Sylvain Sylvain, Jewish guitarist for the New York Dolls, has died at 69

• Author: GABE FRIEDMAN/JTA
• Published date: 17 January 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

His Facebook page announced the news Thursday night. The rocker had been battling an unspecified form of cancer.

He was born Sylvain Mizrahi to a Syrian Jewish family in Cairo in 1951. But his family left during the Suez Crisis, which triggered a renewed wave of antisemitism across the Middle East after Israel attempted to help British and French forces take over the Suez Canal in 1956.

"I was probably one of the last immigrants to sail into New York harbor to be greeted by the Statue of Liberty," he once reportedly said. "I would be standing there … and people would say, 'You speak English?' I'd say no. They'd say, 'F*** you.' The first words I learned when I got off the boat were 'f*** you.'"

The New York Dolls, which formed in 1971, were known almost as much for their pioneering flamboyant onstage fashion as for their raucous rock songs that would help seed the punk movement later in that decade. Their best known songs...