“Try to leave behind your logical mind, transcend that, and become a spiritual entity,” Cantor Dan Singer challenged the crowd gathered for a b’nai mitzvah service on a Saturday morning in May. “Open your minds, open your mouths, open your hearts, open your spirits,” he riffed over the pianist’s uplifting ostinato. “We don’t need words, okay?” he encouraged the mix of friends and relatives of all backgrounds who came to celebrate. “If you want to use the words, use them; if not, make them up!” Then he turned to the patient young man and woman next to him and asked: “You guys ready?” Together, they launched into “Mah Tovu.”
Two months later, on an early July afternoon, Dan and I were sitting in his office, surrounded by musical instruments, recording equipment, religious texts, genealogies, stacks of books, some sheet music, CDs and records, artwork and photographs, Bob Dylan memorabilia, assorted Judaica, and other curios. Dan had traded his suit for a pastel polo and a pair of cargo shorts, but his expression was the same; he looked as relaxed then as he does on the bimah. Over his more than 20-year career, he told me after running some rough calculations, he’s led well over a thousand b’nai mitzvah services. “You know, my son Aiden is having his bar mitzvah in February?” he reminded me.
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Dan didn’t have a bar mitzvah when he came of age. Growing up in Superior, Wisconsin, the third child of Barry, a librarian from Detroit, and Sarkah, an Israeli artist, money was tight — and the closest synagogue was across the St. Louis River in Duluth, Minnesota. “I was Jewishly deprived,” he said. But Dan’s parents did keep a Jewish home — complete with mezuzot and stocked with tapes recorded by the famous cantorial and folk-singing Malavsky family. “I remember playing them as a kid and thinking, ‘These are amazing, amazing singers,’” he said.
The depleted state of Superior-Duluth’s Jewish community has left a hole in Dan’s heart and led him to become something of an expert on his hometown’s history. For him, the crossroads of Highway 61 and Hammond Avenue in Superior, Wisconsin, is the epicenter of Jewish-American musical history. The two roads don’t actually meet anymore, but they would, Dan explained, “if they hadn’t replaced 61 with 35 in the 60s, which is when Bob Dylan came out with ‘Highway 61 Revisited…’” Following in the footsteps of his father, who was tapped as a researcher for Dave Engel’s acclaimed 1997 book, “Just Like Bob Zimmerman’s Blues,” Dan has produced an impressive body of research that examines Dylan’s Lithuanian genealogy, his Jewish upbringing in the north country, and the area’s outsized contributions to rock ‘n roll.
Last year, Dan visited his brother in Minneapolis before driving his rental car north to Hibbing, where Dylan was raised, and then to Duluth where the star was born. “I did it all in one day,” he boasted. “I called it a ‘Tour de Bob.’” He visited Dylan’s childhood home and managed to gain entry to the private residence that was once Dylan’s synagogue.
But you have to be careful around Dan. If you let him keep going, he’ll trace his own ancestry back to Rashi; present convincing evidence that Superior’s founder Gen. John Hammond (grandfather of the famous music producer, also named John Hammond, who discovered and signed Dylan to Columbia Records) had married into the prominent Jewish-American Wolfe family; and then somehow connect it all to Morrie Arnovich, who, Dan argues, is Major League Baseball’s first true Orthodox Jewish player. Dan’s historical and genealogical investigations culminated in “The Crossroads of the North,” a narrated concert he presented in April with local musicians at his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Superior, featuring the music of Dylan and Hammond’s artists.
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Dan earned his bachelor’s in music and mass communications from UW-Superior. But “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I have a lot of different talents and interests,” said Dan, who was thinking about going into radio (he was being mentored by a local Duluth disc jockey) or maybe doing voiceovers (Dan has since voiced the character Gur in the 2015 animated film “Savva,” and provided the voices for a number of kitschy electronic products, including a talking flyswatter that says, “Hasta la vista, baby!”).
Dan’s father had dreamed of attending the University of Michigan and was elated when Dan received a full ride for graduate school. While he was earning his master’s in vocal performance, Dan got a call from Detroit’s Temple Beth El, which urgently needed a High Holiday soloist. He arrived there to find an incredibly charismatic cantor. “This guy was, like, off the hook,” Dan said. “He had worked on Broadway, done stand-up comedy at Dangerfield’s. He was an opera singer. He could tap dance. He’d worked in Vegas. He’d done everything you could imagine. He was, like, the biggest showman you ever met in your life.”
Dan told the cantor, Stephen Dubov, he’d really love to have a bar mitzvah one day “and he’s like, wait, you’re Jewish? What’re you doing wasting your life studying opera? You could be a cantor!” That’s when it dawned on Dan that he could do everything he loved — singing, writing, teaching children — professionally and Jewishly. But before Dan had reached any decisions about his future, Dubov started announcing from the bimah: “Danny Singer’s gonna go to Hebrew Union College and become a cantor, and then he’s gonna come back here and he’s gonna work with us!” “And I was like, I am?” said Dan. “But he would do that literally every week — any time I was singing with him. And I was like, ‘Oh, okay. I guess I’m doing this.’”
It was around that time that Dan’s father was diagnosed with stage-four stomach cancer. Dan had promised his dad that one day he’d have a bar mitzvah, so he asked Dubov to help him fulfill that dream before his father passed. The disease progressed too quickly, but Dan was able to chant Torah at his father’s hospital bedside. And he made his father another promise: “I’m going to become a cantor.” A few weeks after his dad’s funeral, Dan became bar mitzvah and applied to Hebrew Union College.
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During Dan’s first year of cantorial school in Jerusalem, the Second Intifada broke out. “There were terror attacks everywhere. We were falling asleep to the sound of machine gun fire just steps away. And we were still in school,” he said. “If we wanted to go back home, we’d have had to leave the program.” There were a few who fled. But the ones who stayed developed strong bonds to Israel. “That was when my identity was born as a real Israeli,” said Dan. According to Israel’s Ministry of the Interior, though, Dan became a real Israeli this past March, when it confirmed his citizenship and issued his Israeli passport.
Still attending HUC, Dan moved to New York in 2001, when another act of terror “forged my identity as a New Yorker,” he said. On 9/11, he recalled, he walked home to Brooklyn Heights across the Williamsburg Bridge with hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews, watching the plumes of smoke.
Dan’s first pulpit was at Temple Shaaray Tefilah, where Rabbi Ammi Hirsch had also gotten his start (along with a few other Stephen Wise staffers). When Rabbi Hirsch arrived at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and started looking for a cantor to help him revitalize the community, Dan jumped at the opportunity. “I called us the ‘Shaaray shul dropouts,’” Dan said, before singing a brief parody of “Beauty School Dropout” from “Grease.” As he described his early days at Stephen Wise, I got the impression that Dan had been working at the world’s oldest startup: “The great thing about Stephen Wise at that time was that we had free rein to create. The bad thing is that there was no infrastructure,” he said. “We have five full-time rabbis now, but back then it was just Ammi and me.” Together, they were responsible for everything from attending board and committee meetings to dealing with the neglected synagogue building to managing the website to tutoring the b’nai mitzvah students.
Ammi and Dan were also trying to establish a whole new culture here. “The service that we created was completely different from anything I’d ever done before. And I had to write all new music — nobody had any good music for a Reform service that was so Hebrew-rich.” Dan oversaw the installation of livestreaming cameras in the sanctuary, secured a three-year grant funding a Jewish arts and music program for children, and recorded “Kol Zimra” (“Voice of Song”), a CD of Shabbat music with Rabbi Hirsch. And, Dan reminded me, he was the one who pressed for the synagogue to hire a director of marketing.
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When Dan first met his wife Lauren, he gave her the cold shoulder. The granddaughter by marriage of Stephen Wise’s Rabbi Emeritus Balfour Brickner z’’l, Lauren reached out to him after seeing him on the bimah during the High Holy Days. But Dan thought she was a member and didn’t want to be improper. Months later, after an event in the home of Lauren’s grandmother — during which Tamara Engel z’’l, famous in our community for matchmaking, encouraged the two to get together — the couple shared their first kiss. On June 19, 2011, Rabbi Hirsch officiated their marriage in Stephen Wise’s sanctuary, and the next year, their first son Aiden was born. Their second, Ariel, came two years later.
Becoming a father reinvigorated Dan’s passion for early childhood education. “I wanted to create music for my kids. And I was very much inspired by wanting to leave them a legacy of music,” he said. From his work in our Early Childhood Center and with our programming for young families, Dan released two children’s albums, “Let’s Get Kiddish” and “Aleph Bet Bop.”
“So now we’ve come full circle,” I told Dan, as we began to discuss how he’s helping Aiden prepare for his bar mitzvah. “I’m going to have a hard time keeping myself together,” he said, “but I know that I have to lead the service. And I want to sing with my son.”
“I’m not going to lie. I’m very emotional,” Dan admitted. “It brings back memories of my childhood. I saw what happens when a Jewish community collapses. And I’m glad that I’m able able to give my kids so much more than I had. They’re going to a Jewish day school. They go to a Jewish summer camp. I never had that.” Dan always reminds his kids and all the b’nai mitzvah students he works with: “You are in New York City. Don’t take your Jewish upbringing here for granted.”
