Leonard Cohen turns 75

Leonard Cohen turns 75 next week and in his honor Mark Steyn reprises a piece about his favorite Cohen song, Dance Me to the End of Love

the song is almost like a lyric-writing exercise, as if Mr Cohen had wearied of avoiding the four-and-a-half rhymes for "love" and set himself the challenge of using them in fresh but entirely natural ways.
--
But then I chanced to stumble across an interview in which Cohen talked about how "Dance Me To The End Of Love" came to be written:

It's curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that's why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt.

Just like Irving Berlin, the Gershwins and all the rest, Cohen is a Jewish songwriter. But, as that genesis suggests, he's far more explicitly Jewish in his work. On the other hand, just like the best songs of Berlin & Co, "Dance Me To The End Of Love" is trembling on the brink of becoming a standard - a song for anyone to sing, and to bring anything you want to it, for now and till the end of love:

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance Me To The End Of Love.