Billy Joel Breaks Silence On Wearing Yellow Star At Concert
Image by Getty Images
Billy Joel made headlines last August for wearing a yellow star to his sold-out Madison Square Garden concert, which came on the heels of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally.
Joel didn’t make a public comment about the star at the time, but in a new interview with Vulture, he broke his silence regarding his provocative choice, which inspired copycats like Nev Schulman of the MTV show “Catfish.”
“Wearing the Star of David wasn’t about politics. To me, what happened in Charlottesville was like war,” Joel said. “When Trump said there were good people on both sides — there are no good Nazis. There are no good Ku Klux Klan people. Don’t equivocate that shit. I think about my old man: Most of his family was murdered in Auschwitz. He was able to get out but then got drafted and went in the U.S. Army. He risked his life in Europe to defeat Nazism. A lot of men from his generation did the same thing. So when those guys see punks walking around with swastikas, how do they keep from taking a baseball bat and bashing those crypto-Nazis over the head? Those creeps are going to march through the streets of my country? Uh-uh. I was personally offended. That’s why I wore that yellow star. I had to do something, and I didn’t think speaking about it was going to be as impactful.”
After Joel wore the star, his daughter, Alexa Ray Joel, tweeted her support for his decidedly Jewish act: “THAT’S MY POP! Proud Jewish New Yorker Through & Through!!!!”
Juliana Kaplan is a news intern at The Forward. Email her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter, @julianamkaplan
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
