Yakov Rotblit

Born in Haifa, the singer, songwriter, and journalist Yakov Rotblit has mixed art and activism his entire career. After enlisting in the IDF, he served in the Six-Day War, an experience both traumatic—he was gravely wounded in action—and artistically formative; two years later, he wrote “Shir le-shalom” (A Song for Peace), his best-known protest song and a favorite of the Israeli peace movement. Twenty-six years later, it was sung just before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, and Rabin was later found to be carrying the song’s lyrics in his breast pocket. Rotblit was an outspoken pacifist whose first solo album, Kakh shiḥrarti et Yerushalayim (This Is How I Liberated Jerusalem, 1978), was banned from Israeli airwaves for ten years. In between other projects, he has written songs for Israel’s most popular singers.