When a pop legend whose songs you’ve been singing for a lifetime turns 70, some might contemplate their own mortality. Celebrating David Broza’s milestone birthday today invites the opposite conclusion. Listening to his greatest hits got me thinking about his immortality – and ours.
Broza has been famous forever. In 1977, when he was 21, his exquisite, optimistic, hope-generating “Yihiyeh Tov,” – it’ll be good – became an instant classic. The Grammy-award-winning music producer, Steve Greenberg, notes that although that remains “Broza’s signature song,” which we will keep singing decades from now, “he achieved his greatest mass popularity in Israel with his interpretations of Spanish romantic songs on his 1983 album Haisha She’iti – the woman with me.
That album was, for a very long time, the biggest selling album in the history of Israel and made him a superstar. It demonstrates the range of Broza’s music and his ability to absorb influences from various cultures to create something uniquely his own. His music is very Israeli, but also completely international – reflecting his Israeli, Spanish, and British roots.
Still energetic and compelling, Broza just keeps performing. He, Gidi Gov, Yehudit Ravitz, and Yoni Rechter are wowing Israelis with their HaKeves HaShisha Asar (The 16th lamb) reunion tour – that eternally charming children’s album for adults, too.
“I work non-stop – that’s what makes me happy,” Broza told me this Sunday. Watching him perform, you realize he’s not fighting age – he’s just being himself. Plucking, banging, strumming, away, he embodies the miracle of music. All he’s got is wood, metal, plastic, a strategically-placed hole. With that – and his heavenly hands – this virtuoso generates timeless, entrancing melodies, which illuminate our lives.
Humble beginnings
Calling himself a “living troubadour with a Don Quixote mind,” this Israeli dreamer exudes a quintessentially Zionist optimism. “Some think the fools are the ones who don’t know,” he notes, “but fools are the ones who make their way – reading Shakespeare, they’re always the wisest ones.”
Born “gifted with a very positive outlook,” he has inspired generations to realize that “if you don’t fill your half-filled cup with positive thoughts, it’s easy to become bitter.” He adds: “Maimonides and our elders didn’t promise us a rose garden, but they teach us to look for the positive direction, and stay on the path.”
Growing up in a young, primitive Israel, Broza wandered the streets as a six-year-old, distributing milk, rolls, and his smile. The smile “was something of a rare commodity in our neighborhood, barely 15 years after the Holocaust, in war-clouded Israel,” he recalls. Learning to detect rays of light amidst the gloomy conditions, he prepared his generation “to create the Israel of today – ready to fight when necessary, but always seizing any chance to live, to laugh.”
Making music and peace
“David Broza believes in the power of the possible,” Greenberg says. “Against great obstacles, he recorded the East Jerusalem/West Jerusalem album in a Sheikh Jarrah studio with a combined Israeli/Palestinian band in 2013.” Fearing boycotts and Palestinians’ anti-normalization campaign, some musicians hesitated. But Broza was relentless.
“After a couple of days in the studio, the wary musicians began to appear, one by one, sometimes drawn by the promise of a festive communal dinner at the end of each day’s sessions, and David’s vision was realized,” the famed music producer remembers. “Those dinners may well have been as powerful as the album itself in personifying the ideal of understanding and friendship that David was striving for.”
Greenberg explains: “David brings the same can-do spirit to making peace as he does to making music. Rather than waiting for governments to make peace, he endeavors in his everyday life to make peace with individuals, believing that if enough individual Israelis make peace with individual Palestinians and vice versa, a wider peace will inevitably follow.”
The album, which Greenberg co-produced, also resulted in an uplifting documentary.
Post-October 7 performances
Broza is not naive. These years have been trying for him – and his beloved Israel. Appalled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government from the moment it formed – and shattered like everyone else by October 7 – Broza did what Broza does. He started playing and playing, performing over 300 shows: for soldiers, the wounded, the displaced, Jews and non-Jews alike. Sometimes, he brought crowds to tears. Sometimes – as in one October 16, 2023, video that went viral – he sang the sweetest “You’ve Got a Friend” duet with a female Ethiopian-Israeli soldier, in full combat gear cradling a massive M4 assault rifle.
Broza was amazed. “I could see then, and can still see – amid all the worry, misery, fatigue, the darkness in their souls – all these Israelis keep a brightness in their eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he marvels. “There’s an essence, a vitality on our side I haven’t seen anywhere else. We see a problem – we fight to correct it. But Israelis never stop singing, gathering to sing, and enjoying what life can give them. I’m ‘sorry’ to disappoint our enemies,” he concludes, “but our zest for life keeps us going.”
On June 14, just after the Iranians bombarded Israel, I entered the King David Hotel with my son-in-law, who was checking on friends. The staff ushered us into the deep recesses of the hotel, where the few guests were sheltering. There, at the long end of this seemingly endless, concrete hall, I saw David Broza, with a guitar on his back.
This reassuring image exuded perseverance, normalcy, hope: the forever troubadour, armed to inspire. He knows we cannot sing our troubles away. But when we fight and smile and sing despite our troubles, we remind ourselves – and the world – of Broza’s, Zionism’s, and Judaism’s eternal message: Yehiyeh Tov – it won’t just be good… but great.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath, were just published.