Remembering Connie Francis, Italian Singer Who Sang Hebrew and Yiddish Songs

Connie Francis, the pop singing star of the 1960s who died last week at the age of 87, had an affinity for Jewish music, having released an album of popular Jewish songs including Tzena, Tzena, Mamele, Oyfen Pripitshok, and Shein vi di Levone.

As Phylissa Cramer wrote in The Times of Israel, 

Francis, whose real name was Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1940s, when the city was home to a large Jewish population (including Phillip Roth, four years her senior). “If you weren’t Jewish, you needed a password to get in,” she once told an interviewer, the Forward reported in 2018.

Francis wound up deploying the Jewish culture and language she picked up in her childhood neighborhood as she emerged as a vocal star in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She performed at Borscht Belt resorts during their heyday, then recorded an album of Jewish music as part of an effort to make herself as widely known as possible in the early 1960s.

In 1989 at a concert at the Diplomat Hotel in Miami Beach, she sang the song from the movie Exodus intertwined with Hebrew and English versions of Hava Nagila. She introduced the song with a dedication "to the great state of Israel, a nation of people who are truly an inspiration to the whole free world."