The BEST: Porgy and Bess

Chaim Strauchler relaunches his popular “The BEST” series, a bi-weekly feature in which writers consider what things “out there” make us think and feel. What elements in our culture still inspire us to live better? We seek to share what we find that might still be described as “the best that has been thought and said.” Click here to read about “The BEST” and to see the index of all columns in this series.

Summary

George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) blurred the boundaries between “high” art and popular idioms, creating a distinctively American sound. Described by the Gershwins as a “folk opera,” it adapts DuBose Heyward’s novel about the fictional African American community of Catfish Row. Through the story of Porgy, a disabled beggar, and his troubled love for Bess, the opera explores love, violence, addiction, and resilience. Musically, it fuses operatic form with blues, jazz, and spirituals, producing enduring songs such as “Summertime” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Although criticized for its racial representations, Porgy and Bess remains a landmark of the American stage—both an act of cultural appropriation and of genuine synthesis.

Why this is “The BEST”

Great art probes universal human struggles—love, faith, doubt, and dignity. Our “The BEST” project asks how such art might deepen religious life. Judaism has long existed both within and as a subject of the world’s greatest works. From Shakespeare’s Shylock to Rembrandt’s “The Jewish Bride,” Jews have been portrayed through lenses that reflect admiration and prejudice alike. “The BEST” therefore demands discernment: it invites appreciation, but also critique.

The Gershwin brothers—born Jacob and Israel Gershwine—embody this tension. As Jews creating American art, they brought their own spiritual language into their compositions. In Porgy and Bess, their song “It Ain’t Necessarily So” draws directly from Jewish liturgy (heretically suggesting “the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible ain’t necessarily so”). Musicologist Howard Pollack notes that its opening phrase mirrors Birkat HaTorah, the blessing recited before reading from the Torah. The line “It ain’t necessarily so” corresponds melodically to Barkhu et Hashem ham’vorakh, even including a congregational-style response.

Here the Gershwins’ Jewish inheritance is both preserved and inverted: the melody of blessing becomes a vehicle for skepticism. The song’s charm conceals a deeper irony—the sacred sound of Torah transformed into a declaration of doubt. In seeking to create a new American voice, the Gershwins synthesized multiple musical traditions, including their own, but in doing so, they subverted their source.

This duality lies at the heart of this TraditionOnline series. Great works can uplift and unsettle at once. To engage them is to filter; to recognize beauty without surrendering judgment. Porgy and Bess honors the dignity of African American experience even as it reflects the prejudices of its time. Likewise, “Summertime” may celebrate ease and abundance—but the religious seeker must ask whether such ease is truly life’s highest good. To pursue “The BEST” is therefore to listen deeply to hear not only what art says beautifully, but what it teaches about how, and why, we live.

Chaim Strauchler, an associate editor of TRADITION, is rabbi of Cong. Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck.