For any new immigrant to Israel who has felt like a fish out of water, it’s an inspirational story.
An eight-year-old boy is dragged by his parents on aliyah from his home in Long Island, New York, forced to learn Hebrew in a new school with not-so-friendly kids. The family flounders, goes back to the US after a year, where the boy, a gifted classical pianist, has to relearn the English he lost and make new friends again.
Then, a couple of years later, as the youth is about to enter fourth grade, the family returns to Israel for good, settling in Tel Aviv.
If that wouldn’t screw up a kid for life, what would? But for Rami Kleinstein, the jostling and forced acclimation made him resilient. It also forged a stronger connection to his one constant companion that he could rely on through the turbulence – music.
Some 50 plus years after first setting down in Israel, the consummate musician, songwriter, and performer is celebrating the 30th anniversary of his album Apples and Dates, considered to be one of the quintessential Hebrew-language albums ever produced, with a gala concert on November 28 in Tel Aviv. Not bad for a kid from Long Island.
His rich catalogue of songs, like his translation of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” (Tzair L’netzach), “It’s Cold Out There” (Kar Sham Bahutz), the Apples and Dates title song, “On the Old Bridge” (Al Hagesher Hayashan), and “Little Presents” (Matanot Ktanot), have entered the pantheon of Israeli pop, touching an emotional and sentimental nerve. They can be heard at graduations, ceremonies and, of course, on the radio whenever a special event occurs, or any old time.
The life and career of Rami Kleinstein, Israel's Billy Joel
Many people refer to Kleinstein as the Israeli Billy Joel, mainly for the similarities in their melodic, piano-based songs about love and life. But the parallels don’t end there. They also share Long Island roots, childhoods shaped by classical-piano studying, marriages to glamorous stars (model Christie Brinkley for Joel, and singer Rita for Kleinstein), and a striking ability to tap into raw, human emotion.
ON THIS November day, however, Kleinstein didn’t give off the vibe of a lauded pop star; he’s just a middle-aged, bearded guy, looking trim but unassuming in a T-shirt and trademark wool cap. Clutching the leash of one of his three dogs, he opened the gate to his spacious but unostentatious home in one of Tel Aviv’s upscale suburbs.
“We’re trying to train this one,” he said, pointing to a Rotweiler, who was reluctant to return to his spot under the dining room table.
Aside from an electric piano standing in a corner of the living room, there’s no indication that the inhabitant, who lives with his second wife, Alex (he and Rita divorced in 2007 after 20 years of marriage), and their three children, is one of Israel’s most successful and enduring performers and recording artists.
Speaking in English unaffected by more than 50 years in Israel, the 63-year-old Kleinstein reflected on his volatile introduction to the country.
“My father’s was an Israeli-born scientist, and my mother was born in Germany and made aliyah. After studying at the Technion for a year, my father felt that the place to study physics and aerodynamics in depth was in the US, so they left Israel in the 1950s,” he said.
Kleinstein was one of three siblings, growing up in West Hempstead, Nassau County – “a typical American environment. But my parents were Israeli. So they used to speak Hebrew to each other when they didn’t want us kids to know what they were talking about. It was their secret language.”
When his father was offered a professorship at Tel Aviv University, when Kleinstein was eight, the family picked up and moved to Tel Aviv.
“But the job never materialized. We sold everything, came to Israel, and he was out of a job. After a year of looking for another job, we returned to New York. But before we left, my father bought a place in Ramat Aviv because he was keen on eventually coming back.
“But for me, going to back to New York, to a new place, this time Forest Hills in Queens, it was hard. I had to make new friends; and after a year in Israel, I had to relearn English. There were so many hardships.”
After two years back in the US, the family returned to Israel for good, and Kleinstein had to start over again with Hebrew.
“I remember my first day in fourth grade in Tel Aviv, I didn’t know what was going on, and after three hours I broke down in tears. Then the teacher started writing numbers on the blackboard for math, and I thought, ‘Numbers, that’s something I can understand. I can make it through this hour at least.’”
He also understood the piano, something his parents realized early on. During his first year in Israel, they bought him a melodica, sort of like a harmonica with a keyboard on top that you blow into.
“They saw that I had some talent there. Then when we went back to the US, the house we rented had a piano in the basement, and that’s what started it all. It was clear I had a good ear for music,” said Kleinstein, who began studying classical piano.
When the family returned to Israel for good, settling in Ramat Aviv, his parents looked for a suitable piano teacher. They found two of the best – the Barenboims, the parents of future famed conductor Daniel Barenboim. Both mother Aida and father Enrique were professional pianists who had made aliyah from Argentina in the 1960s.
“At first, I studied with the mother, and after a couple years she said she couldn’t help me anymore. Then I dreaded what she said.. ‘You can move to the professor,’ meaning her husband. He was a very scary, strict guy,” Kleinstein said with a laugh.
“I studied with him through high school, and he had a lot of plans for me. He told me that I could be a great concert pianist, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to write and play my own music.”
KLEINSTEIN BEGAN performing in small clubs before even smaller audiences, mainly English covers of the piano-based pop stars he admired – Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and, of course, Billy Joel. It was during one of those shows, in Tel Aviv, about a year before he was drafted into the IDF, that he met Rita Farouz, a dark-skinned exotic beauty who had arrived in Israel with her family from Iran when she was young.
“She was a singer and thought we could do something together. But when I saw her, I thought, ‘Ooh maybe we could do more than sing together.’”
When he did hear her sing, he was smitten anew, and the two quickly became a romantic and musical duo, with Kleinstein harnessing Rita’s unharnessed but powerful voice.
“It was like she was Eliza Doolitle and I was her mentor,” he said.
The couple began performing together, and following a year break when Kleinstein fulfilled his military service doing shows for the troops, Rita joined him for her army service, and Rami and Rita became a staple on the IDF circuit.
When they returned to civilian status in the mid-1980s, the entertainment industry beckoned. Rita was signed to Helicon Records as a solo artist, but Kleinstein wrote and produced the eponymous-titled album Rita that ensued in 1986 that introduced a fully formed diva to the country.
It was also apparent to anyone who listened that Kleinstein’s sense of melody and popcraft were already in full bloom.
“It was a change of style for Israelis to hear, but Rita was such a wonderful singer. She had this East-West mix of her Persian background with these Western songs I was writing,” Kleinstein said.
Later that year, it was Kleinstein’s turn in the spotlight when his debut album, On the Day of the Bomb, was released, led by the radio-friendly hit “Radio, Radio.”
The videos of an overly enthusiastic Kleinstein in headband and wide grin at the front of the stage playing a keytar (a keyboard synthesizer supported by a strap over the shoulder similar to a guitar) may be dated, but they were just right for the era and breathed an exuberant element into the staid Israeli music scene. A combination of Born in the U.S.A.-circa Springsteen and Money For Nothing circa Mark Knopfler, Kleinstein underwent growing pains trying to forge his own identity apart from Rita’s, before establishing himself as a the premier pop chameleon he is today, able to shift effortlessly from rousing anthems to introspective ballads.
“I had a different kind of path than Rita. My music was not as instantly understood like hers, and maybe in retrospect, maybe I didn’t understand who I was as an artist. She was born with this stage charisma, and I had to work at it, playing small clubs for years. The songs were there, but the artist wasn’t.”
According to Kleinstein, there was no professional rivalry between them as Rita’s career skyrocketed while his had a slow climb.
“There’s no way I could have been jealous because her records sold so much more than mine, it wasn’t even close,” he laughed. “But it couldn’t have been a rivalry because her songs were my songs.
“I would say that even 20 years ago, I could walk down the street and rarely be recognized. My career took much longer to take off; Rita’s was like magic, it was stardom from the beginning,” he said.
“I wore a couple of hats and had some things to juggle around between my career and hers... I was her producer, wrote her songs, and it was very important to me, more than just a job. And I was working parallel at my own solo career. I wouldn’t say it was easy, but it was what it was, and I’m very proud of what we produced together.”
In their heyday, Rami and Rita were the Brangelina or Bennifer of Israeli celebritydom - the glamorous successful couple on the covers of magazine and featured performers on TV and stage. Along the way, they raised two girls, Meshi and Noam (both of whom are professional singers today), before divorcing in 2007.
In recent years, the couple returned to perform together in well-received career retrospectives, and both take active guidance roles in their daughters’ careers.
WHEN KLEINSTEIN takes the stage next week at the Tel Aviv Culture Center, accompanied by the Israel Philharmonic, to perform his landmark Apples and Dates, it will mark a career triumph of sorts.
His most successful album to date, Apples and Dates went platinum within its first six months and has left the Israeli music landscape with standards like “Haboker At Holechet” (“This Morning You’re Leaving”), “Karov El Libech” (“Close to Your Heart”), and “Shemesh” (“Sun”).
It also marked a breakthrough for Kleinstein, in which he graduated from being a rock artist to being an “Israeli” artist, performing songs that evoke the Sabra ethos but without the inevitable schmaltz associated with the Eretz Yisrael hayafa (“the beautiful Israel”) genre.
“I had written some Israeli songs before, for Rita or during my army days, but never for myself. There was this kind of split in my mind. For myself, I write pop and rock songs,” he said.
“Then, I was the musical producer for a show by Gidi Gov and Yehudit Ravitz for the Arad Festival in 1993, two wonderful artists. And during the show, there was a section where they came out with acoustic guitars and played these beautiful Israeli songs, and the crowd of 18,000 – most of them teenagers – all sang along.
“I was taken aback. All the production I had arranged, the extravagance and the big band, and the peak of the show was this moment of quiet beauty. For me, it was a shock and a wake-up call.
“That’s when I wrote the song ‘Apples and Dates,’ which I consider my first Israeli song. And when it was released, it was like a missile. It was crazy how popular it became.
“But it taught me that it’s what I am. All my life, after coming on aliyah, and going back and forth and trying to feel Israeli, it was time to root down. And that’s what I did with that album.”
According to Benny Dudkevitch, an Israeli music historian and former music reporter for Israel Radio for decades, Kleinstein’s gift has been to blend his American and Israeli influences into a sound that is palatable to both ears.
“It’s an absolute achievement that he was able to absorb so much of Israeli music into his songs, considering he wasn’t born here,” said Dudkevitch. “He doesn’t have big social messages, but his songs of people, love, relationships, and places is what connects audiences to him. It’s pleasant to the ear without being easy listening.”
When told that his music on his first few albums were familiar and endearing to ears from the West not acclimated to the Middle Eastern tinge of most Israeli music, Kleinstein said that he made the same connection when he was a young oleh to the music of Danny Sanderson.
“He spent a number of years in his youth in the US and was greatly influenced by American music. And for me, being an oleh hadash, I had the same experience of connecting with his sound. And his influence stayed with me.”
And for those comparisons to Billy Joel? Kleinstein, a lifelong fan, will take it.
“The Stranger was the first album I bought with my own money. He’s one of my great heroes, so if people call you the Israeli Billy Joel, you take it as a compliment, for sure. Thank you very much,” he said.
As Kleinstein basks this month in the well-deserved recognition of his career and wonders what inspiration awaits (“I was more sure of myself at 25 than I am today”), he recalled the advice his piano teacher Enrique Barenboim offered during one of his marathon high school lessons.
“The biggest lesson he taught me – and he was a great teacher - was when he told me about making music in general, whether it be classical or pop or rock: ‘There’s good music and there’s bad music. Go make good music.’”
Rami Kleinstein has spent his career doing just that.
Tickets to Kleinstein and the Israel Philharmonic are available at: to-mix.co.il/product/ramikleinsteinphilharmonic-apple30/?swcfpc=1
After Oct. 7: ‘I should be thanking them’
Three days after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Rami Kleinstein headed to the Dead Sea hotel where residents of devastated Kibbutz Be’eri had been relocated.
“Sadly, even though this was the most horrendous attack Israel ever faced, it’s not the first time we’ve been under attack. And ever since my career got established, whenever there was a ‘campaign’ that forced Israelis into shelter, I would take off with an electric piano and perform for them,” said Kleinstein.
“When I perform, I connect, and people connect with me. I couldn’t stay home, and I knew I had to do something with my time that was meaningful.
“So when this war started, it was the only thing I could do. I was kind of like on the frontline of those broken hearts from Be’eri. Then, over the months, I continued to perform for the wounded in the hospital, and for soldiers, collecting tears and stories.
“And they’re thanking me. And I’m going, ‘For what?’ For singing some songs. I should be thanking them.”
A traveling troubadour, Kleinstein also performed multiple times at Hostages Square. The experiences he and the country endured over the past two years of war prompted him to do something he had never attempted before.
Given his mastery of English and his American and British rock influences, it’s surprising that Kleinstein has never recorded an English-language album, but he said although he could have, it was not something he wanted to do. Until two months ago.
Spurred by the two-year Gaza war, Kleinstein recently released a Dylanesque ballad titled “A Different Kind of Song.”
“It was important for people not from Israel to be reached, and it enabled me to give my version of the feeling that took over Israel the last couple of years,” he explained.
“A Different Kind of Song” is available on online music platforms like Spotify. Kleinstein performed part of it exclusively for The Jerusalem Post. The video can be watched at jpost.com.
Anouk Carter-Dorf contributed to this article.