The Jewish threads running through Woodstock

On the second morning of Woodstock, 17-year-old Deborah Fineblum was walking through Bethel, New York, looking for a bus out of town when she spotted a picnic table.

A middle-aged couple had set out peanut butter sandwiches and lemonade, and were letting festival-goers use their kitchen phone to call their parents.

Fineblum, now a journalist based in Israel, was one of an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 people at the festival, which ran from August 15 to 18, 1969.

The land belonged to a Jewish dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, and the festival was organised by four Jewish men: promoter Michael Lang, music executive Artie Kornfeld and financiers Joel Rosenman and John Roberts.

Lang, from Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, had spent his bar mitzvah money on a head shop in Miami. Kornfeld had been named Capitol Records’ first vice president for rock at 21, and has introduced himself as a kohen born on Rosh Hashanah. Roberts was an heir to the Block Drug fortune, the company behind Polident. In another notable Jewish connection, the festival’s poster, a dove perched on a guitar neck, was drawn by Arnold Skolnick.

Yasgur was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants from Minsk. He ran one of the biggest dairies in Sullivan County and had studied real estate law at New York University. He was a registered Republican who supported the Vietnam War. His farm covered 600 acres.

Yasgur was not an obvious champion of the counterculture, and he said as much when officials in Bethel moved to block the festival. He told the town board he did not share the young people’s views on government, drugs or free love, but that they had a right to be in town. Then he asked whether the board planned to throw him out of town “because I am a Jew”.

Not every neighbour was won over, though. Yasgur’s son, Sam, told journalist Nate Bloom in 2009 that western Sullivan County had a history of antisemitism, and that his father had dealt with a lukewarm reception there by being a better farmer than the people around him.

As the festival took shape, signs appeared urging locals to boycott Yasgur’s milk.

According to local Elliot Tiber, whose parents ran a motel nearby, swastikas and antisemitic slogans were spray-painted on the building nightly.

How the farm ended up as the festival site is a story told several ways. Tiber said he suggested it. Lang’s account credits a Jewish real estate agent named Morris Abraham, and Kornfeld says he found Yasgur through his own contacts.

Yasgur’s farm was about a dozen miles from Grossinger’s, one of the best-known Jewish resorts. Jewish immigrants had been farming in Sullivan County for more than 60 years by then. By 1910, between 500 and 1500 Jewish farmers lived there, around 30 per cent of all American Jewish farmers, and families who took in boarders went on to found resorts including Grossingers, Kutshers and Tamarack Lodge.

By 1969 the Borscht Belt was already declining, with jet travel and assimilation among the most common reasons cited. About a year before Woodstock, American rock band Jefferson Airplane played Grossinger’s, and guitarist Jorma Kaukonen told Bloom he sensed the hotel was trying to do “something for the kids”.

Kaukonen had his own link to that world. He was the son of a Finnish father and a Jewish mother, Beatrice Levine, and he told Bloom he enjoyed the Jewish food at Grossinger’s and thought his late grandmother would have liked the place. He was far from the only musician on Yasgur’s stage with Jewish roots. A few of them, however, were hiding behind stage names.

Jefferson Airplane’s vocalist Marty Balin was born Martyn Buchwald, and Leslie West of Mountain was born Leslie Weinstein. Arlo Guthrie’s maternal grandmother was the Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt.

Country Joe and the Fish guitarist Barry Melton’s mother, Taube, came from an East Coast Russian-Jewish family whose parents originally fled Odessa, and the band’s namesake, Country Joe McDonald’s mother, Florence Plotnick, was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants.

Others were closer still to the Catskills circuit. Henry Gross of Sha Na Na, at 18 the youngest performer on the main stage, had attended an Orthodox Jewish day school and played Catskills resorts as a teenager. His bandmate Alan Cooper went on to become a biblical scholar and provost of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Two better-known names belong in the story too, even though neither performed. Bob Dylan, born Zimmerman, lived in the Woodstock area and turned down an invitation to play, while activist Abbie Hoffman, described by 18Doors as a Jewish radical, walked on stage during The Who’s set and was removed, though the sources differ on how.What’s perhaps the most Jewish connection of all though, is the ‘mothering’ nature of the community.

When food ran short, members of the Monticello Jewish Community Centre made and sent thousands of sandwiches, and a local Jewish women’s group also contributed food. Yasgur put up a “Free Water” sign at his barn when he heard some locals were selling it, according to a column in The Jewish Link. On the second day he thanked the crowd for three days of music, ending with “God bless you for it”.

Melton told Bloom he saw Woodstock as the end of an era, arriving as counterculture optimism faded after the Chicago convention riots and the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Bloom wrote that the festival made Borscht Belt hotels look even more old-fashioned and helped hasten their decline.

Fineblum remembers that weekend differently. Walking through Bethel on the second morning, she and her sister were shouted at by locals who wanted the visitors gone. Then came the picnic table and the couple behind it, who reminded them that there was still a lot of kindness in the world.

Fifty years on, she wrote, it was the couple she remembered above the performers, and the packed tents. She moved to Israel at 60, and says she is putting into practice the legacy that one middle-aged couple gave her that summer.

Yasgur, meanwhile, was handing out supplies of his own. His son has recalled his father telling the family to take every empty milk bottle from the dairy, fill it with water and give it to the kids, along with all the milk and milk products on hand.

The festival and the rain that summer left Yasgur’s land unfit for farming, and he later sold up and moved to Florida in 1971. That year, he and his wife Miriam visited Israel. According to an often-repeated anecdote that neither his wife nor his son could confirm, former Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion was told Yasgur was from Bethel, New York, and asked whether that was where Woodstock had been held.

Yasgur died in 1973 aged 53 and received a full-page obituary in Rolling Stone, one of few non-musicians to do so.

And there were more tributes. In a beautiful show of thanks, Joni Mitchell’s song Woodstock refers to his farm, and Kornfeld went on to lead the effort to save the site, now Bethel Woods.

Yasgur’s second cousin Abigail, a former director of the Jewish Community Library of Los Angeles, wrote a children’s book about him. Everyone she spoke to, she said, described a generous man and “a gentle spirit who really cared about kids”.

The book closes with Max, pipe in hand, waving goodbye to the young people as they leave his farm. Of everything that happened in Bethel that August, the title keeps it simple and describes the situation perfectly: Max said yes.