Israeli writer, essayist and cultural arbiter Adam Baruch, 63, died after a long battle with diabetes.

He was considered one of Israel’s most influential print journalists and worked at most of the country’s top media outlets.

According to his obituary on Ynetnews he was born Baruch Rosenblum to a religious family in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood in 1945, spent his childhood in Ramat Gan and his later adolescence at the Noam Yeshiva High School in Pardes Hannah. He later went on to study law at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University:

He adopted the nom de plume “Adam Baruch” during his military service, seeking to circumvent army regulations forbidding servicemen from publishing articles in civilian media.

Baruch’s unique rhetoric was epitomized in his personal column for Ma’ariv’s weekend edition; language that combined archaic Jewish legal decrees with modern Israeli issues. Baruch was also considered one of leading authorities in the field of art.

He served as curator for exhibits in Israel and abroad, and even put together a solo exhibit in 2003 at the Tel Aviv Museum which dealt with images created by the TV medium.

His books dealt with Jewish law as a way of bridging the religious Jewish culture with the secular Israeli experience.

Dorin Frankfurt, a leading fashion designer and one of Baruch’s closest friends said of him on Saturday: “Adam invented much of what we call true Israeli culture. It stemmed from his background, his roots. His hand was in everything: Art, writing… he had a profound understanding of whatever it is he was dealing with…He turned us into a cultural microcosm. Speaking of him in past tense is unbearable.”

In 2002, Baruch was given the AVI CHAI Fellowship award for his achievements in the field of culture. In explaining its selection, the award committee said Baruch “is an exceptional cultural mediator in the Israeli scene. In his extensive writing over the years he has been working on building an authentic, original bridge between the traditional Jewish language and the current Israeli dialect.”

An astute reader noticed that two significant Jewish women writers who died in 2007 were not on our list of notable 2007 Jewish deaths. So, we will make up for the oversight.

From Wikipedia:

Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007)

Born as Grace Goodside in the Bronx, Paley’s Jewish parents, Isaac and Manya Ridnyik Goodside, had Anglicizied the family name from Gutseit on immigrating from Ukraine. The family spoke Russian and Yiddish along with English. By far the youngest of the three Goodside children (sixteen and fourteen years younger than brother and sister Victor and Jeanne, respectively), Paley was a tomboy as a child, allowing her to investigate the conflicts and struggles of her immigrant neighborhood; these issues would later form the raw material for much of her fiction.

In 1938 and 1939, Paley attended Hunter College, then, briefly New York University, but she never received a degree. In the early 1940s, Paley studied with W.H. Auden at the New School for Social Research. Auden’s social concern and his heavy use of irony is often cited as an important influence on her early work, particularly her poetry.

She won many literary honors, including the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award for Literary Arts in 1994.

In a May 2007 interview with Vermont Woman newspaper – one of her last – Paley said of her dreams for her grandchildren: “It would be a world without militarism and racism and greed – and where women don’t have to fight for their place in the world.”

She died at home in Thetford, Vermont, on August 22, 2007, following a battle with breast cancer, aged 84.

Tillie Olsen (also from Wikipedia):

Tillie Lerner Olsen (January 14, 1912 – January 1, 2007) was an American writer associated with the political turmoil of 1930s and the first generation of American feminists.

Olsen was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in north Omaha, Nebraska, where she attended Lake School through the eighth grade. She dropped out of Omaha Central High School to enter the work force. Over the years Olsen worked in Omaha as a waitress, domestic worker, and meat trimmer. She was also a union organizer and political activist in the Socialist community. In the 1930s she was briefly a member of the American Communist party. She was briefly jailed in 1934 while organizing a packinghouse workers’ union, an experience she wrote about in The Nation and The Partisan Review. She later moved to Berkeley, California.

Olsen died on January 1, 2007, in Oakland, California.

Wall painting by Sol LeWitt

Here is the In My Heart list of notable 2007 Jewish deaths as reported in the trade media, New York Times, Canadian Press and elsewhere. This list certainly isn’t complete. First of all, we have left out most of the names you’ll find elsewhere on In My Heart. And we’re sure there are many others. Please send updates and corrections to us at In My Heart.

Teddy Kollek, 95, longtime mayor of Jerusalem, Jan. 2, 2007.

Steve Krantz, writer and producer, Jan. 4, 2007.

Michael Brecker, 57; jazz saxophonist, Jan. 13, 2007.

Harvey Cohen, 55, award-winning composer, Jan. 14, 2007.

Art Buchwald, writer, Jan. 17, 2007.

Sidney Sheldon, 89, Oscar, Tony and Emmy award-winning writer, producer and best selling novelist, Jan. 30, 2007.

Robert Adler, 93, co-inventor of the TV remote (Zenith Space Command, 1956), Feb. 15, 2007.

Ray Evans, 92, songwriter, Feb. 15, 2007.

Stuart Rosenberg, 79, director (“Cool Hand Luke”), Mar. 15, 2007.

Black Form Dedicated to the Missing Jews, Altona City Hall, Altona, Hamburg, Germany, 1987, by Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt, 78, conceptual artist, April 8, 2007.

Harry Rasky, 78, Canada, Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, April 9, 2007.

Kitty Carlisle Hart, 96, actress, singer, philanthropist, arts advocate, Apr. 18, 2007.

David Halberstam, 73, journalist, April 23. 2007.

Bernard Gordon, 88, screenwriter, blacklisted in the 1950s (“55 Days at
Peking”), May 11, 2007.

Baron Guy de Rothschild, 98, French, leader of global banking empire, June 13, 2007.

In 1979, the baron wrote an article in the French newspaper Le Monde accusing the Socialists of pandering to French anti-Semitism that said: “A Jew under Pétain, a pariah under Mitterrand — for me that is enough.”

Joel Siegel, 63, film critic, writer, Jun. 29, 2007.

Beverly Sills, opera singer, arts advocate, Jul. 2, 2007.

Hy Zaret, 99, Oscar-nominated lyricist (“Unchained Meolody”), Jul. 2, 2007.

Albert Ellis, 93, controversial psychotherapist, July 24, 2007.

Carolyn Goodman, 91, civil, human rights ctivist, Aug. 17, 2007.

Hilly Kristal, 75, New York City club owner (“CBGB” birthplace of punk),
Aug. 28, 2007.

Marcel Marceau, 84, French, mime, French Resistance fighter, Holocaust survivor, Sep. 22, 2007.

From Wikipedia: When he was 16, France entered the Second World War, and his Jewish family was forced to flee from Strasbourg, near the German border, to Limoges. His father, a kosher butcher, was arrested by the Gestapo and died in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.

Marcel and his older brother Alain adopted the last name “Marceau” in order to hide their Jewish origins; as a gesture of defiance, however, the name was chosen as a reference to François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers, a general of the French Revolution. The two brothers joined the French Resistance in Limoges, where they saved numerous Jewish children from concentration camps.

Joey Bishop, 89, comedian, actor, last surviving member of the “Rat Pack,” Oct. 17, 2007.

Arthur Kornberg, 89, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, Oct. 26, 2007.

Dina Rabinovitch, 44, U.K. columnist, Nov. 6, 2007.

Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch, 100, geneticist, Nov. 7, 2007.

Norman Mailer, 84, author, Nov. 10, 2007.

Ira Levin, 78, novelist,Tony-Award-nominated playwright, Nov. 12, 2007.

Peter Zinner, 88, Oscar-winning film editor, Nov. 13, 2007.

Freddie Fields, 84, Hollywood producer, talent agent, Dec. 11, 2007.

Freddie Fields and David Begelman created super agency CMA in 1959. They represented: Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Sidney Portier, Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman, among others. Fields produced such films as “Lipstick,” “American Gigolo,” “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” and “Glory.” His first wife was actress Polly Bergen; his second wife was actress and former Miss Universe Corinna Tsopei.

Joel Dorn, 65 jazz, pop producer, Dec. 17, 2007.

Gilbert Metz, 78, only known Holocaust survivor in Mississippi, Dec. 17, 2007.

Michael Kidd, 92, Hollywood, Broadway choreographer, Dec. 19, 2007.

Kidd won five Best Choreography Tony Awards and was nominated for another six. His other nominations included three Best Direction nods. Kidd received honorary Oscar in 1997.

Stu Nahan, 81, sportscaster, Dec. 26, 2007.

Jack Zander, 99, a pioneer and veteran in animation who continued in his field until his 90s, died Dec. 17, 2007. His work included animating Jerry (the mouse) in the first seven “Tom & Jerry” cartoons, now considered classics, TV specials, commercials and more.

Zander was a native of Michigan and was a BMW motorcycle driver until he was 91. According to some in the field, his entrepreneurial instincts, as well as work in commercials, has resulted in Zander having less of areputation than he otherwise deserves.

Animator Tom Sito (above R) and Jack Zander (L) in 1997

By Tom Sito

I worked for Jack Zander, and he was a friend. Jack began at the Rohmer Grey Studio in 1930. He started at Leon Schlesinger Studio in 1933 on the day Friz Freleng threatened to take the entire staff out if Leon didn’t pay them their back wages! He was one of the last surviving animators of the Hanna & Barbera’s MGM team that animated on the great Tom & Jerry shorts. I recall Kevin Petrilak once flipped for me a Jack Zander scene of Jerry he xeroxed from the personal collection of rough animation Friz Freleng kept at his office in Depatie-Freleng. Jerry dancing about the prostrate Tom with a THE END sign. It was very good. Jack was also one of the first presidents of the Screen Cartoonists Guild, and he ran two of the most successful commercial animation studios on Madison Avenue, Pelican and Zander’s Animation Parlour.

When I got to work for him as a freelance assistant in 1978, I knew I had finally made the big time. His studio was one of the best. Jack used some of the best assistant animators in the business, including Jim Logan, Ellsworth Barthen, Ed Cerrillo and Helen Komar, plus elder statesmen like Preston Blair, Emery Hawkins and Clyde Geronimi. He gave a lot of young people a chance, like Dean Yeagle, Nancy Beiman, Dan Haskett and Juan Sanchez. Jack was a man of taste, who never forgot his roots as a studio animator. As he aged gracefully, he maintained a dry wit that was a lot of fun.

He liked to ride a Harley Davidson motorcycle and rode his Hog across the U.S. to get his Annie (Animator’s) Award. This while near 90 years old. He only stopped riding his Harley when he suffered a spill on a road in South Carolina that banged him up. He was 92 then.

(In My Heart Editor: A correspondent shown in a comment below saying Zander was her uncle corrects the blogger to say Zander rode BMW’s. Very different bikes.)

He gave one of the best Annie Award speeches ever, in my humble opinion.

“Getting this award at this great age kinda reminds me of the joke about the two old men walking down a road until one encountered a talking frog. The frog said, “I am not a real frog, but an enchanted princess. Kiss me and I shall turn into a beautiful woman and do any erotic thing your heart desires!” The man pocketed the frog and they walked on. After a while the man’s companion said to him, “Aren’t you going to kiss her?” The old man replied: “When you reach my age, sometimes you’d rather have a talking frog. Thank you.

He contributed a lot about his past to my book,”Drawing the Line,” and was giving me notes up to this past spring. He used to send me long faxes, labeled Jax Fax; then he was on the Internet. My condolences to Mark and the family.

Adieu Jack. I hope you are at the celestial version of Costello’s Bar now, having a drink with old pals like Friz Freleng, Joe Barbera and Bill Tytla. Age may have finally stilled your noble heart, but on the screen, Jerry continues to dance merrily, imbued with your indefatigable spirit. New generations of children continue to laugh at his antics. And so this is the way of the animator. For in this way, you live on.

Reprinted with permission from Tom Sito.

Rosemarie Koczy, 68, who survived a childhood in German concentration camps and later spent years creating searing art infused with images of Holocaust victims, died from breast cancer Dec. 12, 2007.

Her works have been gaining increasing stature, despite her status as an art world “outsider,” that is, someone who was not believed to be formally trained in art and who did not travel in art world circles. Her art, including tapestries and pen-and-ink drawings, has been shown in the U.S., Japan and Europe.

A New York Times review of a 1998 “Outsider” art show said:

Yad Vashem, the Israel Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Jerusalem, this year bought her “Deportation Train of the Children,” a 16-foot pine carving of intertwined human figures.

According to the New York Sun, Koczy, three years old at the time, was transported to a concentration camp at Traunstein, the hometown of Pope Benedict XVI. She was sent to a second camp, where she spent the remainder of the war.

After the war, Koczy and a surviving sister lived with her grandparents, and then in a Catholic orphanage, where she trained as a seamstress. Koczy later studying tapestry at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Geneva, Switzerland. As her work became known in work became known in Europe, she came to know Peggy Guggenheim, the art patron.

Koczy’s husband, Louis Pelosi, told newspapers Koczy’s work went from decorative tapestries to addressing her heritage as a Jewish Holocaust survivor. She located family members, some in graveyards and some yet living, but most of the reunions ended up chilly, Pelosi the Sun.

She began producing pen-and-ink images of children and grotesques in the death camps and produced some 12,000 pieces by her death. Her exhibitions included the statement, “The drawings I make every day are titled, ‘I Weave You a Shroud.’ They are burials I offer to those I saw die in the camps.”

“Because surviving the concentration camps as a child, she was marked by that her whole life,” Pelosi told the Westchester Journal News. “She was burying each one of the people she had seen die in the camps.”

Koczy met Pelosi, a composer, during a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Koczy founded a community art school outside Geneva in the 1970s, and taught hundreds students at her Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., studio. She also taught elderly and disabled residents. She became an American citizen in 1989.

According to the Sun, she suffered from depression, was occasionally hospitalized, and had limited use of her hands due to repetitive motion trauma from her compulsive image-making near the end of her life.

A review of her work in a 2002 show at Swedish Prince Eugen’s Waldermarsudde Museum titled “Solitary beings – Art by odd persons from the collection of Eternod-Mermod, Lausanne,” published in a newsletter on schizophrenia said:

“Rosemarie Koczy’s pictures are, like her destiny, deeply shocking. She remembers in detail the deportation and the life at the concentration camps. With black pen-and-ink drawings she mediates impressions from these painful experiences. The author Allen S. Weiss has said that Rosmarie Koczy has created ‘an esthetic method whose conclusions are ethic, a horrible vision of the ghostly beauty and the forbidden truth.’”

Koczy was given a traditional Jewish burial, despite eschewing most religious observances during her life.

“We used to light a Menorah every Friday night to remember the missing members of her family,” Pelosi told the Sun. “A rabbi told her, ‘With what you’ve been through, don’t you dare fast on Yom Kippur.”

Koczyis survived by her husband, as well as a sister, Gasela Grob, and a half-brother, Walter Wusthoff, both of Germany.

Reminiscences

Remembering my father, Michael H. Abbey, 27 years later

Remembering Harvey Milk, gay activist, assassin’s victim

Obituaries

Karen Elizabeth Margalit, 29, U.S., Israel, Sept. 26

Howard Zimmerman, 64, U.S., developer, Nov. 15

Paul Brach, 83, U.S., artist, Nov. 16

Hollis Alpert, 91, U.S., film critic, author, Nov. 18

Pauline Weinstein Ledeen, 97, U.S., prison volunteer, ‘Bubbe Teresa,’ Nov. 27

Moses M. Weinstein, 95, U.S., politician, judge, Nov. 30

Seymour Benzer, 86, U.S., biologist, Nov. 30

Maayan Rotenberg, 18, Israel, soldier, accident, Nov. 30

Donald G. Kurtz, 64, U.S., decorated war veteran, Dec. 1

Nissen Pinson, 89, Russian, French, Chabad rabbi, Dec. 2

Larry Wachtel, 77, U.S., stock analyst, Dec. 2

Sherman Dreiseszun, 85, U.S., real estate developer, Dec. 2

Shulamit Lack, 83, Hungary, U.S., WWII resistance fighter, Dec. 3

Mel Cheren, 75, U.S., disco impresario, AIDS activist, Dec. 7

Ben Kane, 97, U.S., played for Rockne at Notre Dame, Dec. 7

Murray Klein, 84, U.S., Zabar’s co-owner, Dec. 7

Walter Gerson, 85, U.S., businessman, Army chaplain, Dec. 8

Elli Kohen, 77, Turkey, U.S., professor, Dec. 9

Vitali Hakko, 94, Turkey, leading fashion designer, Dec. 10

Gordon Samuels, 84, U.K., Australia, lawyer, jurist, Dec. 10

News

Herzl’s grandson reburied in Jerusalem with family

Prominent Jewish deaths Dec. 1-7: Ben-Gurion, Copland, Klemperer

Mel Cheren, 75, a music producer once named the “Godfather of Disco,” an AIDS activist, and owner of a gay-friendly inn in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, died Friday, Dec. 7, 2007.

Cheren was a double minority: gay and Jewish, an Army veteran, a music industry veteran of 50 years, and an indefatigable promoter and self-promoter. Cheren was actively involved with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and started 24 Hours For Life in 1987, a non-profit organization of music and media professionals who raised money for AIDS awareness.

The late and lamented website Jewsrock described Mel Cheren as the “Godfather of Everything That Moves.” The article said that much of today’s music “hip-hop, punk-funk, techno, house – anything with a beat – shares its DNA with the music played at the Paradise Garage,” a massive downtown New York club Cheren and his partner Michael Brody ran from 1977 to 1987.

Before and since the club has closed, Cheren’s West End Records also has played a key role in dance club and hip hop culture by providing the raw material for the sampling of old tunes that is a hallmark of hip hop, as well as some of the seminal recordings, as well.

Jewsrock said:

The Paradise Garage is the Eden of BPM culture, Cheren its Adam. It would be too easy to say that Cheren, a gay Jewish kid who came of age in the 1950s, is an unlikely icon of post-modern groove. But popular music history proves that agents of profound cultural change are just as likely to be behind the boards as in front of them (think Sam Phillips creating the spectral sound of Sun Studios or Phil Spector laying down the primal, kick drum beats of “Be My Baby.”)

Like Phillips and Spector, Cheren both reacted against something and saw an opening for something new. As an employee of ABC/Paramount Records in the 1950s, he recoiled at the saccharine sounds of Pat Boone. Later, working at Scepter Records in the 1960s, after falling in love with the orchestral soul sound coming out of Philadelphia, Cheren imagined a moment when DJs (and dancers, too) would want those lush grooves extended over the length of an entire song.

With that background, In My Heart is pleased to present you with an interview conducted with Mel Cheren by Claes “Discoguy” Widlund on his website, disco-disco.com:

Discoguy: West End Records was formed in 1976, by Mel Cheren and Ed Kushins and according to Mel, West End was one of these things that just happens. He and Ed were colleagues at Scepter Records, and when Scepter was closing down in 1975 they had to do something and they decided to start their own business.

Mel had been the head of production for Scepter, and he was one of the guys who started the Disco Era. Some other stuff he “invented” was to put an instrumental version of the song on the B-side of Scepter’s singles; for this new idea Scepter won Billboard’s Trend Setter Of The Year Award.

Besides this, and even more important: He created the first 12″ single. This was still at Scepter.

Mel Cheren: “The idea came from Tom Moulton, because he suggested that if we put the record on 12″ we could spread the grooves and make it hotter for the club DJ’s. We were the first company to put it out for DJ’s. SalSoul put their first 12″ record out at about the same time on commercial with “Ten percent” by Double Exposure. That’s how it came about to the fact that you could spread the grooves and make it hotter than in the 45 records.”

Discoguy: We all know how important the 12″ single has been to DJ’s all over the world ever since. So, in 1976 Mel and Ed founded West End Records. They got the name from the location of their office, which was located close to Broadway in Manhattan’s theater district – the West End. Their address was 254 W. 54 Street, an address that soon would be known to the rich and famous, the fashion pack and disco lovers all over, as… Studio 54. Actually, it just so happened that both these legendary Disco “institutions” were located in the same building.

(IMH Editor’s note: The Jewsrock article quotes Cheren from his self-published autobiography, “Keep On Dancin: My Life and the Paradise Garage,” as writing that Cheren and Brody refused to kowtow to disco’s increasingly glitzy, classist sensibility: “Standing on a pedestal outside the door, picking and choosing, Mark the doorman resembled some elitist Nazi youth.” His club had a membership policy, complete with photo ID cards, but it sought “democracy on the dance floor. At the Garage, drag queens, outer-borough gays, and even celebs like Mick Jagger, Eddie Murphy, Diana Ross, and Keith Haring mixed. Cheren later dedicated part of his Chelsea inn to a gallery of artwork by Haring, the gay graffiti artist who died of AIDS at 32).

The record label’s first release and hit was an album called, “Sessamatto,” which was actually a soundtrack to an Italian movie. This record, Mel tells me, was, according to Grand Master Flash, the first record to be used in the first rap and scratch records. Mel knew from the first time he heard this rap record that this would become a whole own music style. And time has really proved him right: rap and hip-hop really are its own genres these days.

Discoguy: Since West End was (and still is) one of the hottest Disco labels, what was it that made it so hot? Is there anything special you can think of?

Mel Cheren: “I think you have to be into the music and I have always had this love for music. I have always loved black music, R’n'B tunes with a good melody and lyrics, and I have always loved to dance. I’ve always heard we had a special sound, but ’til today I still don’t know what that was… If I liked a song – We would put it out!”

Discoguy: This may sound simple, but it’s really hard to pick out good songs to release. I guess this shows that Mel is one of these talented people who always can hear a hit at once. Besides being able to spot a hit song, Mel was also one of the first and one of the driving forces behind this new dance music genre, Disco, and the whole Disco era. If it wouldn’t have been for pioneers like him and labels like West End and Prelude (another New York Disco label) the Disco scene probably wouldn’t have become as powerful as it became in the late 1970s.

In an article called, “A Retrospective of Disco,” by Stephanie Shepherd, featured in “Dance Music Report” in 1982, Stephanie dubbed Mel, “The Godfather of Disco.” Did Mel really like Disco music during that period or did he just consider it as a job?

Mel Cheren: Did I like it? That was the only reason I did it. I kept on putting it out because I used to go dancing. And ’til this day I still do.

Discoguy: It seems like many people were in the business just to make money.

MC: Oh, that’s why that separates eh… the serious… it separates the men from the boys. I mean I did it for the love for the music. And I was very fortunate to get into the music business and I loved it. You cannot do a good job if you don’t have passion for what you do.

Discoguy: We already know of the close location to Studio 54, but actually West End Records was closer to another of the world’s most famous and legendary clubs – the Paradise Garage.

MC: (The late) Michael Brody was my life partner, so the connection to the Garage was natural. I’ve got lots of memories of (the late) Larry Levan and the Garage that’s very important to me.

Discoguy: Cheren shares much more of his memories of Larry, the Garage, his life, West End Records and the whole Disco Era in his book – “Keep on Dancin’,” which was released in 2000. If you are interested in Mel, WestEnd and Paradise Garage – Buy this book.

MC: I really hope someone would like to make a movie out of the book and that for the movie would restore the Garage to its original condition. And then open it again with a diner in the bottom floor, which never was used before, like the Hard Rock Cafe or Planet Hollywood. I really wish the profit should go to charity. Also, I’ve got the ashes of the late Larry Levan and I would like to have the urn with the ashes in the entrance of the Garage, so the fans from all over would be able to see it.”

(In My Heart editor: Mel got his part of his wish, at least. A documentary, “The Godfather of Disco,” focusing on Cheren, Paradise Garage and the rise of disco was released last year. See a generally praiseworthy review of the movie here.

Discoguy: Have you got any other special memories or comments on some of the West End acts, Larry Levan or something else?

MC: I’ve got too much memories to tell. That’s basically the whole book. But everything of Michael, Larry, the Garage and the whole start of the Disco era is very precious to me.

Discoguy: As the 12″ single lover I am, we got into talking about how many 12″ singles that came out on West End during the years. Mel can’t remember the exact number, but they started at number 1 and they reached somewhere over 150 releases. I think it’s more like around 175 releases. So, the next question is naturally: Which was West End’s biggest hit?

MC: It’s “Hot Shot” (Karen Young). It sold over 800,000 copies and that’s one of the biggest selling 12″ singles in the Disco history. But, these days “Heartbeat” (Taana Gardner) is even bigger since it has been sampled several times, and Ini Kamoze used it in “Here Comes the Hotstepper,” which became a # 1 hit in many countries all over the world. “Heartbeat” also sold over 800,000 copies.

Discoguy: I asked if Mel had any personal favorites among his West End releases. But Mel thinks it’s like if you have many kids, you love them all and it’s impossible to pick one favorite.

MC: So, it’s very difficult to pick one that stands out of all of them. There are many that have a very special meaning to me.

Discoguy: West End Prelude Both West End and Prelude Records were New York labels, have you got any idea why New York labels released so many songs that’s considered Disco classics today? I mean many of the other bigger labels didn’t release that many classics.

MC: Well, just because that we were small independent labels. The same way it is today. The small labels are the ones that are on the cutting edge, you know. When you’re on the street and you know what’s going on. And the major labels always copy the small labels… And why in New York?! Because that’s where all excitement started. It wasn’t in California it was here in New York… All the excitement with the Garage, the Loft, the Gallery, Studio 54 and the Saint. Those were the clubs… Then things happened out in California, but at that period most record companies’ offices were in New York. It wasn’t until years later that lots of them moved to California.

Reprinted courtesy of Disco-Disco

“Rolling Stone” named Cheren one of “Disco’s Top Thirty” in 1979. Cheren received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dance Music Hall of Fame in 2005.

AIDS charitable activities

Cheren was involved with the development of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the world’s first AIDS service organization. Cheren and his friends organized the first AIDS fundraiser, the “Showers” party at the Paradise Garage. He owned a single room occupancy brownstone on West 22nd Street in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, and donated the building to GMHC in 1982 to use as headquarters. West End Records helped provide seed money for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus Benefit for GMHC in 1983 in Madison Square Garden, the largest AIDS fundraiser yet produced.

“Personally, I have known over 500 people who have died of AIDS. I put together 24 Hours For Life so that they will not have died in vain,” Cheren said on the record company’s website. “When you want do something without taking a profit for yourself, people are always suspicious of an ulterior motive. Frankly, if knowing 500 who have died of AIDS isn’t a good enough reason, I don’t know what is.”

Business and art

Following GMHC’s departure from the building, Cheren renovated the building to make a home for himself and to create a gay-friendly, the Colonial House Inn.

Cheren is also an artist. His works have been on 10 album covers, five of which were nominated for Grammy Awards. Others line the walls of Colonial House.

According to the West End website, a tribute event for Cheren is being planned around his birthday, January 21.

Paul Brach, 83, an artist and educator whose late work expressed the eternal Jewish struggle of man’s relationship with God, died Nov. 16, 2007, a few weeks before a major exhibit of his recent work was scheduled to open.

Elly Flomenhaft, co-director of the New York gallery where Brach’s work will be exhibited beginning Dec. 6, said Brach knew he was dying from prostate cancer, and his desire to complete the show kept him going.

“He was creating some of the last works for this show,” she told In My Heart in an exclusive interview. “It was so special to him. It kept him up and painting. He knew he might not make it to this show, and he was thrilled it might happen.”

Brach was born in New York City and lived in Brooklyn until he was 14. He was both a product of and a rebel against his comfortable, upper middle class, liberal Jewish upbringing. He attended the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School. Brach once described the Ethical Culture movement as being “like Unitarianism for the children of Jewish socialists.”

At 14, his family moved to Riverdale, where he attended Fieldston School, and when he decided to be an artist. Brach also continued riding horses and spent several summers on an Arizona ranch.

In a 1971 interview for Archives of American Art on its project “The Art World in Transition,” Brach said: “One break from the sort of upper middle-class Jewish, New York privilege was that I spent my summers working on ranches in Arizona during my teen years. I had this whole fantasy about the west which meant freedom and getting away from a kind of constriction.” Images of the American West remained in his art over the years, as well.

The New York Times obituary of Brach summarized the arc of his art thusly:

“Brach evolved from Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s to monochromatic Minimalism in the ’60s. From the ’70s on he produced simplified landscapes of the American West with horses galloping through them. In recent paintings he blended geometric abstraction and spacey, cosmic atmospheres.”

After college at the University of Iowa, Brach served in the U.S. Army in World War Two before finding his way back to New York City, where he and his wife Miriam Schapiro joined the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist art circle. According to information on the Flomenhaft Gallery website, they both worked in Hayter’s Studio 17 in Greenwich Village and met artists such as Joan Mitchell, Mike Goldberg, Larry Rivers and gallery owners such as Leo Castelli.

In 1969 Brach became the founding dean of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts. “Cal Arts” is now one of the best U.S. art schools. According to the Times, Brach hired John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow and the critic Max Kozloff, among others and helped create a “freewheeling experimental atmosphere” out of which emerged artists like David Salle, Eric Fischl, Barbara Bloom and Jack Goldstein.

Brach returned to New York in 1975 and became chairman of Division of the Arts of Fordham University at Lincoln Center. He and Miriam moved permanently to East Hampton in 1998 and was without a dealer until 2005, when his work was picked up by Flomenhaft Gallery.

His 2005 show there received strong reviews, and he was a favorite of renowned art historian and critic Leo Steinberg: “I’m over here to see Paul Brach’s show (at Flomenhaft Gallery),” Steinberg told Artnet magazine in 2005, which referred to Brach’s spiritual striving in his work: “Back in 1964, in Art International magazine, Steinberg called Brach’s simple yet opaque paintings “the invisibility of an encompassing, undifferentiated homogeneity,” then asked rhetorically, “can it be painted, this ineffable, metaphysical One?”

New York Times art critic Grace Glueck said of the 2005 show:

“Paul Brach’s subject is nothing less than the cosmos in this show of paintings that cover more than a decade, and invoke infinity by means of orbs, circles and luminous color effects….

“He takes a more metaphysical approach in ‘The Geometry of Faith,’ a circle halved by a bar, one half glowing white, the other black, radiating out to gray, on an ethereal gray ground. A legend underneath proclaims, ‘I Form the Light, and Create Darkness.’

“This show [is] a welcome reactivation.”

As far back as the 1960s Brach was interested in exploring spiritual subjects in his art. He said:

“In 1964, I was invited to make lithographs at the Tamarind Lithographic Workshop, then in LA. My friend, the late Arthur Cohen, a novelist and a theologian, suggested that we collaborate on a series of prints that would illustrate Arthur’s propositions about the relationship of mankind to God. We called it The Negative Way.”

Flomenhaft said Brach’s works show that “one of the great things about great learned men is that they are always struggling with their relationship with God. You must see ‘Sinai’ in person. You will see the tablets [of the Ten Commandments] and Sinai below it, and you will see the web of the world around it. It glows with an inner light.”

She said the Brach’s work expresses that God is that being who has that center, but the circumferences – the edges – blur. That’s because the end – the infinity – of God is everywhere and nowhere. He couldn’t make it exact.”

Brach was modest and honest about his relative lack of success in the heady 1950s and 1960s, as compared to some of his friends and colleagues. In the 1971 interview, he said:

“It was a kind of meritocracy; that is, almost everybody I knew was very good at what they did. It seems that the people who were stumbling never found themselves. Downtown loft life was accessible. But sort of East Village drug life was not accessible, nor did I want it. And most of my friends were a little too old to be involved with a heavy drug scene although there was and remains a good deal of alcoholism.

“In comparison with some of my very good friends like Lichtenstein and Bob Rauschenberg, etc., my success has not been that much. I made it. So that leaving New York was not a sour grapes situation. Although, if your friends are selling a quarter of a million dollars a year and buying buildings downtown and taking off to Europe at the drop of a hat to have another show, etc., you begin to feel a little stuck. And you begin to wonder how corrosive a competitive mentality becomes anyway.

Besides Schapiro, Brach’s survivors include his son and a brother.

Dec. 1

David Ben-Gurion, 87, Israel, founding prime minister, 1973

Sid Raymond, 97, U.S., actor, voice of cartoon character Baby Huey, 2006

Hugo Haas, 67, Czech, U.S., actor, 1968. Buried in Jewish Cemetery in Brno, Czech Republic.

Dec. 2

Nadine Renee (Renee Shamir), 32, U.S., singer, 2004

Joey Adams (b. Joseph Abramowitz), 88, U.S., comedian, 1999. Ashes with wife, New York Post columnist Cindy Adams.

Aaron Copland (Cohen), 90, U.S., “dean of American composers, 1990. Ashes scattered throughout Tanglewood Music Center in the Bershire Mountains of Massachusetts

Marty Feldman, 49, U.S., comedian, 1982

Dec. 3

Madeline Kahn, 57, U.S., actress, 1999

Elizabeth Meyer Glaser, 47, U.S., social reformer, 1994

Aaron Schreier, 72, U.S. architect, 2003 (WTC architect)

Henry Shorr, 38, U.S., gangster (Purple Gang), 1934. Body never found.

Dec. 4

Greg Hoffman, 42, U.S., film producer, 2005

Bert Lahr (b. Irving Lahrheim), 72, U.S., actor (Cowardly Lion, “Wizard of Oz”), 1967

Hannah Arendt, 69, U.S. political scientist, philosopher 1975

Dec. 5

Herbert Henry Lehman, 85, U.S., politician, 1963. Among founders of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (“the Joint”)

Edward Lewis Wallant, 36, U.S. writer, 1962. Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award remembers Wallant’s contribution to Jewish letters, and honors a Jewish-American writer for fiction that has significance for the American Jew.”

Dec. 6

Michael Zaslow, 55, U.S., actor (“Lou Grant,” “Star Trek”), 1998

Sammy Fain, 87, U.S., composer, 1989

Dec. 7

Werner Klemperer, 80, Germany, U.S., actor (Col. Klink, “Hogan’s Heroes”), conductor, 2000

Nat Hiken, 54, U.S., writer, producer, director (“Sgt. Bilko,” “Car 54, Where Are You”), 1968

Rube Goldberg, 87, U.S., cartoonist, 1970

Edward “Mogul” Gottlieb, 81, U.S., Basketball Pioneer, 1979

Hannnah Greenbaum Solomon, 84, U.S., social activist, 1942

Obituaries

Samuel Steinfeld, 101, U.S., lawyer, state chief justice, Nov. 22

Sarit Weiss, 23, Israel, possible alcohol overdose, Nov. 23

Claire Flom, 82, U.S., philanthropist, Nov. 24

Herb Strauss, 78, U.S., ad exec, cantor, fund-raiser, Nov. 25

Mel Tolkin, 94, U.S., pioneering TV comedy writer, Nov. 26

Tributes

Remembering Paul Wasserman, ultimate music, film publicist

TV writer remembers Mel Tolkin

Remembering Norman Mailer: ‘Who’s da broad?’, ‘No more BS’

My dad, David Weinberg, most influential in my life

Historical Figures

Luis de Carvajal the Younger, Spain, Mexico, Inquisition martyr, 17 Kislev 5357

News

Giant Nazi archive open to public after 60 years

Baltimore cemetery, gravestones vandalized