Dan Epstein is the Forward’s contributing music critic. His books include Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76.
Dan EpsteinContributing Music Critic
By Dan Epstein
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Culture Meet the Top 11 Jewish Sellout Artists
It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock ’n’ roll, as some wise man once said; and even once you get there, you may be waiting awhile for the promised rewards to start rolling in. While there’s a long tradition of criticizing musicians for “selling out” when they release music with…
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Music Why Neil Diamond Still Matters
Back in 1967, in the midst of his initial run of brilliantly pithy three-chord pop singles, Neil Diamond cut a pair of radio jingles for Coca-Cola. One of them was an upbeat rocker in the Latin-tinged “Cherry, Cherry” vein, the other a slow strummer that built to a crescendo a la “I Got the Feelin’…
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Culture When Hank Greenberg Went to War
The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII By John Klima Thomas Dunne Books, 432 pages, $27.99 On December 5, 1941, Hank Greenberg walked out of Michigan’s Fort Custer Training Center a free man. Seven months earlier, he had become the first…
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Culture When the Legendary Theodore Bikel Turned 90
Broadway star, Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning film and TV actor, folk singer, recording artist, radio host, raconteur, advocate for the arts, international human rights activist — Theodore Bikel has been all of these things and more over the course of his long and intensely rich career, and he’s still going relatively strong at the age…
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Culture Neil Diamond’s 32nd Album Is His Best in 40 Years
Sometime back in 1986, it finally dawned on me that Neil Diamond might actually be cool. This wasn’t the easiest or most logical conclusion to come to, having spent so much of my elementary and high school years cowering amid the bombastic onslaught of “Longfellow Serenade,” “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” (his wrist-slittingly maudlin divorce-rock…
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Culture Hey Baby, It’s the 4th Of Jew-ly!
When it comes to popular patriotic American songs written by Jews, “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin certainly stands at the top of the list; it isn’t, on the other hand, particularly festive. If you want to soundtrack your Fourth of July cookout with tunes by Jewish artists that are appropriately star-spangled, and haven’t already…
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Culture The Most Psychedelic Jewish Movie Ever Made Is Back
‘How does it feel to be completely free at last?” asks Mike, a bearded American hippie, as he and his three newfound Israeli friends sit grooving around a campfire. “Man, I feel really turned on!” A veteran of the Vietnam War, Mike has come to Israel by way of Rome, seeking to leave the horrors…
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Culture How Sammy Davis Jr. Became the Great Jewish Entertainer
● Sammy Davis Jr.: A Personal Journey with My Father By Tracey Davis and Nina Bunche Pierce Running Press, 208 pages, $30 ‘Even when my own people would complain to me about racism,” Sammy Davis Jr. told his daughter shortly before the end of his life, “I would always say, ‘You got it easy. I’m…
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