In the 1980s the world's most famous political prisoners were South Africa's Nelson Mandela and Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky. Rallies for Mandela were full of music and motion but Sharansky demonstrations were dull, windy affairs. A few of us in Jerusalem decided, somewhat whimsically, to remedy that with a dance song we called The Sharansky. Based on The Locomotion, it begins, "Everybody's doin' a brand new dance-ski/ Come on, baby, do the Sharansky/ I know you'll get to like him if you give him a chance-ski/ Come on, baby, do the Sharansky ..."
In 1986, after almost a decade in the gulag, Sharansky was...
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