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 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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Culture How the Son of German and Polish Jews Became the ‘Starchild’ of KISS
● Face The Music: A Life Exposed By Paul Stanley HarperOne, 480 pages, $28.99 I’ll admit that I was a little late to the KISS party. In the mid-1970s, while most of my elementary school friends were cranking “Destroyer” and ooh-ing and ah-ing over the photo booklets from “Alive!” and “Alive II,” I was gravitating…
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Culture Sandy Koufax’s 10 Greatest Jewish Baseball Moments
1) September 9, 1965: Koufax pitches a perfect game (no hits, walks or errors) against the Chicago Cubs at Dodger Stadium, and sets a record for the most Ks in a perfecto by striking out 14 batters. The victory gives Koufax four career no-hitters, the most by any major league pitcher at the time. 2)…
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