Dave Matthews didn’t just lose me over Israel. He turned the one place that felt like home into a place where kids feel free to scream slurs. Here’s what we do about it — and why we don’t have to give up the music.

A friend of mine was at the Dave Matthews Band show in West Palm Beach this past weekend. He posted a story from the lawn — the old crew, all of them, grinning in the dark with the stage lights behind them. I knew most of the faces. I have stood in that exact spot more times than I can count.

I replied with one word. Fomo.

I meant it. Genuinely. There was no irony in it, no asterisk, no little voice in the back of my head. I saw the photo and felt the pull of twenty years of muscle memory and I wanted, with my whole chest, to be there.

An hour later, my phone buzzed again. Same friend.

Dave just went off about Gaza. Fml. We left.

And then, a few texts down, the part I can’t stop thinking about. The kids standing behind his brother, responding to whatever Dave said from the stage, said this out loud, to a crowd, in 2026: “Yeah, f*** the Jews. F*** those kikes.”

He’s one of the biggest Dave fans I know. It was the twentieth year since his first show. He left in the middle of it. And then he texted me: write an article on it.

A Very Specific Kind of Jew

Let me tell you who I was before October 7, because you cannot understand what was lost unless you understand what it was.

I am not religious. I never have been. But I am culturally Jewish in a way that is so specific it practically has a uniform. I went to Jewish summer camp. I was in BBYO. I was an AEPhi in undergrad, an AEPi sweetheart, the whole ecosystem. I once made a rush poster with the Grateful Dead dancing bears and the slogan “Get Chai with AEPi.” Was it a little on the nose? Yes. A little pick-me? Also yes. But every single one of my friends knew exactly what it meant, because we were all the same phenotype: the tie-dye-t-shirt, summer-camp, youth-group Jew. The one who maybe smoked a little too much weed in college. The one who could fold a perfect spiral tie-dye in her sleep. The one who never, ever missed Dave when he came to town.

This is not a bit. There is actual scholarship on it. There is a Boston University doctoral dissertation — and I am not making this title up — called So Much More Than Kumbaya: Music at Jewish Summer Camps and the Formation of Jewish Identity.[1] Its whole argument is that communal song at camp doesn’t just accompany Jewish identity; it builds it. The melodies become the architecture. You carry them out of the canteen and into the rest of your life, and they keep meaning home no matter how far you get from the lake.

That is what jam-band culture became for a certain kind of American Jew. It is not an accident that “Jews love Phish” is a sentence everyone in my world just nods at — there is a Penn State University Press book about that, too, with two of the band members being Jewish,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)