
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 Epstein is the Forward’s contributing music critic. His books include Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of ’76.
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,”…
In the late spring of 1967, the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” hit the world like a paisley paint bomb. Its psychedelic splatters were especially evident in England, where pop artists of all stripes immediately seized upon the album’s heady mixture of lysergic wonder and Victorian nostalgia as a new…
There are certain things in this life that I pretty much take for granted: Snow will fall in December. A new baseball season will begin in April. And if he’s not already touring somewhere as we speak, Neil Diamond will be going on tour again soon. Which is why the announcement that the multi-platinum-selling singer-songwriter…
I first started digging for old records in thrift stores in the late 1980s, back when you could still score stacks of 45s from the glory days of AM radio at 5 or 10 cents a pop. In the course of each thrift store foray, I would almost inevitably come across a single or two…
Lou Reed: A Life By Anthony DeCurtis Little, Brown and Company, 528 pages, $32 At first glance, Lewis Allan Reed wasn’t all that different from the other middle-class Jewish lads he grew up with in 1950s Freeport, New York. He was a diligent student and an avid tennis player; he liked to make weekend forays…
By Dan Epstein Swimming lessons at the “Y” were the worst. For reasons I can no longer recall — but which probably had at least something to do with my stubborn resistance to taking any sort of extra-curricular instruction in anything that I wasn’t already deeply interested in — I got a late start on…
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on Jewishbaseballmuseum.com Josh Kantor has performed everywhere from synagogues to orchestra pits, from seedy nightclubs to outdoor festival stages. But his favorite venue for playing music is Fenway Park, where he serves as the organist for the Boston Red Sox. A pianist since the age of five, Kantor (now…
In a sport where players generally peak in their late-twenties and decline precipitously thereafter, Ian Kinsler’s early-thirties revival has been an unexpected joy to watch. A three-time All Star second baseman (and two-time 30-30 player) during eight seasons with the Texas Rangers, Kinsler has somehow kicked things into even higher gear since being traded to…
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