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 How Rush rescued me in quarantine — twice
As these days of self-quarantine warp and fold my sense of time, I’ve increasingly found my mind drifting back forty years, to the last time I was floating in a similar state of semi-housebound limbo. I’d moved to Chicago from Los Angeles with my mom and sister at the end of 1979. I had been…
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Film & TV On Neil Diamond’s birthday, his most cringe-worthy moment
Editor’s note: Today is Neil Diamond’s 79th birthday. To mark the occasion, we’re revisiting this essay about the part the singer-songwriter played in one of Jewish cinema’s most peculiar moments. On October 6th 1927, the original film production of “The Jazz Singer” made its world premiere at the Warners’ Theatre in midtown Manhattan. (I know,…
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Culture The Astonishingly Menschy Side Of Bob Dylan
Dylan & Me: 50 Years of Adventures By Louie Kemp, with a foreword by Kinky Friedman West Rose Press 240 pages It’s a story familiar to anyone who ever attended summer camp. You hit it off with another kid, mostly over a shared sense of humor and mutual feelings of being slightly different than the…
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Culture My Bubbe, The Bull And The Kabbalah Of Catching A Foul Ball
It’s a weird thing to admit, perhaps, but my most vivid memory of my first major league baseball game involves foul balls. Sure, I still remember how awestruck I was by the hulking, battleship-like presence of Detroit’s old Tiger Stadium, and by how lush and lurid the green of the field appeared in contrast with…
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Culture Why The Rock ‘N’ Roll Faithful Are Flocking to The Met
To enter “Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll” — an exhibition currently running at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 1 — you must first walk through a Met gallery devoted to Greek art from the 5th century BC. Jarring as it may be to hear the strains of Chuck Berry’s…
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Music For Paul Simon On His Retirement — Wisdom From My Grandpa Joe
My grandfather had a surprise for me. Seven years after buying his 1971 Buick LeSabre, he’d finally decided to get with the times and install an eight-track cassette player under the car’s dashboard. This in itself was not surprising, as he was a talented amateur pianist and violinist who genuinely loved music, even if his…
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Music Barry Goldberg: Rock ‘N’ Roll’s Most Underrated Jew
“Jewish soul brother” is a term Barry Goldberg likes to use when praising his favorite musical tribesmen, and it certainly applies to him, as well. Over the course of his six-decades-and-counting career, the keyboardist, songwriter and producer has had enough musical adventures for three lifetimes, including serving as Bob Dylan’s piano man at the 1965…
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Culture Resurrecting Yiddish Music One Song At A Time
Sometime in late 1944, Taybl Birman, a 28-year-old Soviet Jew working in a tailor shop in war-torn Minsk, composed a song for her husband, Misha, a Red Army soldier who was fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front. The song began playfully — with Taybl mentioning that she was sitting “beside my beloved sewing machine,”…
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