Just hours after Dolly Parton’s death Aug. 25, a cowardly anonymous vandal imposed a swastika on her photo on Wikipedia, along with the words, “Jew lover.” A look at Parton’s long history shows she was an unapologetic opponent of Jew-hatred and drew on Jewish traditions in her music. Two of Parton’s most popular songs, “Coat of Many Colors” and “The Master’s Hand” drew on Old Testament themes. And she shared close working relationships with Jews throughout her career.
Parton credited Sandy Gallin with helping her make the “crossover” from country music to pop, and co-founded a successful film and TV production company with him.
“We were from two completely different worlds, but we just clicked, somehow,” Parton said in an interview. “Nobody could quite get how the Christian Southern girl and the New York Jewish boy could have so much in common. But it was real.”
Growing up poor in rural Tennessee, Parton learned the importance of unions for working people. She was a lifelong member of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, as well as the American Federation of Musicians. Parton insisted “that the bands, singers, and studio musicians working alongside her received the benefits of union membership,” Dave Pomeroy, president of AFM Local 257 in Nashville, Tennessee, told the Nation.
Parton founded Imagination Library, a literacy program that has sent over 300 million free books to children. “This actually started because my father could not read and write, and I saw how crippling that could be,” she said.
She told Harold Grinspoon she was honored when he informed her she was the inspiration for the launching of PJ Library in 2005, a program that sends free children’s books to Jewish families.
The targeting of Dolly Parton is just one of the latest examples that Jew-hatred is on the rise. There are mounting examples of Jews being attacked as they walk the streets, with a recent assault taking place at a New York City synagogue. Narratives straight out of the playbook of Tehran, Hamas and Hezbollah are being spread by candidates endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America in the Democratic Party primaries. Senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan campaigned alongside Hasan Piker, a video streamer who hails Hamas’ murderous pogrom against Jews in Israel Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
Fighting Jew-hatred is a world question, and a working-class and union question. There is no better proof of this than the rise of Hitler’s fascist regime built on the destruction of the labor movement and murder of working-class fighters in Nazi Germany, which went hand in hand with the rounding up and murder of 6 million Jews, Hitler’s “Final Solution” for those he and the Nazis scapegoated for the deep capitalist crisis of the 1930s.
As today’s economic and political crisis of capitalism spreads, Jew-hatred once again is on the rise, both on the left and right of bourgeois politics worldwide, including across the Middle East.
As it campaigns in working-class neighborhoods and on strike picket lines across the country, the Socialist Workers Party and its candidates find opposition to Jew-hatred and terrorist violence of any kind is strongest there. Workers, whose unions, wages and conditions are under attack today, readily understand why, when the bosses’ system is in crisis, they look for a scapegoat to divert the blame from themselves.