Thanks to Joan Swirsky and Kelleigh Nelson for the story behind Somewhere Over the Rainbow reproduced below, explaining its connection with Israel. Click the red arrow above to hear Judy Garland singing the song.

Did you also know that Irving Berlin, born Israel Beilin, gave us the song White Christmas and God Bless America? There is no limit to the depth of genius embedded within the Jewish Nation.

Gibber! Gibber!

Chugley

So beautiful and so true!

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Did you know that Somewhere Over the Rainbow, regarded as one of the 
best songs ever written, was a song written about Israel? The lyrics 
were written by Yip Harburg. He was the youngest of four children born 
to Russian Jewish immigrants. His real name was Isidore Hochberg, and 
he grew up in a Yiddish speaking Orthodox Jewish home in New York

The music was written by Harold Arlen, a Cantor’s son. His real name 
was Hyman Arluck, and his parents were from Lithuania. Together, 
Hochberg and Arluck wrote Somewhere Over the Rainbow, which was voted 
the 20th century’s number one song by the Recording Industry 
Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In writing it, the two men reached deep into their immigrant Jewish 
consciousness framed by the pogroms of the past and the Holocaust 
about to happen–and wrote an unforgettable melody set to near prophetic

words.

Read the lyrics in their Jewish context and suddenly the words are no 
longer about wizards and Oz, but about Jewish survival:

Somewhere over the rainbow

Way up high,

There’s a land that I heard of

Once in a lullaby.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Skies are blue,

And the dreams that you dare to dream

Really do come true.

Someday I’ll wish upon a star

And wake up where the clouds are far behind me.

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

Way above the chimney tops

That’s where you’ll find me.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Bluebirds fly.

Birds fly over the rainbow.

Why then, oh why can’t I?

If happy little bluebirds fly

Beyond the rainbow

Why, oh why can’t I

The Jews of Europe could not fly. They could not escape beyond the

rainbow.

Harburg was almost prescient when he talked about wanting to fly like 
a bluebird away from the “chimney tops.” In the post Auschwitz era, 
chimney tops have taken on a whole new meaning than the one they had 
at the beginning of 1939. The land that the Jews heard of “once in a 
lullaby” was not America, but Israel. The remarkable thing would be 
that fewer than ten years after Somewhere Over the Rainbow was first 
published, the exile was over and the State of Israel was reborn.

Perhaps the “dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”