp

Series classes kick off tonight, and we're pumped. If you've been thinking about actually learning Lindy Hop, this is the week to start. Show up at 7 pm and get in from the beginning.

Not ready for that? No problem. We've got a drop-in swing class at 8pm that requires zero experience and zero partner. Just show up, we'll teach you enough to have fun, and then we dance!

Jewish American Heritage Month, Day 31.

Abel Meeropol was a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, the son of immigrants who had fled European pogroms. In the late 1930s, he saw a horrific photograph of a southern lynching. He could not stop thinking about it. He could not sleep. So he wrote a poem.

He published it under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, the names of his two stillborn children. As a public school teacher in 1937 America, he knew he had to protect his livelihood while releasing something this raw and revolutionary. He carried his private grief as his shield.

He eventually set the poem to music himself. The composition found its way to Billie Holiday, who performed it at the Cafe Society in New York. She recorded the track in 1939 after her own major label refused to touch it. The song was called "Strange Fruit".

It became a haunting masterpiece. Time magazine eventually named it the Best Song of the Century in 1999.

Meeropol never sought fame or fortune for the track. He said simply: "I wrote Strange Fruit because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and I hate the people who perpetrate it."

He was a schoolteacher who saw something unbearable happening to his fellow Americans and responded the only way he knew how. He wrote it down. He gave it to the world.

The song outlived him. It will outlive all of us.

Jewish American Heritage Month, Day 30.

Dinah Shore was born Frances Rose Shore into a Jewish immigrant family in Wi******er, Tennessee. Her parents had come from Russia. They were the only Jewish family in town.

Let that sit for a moment. Wi******er, Tennessee in the 1920s. A Jewish girl in a small Southern Protestant town, a long way from the Lower East Side, a long way from the synagogues of Chicago, a long way from anywhere that looked like her family. She grew up conspicuously other in a way that most American Jewish kids of her generation never experienced.

She overcame polio as a toddler. She lost her mother at sixteen. She went to Vanderbilt, moved to New York, and auditioned for every major bandleader she could find. Benny Goodman turned her down. Jimmy Dorsey turned her down. Tommy Dorsey turned her down.

She stopped waiting for a band to take her in and built a solo career instead. Between 1940 and the late 1950s she charted eighty hits. She sang with Frank Sinatra on New York radio before either of them were famous. She became one of the most beloved entertainers in America, a fixture on radio and then television for four decades.

A Jewish girl from a small Tennessee town that didn't have room for her went on to fill every room she ever walked into.