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 the gods of hair metal worshipped the Borscht Belt hustle
Nöthin’ But a Good Time. By Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock St. Martin’s Press, $29, 560 pages It was during the first few weeks of 1984 that I suddenly realized David Lee Roth was Jewish. I’d been a Van Halen fan for nearly five years at that point, yet had somehow never considered the possibility…
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Culture For Sylvain Sylvain, the Jewish heart of the New York Dolls
For a rock and roll-obsessed teenager in the early-to-mid-1980s, picking up the first two New York Dolls albums was like stumbling across a pair of travel brochures from an enchanting destination that no longer existed. Whenever I visited my dad in New York City I could still traverse the same filthy lower Manhattan sidewalks that…
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Music How Herb Alpert made the most underrated Jewish Christmas album of all time
This holiday season inevitably brings to mind all the classic Christmas songs that have been written by Jews. Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” is the big blini, of course, having been covered more than 500 times since Bing Crosby first sang it on his NBC Radio show on Christmas Day 1941. But there are over a…
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Culture In a hellish landscape of Huey Lewis and Liza Minnelli, a new Dylan album thankfully arrived
It was September 1989, and I’d just been hired as a clerk at See Hear, a small record store in Chicago. I’d spent the summer in a melancholic haze of post-college graduation wastreldom, smoking cheap weed and drinking cheaper beer (where have you gone, Carling Black Label?), and spending countless hours in communion with my…
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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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