Seth Rogovoy, a contributing editor at the Forward, is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet (Scribner) and Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison (Oxford University Press).
Seth Rogovoy
By Seth Rogovoy
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Culture The Secret Jewish History Of Stephen King
Author Stephen King was really born with that name. Not for him the path from Irwin Alan Kniberg to Alan King. He came out all ready, at least in name, to become one of the best-selling authors of all time, just as he was. Although when it came time for the prolific writer — as…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Aerosmith
Today, Joe Perry, lead guitarist for Aerosmith, celebrates his 69th birthday. Which is as good an excuse as any, we suppose, to look back on the band’s Jewish roots. Aerosmith was founded in 1970 when a then-drummer named Steve Tyler – a native of Yonkers, N.Y., who had moved to Boston – stumbled upon guitarist…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Tupac Shakur
Tupac Shakur, who died on this day in 1996 at the age of 25, may seem an unlikely candidate for consideration in our pages. At one time, Vice President Dan Quayle said Shakur’s music “has no place in our society”; Shakur was a convicted felon who in a few years was in and out of…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Pink Floyd
Try as hard as they might, Pink Floyd is the band that refuses to die. The group’s founder and original visionary, Syd Barrett, called it quits in 1968, and by any rights it should have ended there. Yet the group has survived the loss of two frontmen and other founding members, and has endured changing…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History Of James Bond
Editor’s Note: George Lazenby, who gained fame for playing the role of James Bond in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” turns 80 today. In his honor, we present our own history of James Bond. It’s hard to imagine anyone less Jewish — or more goyish — than James Bond: He of the shaken-not-stirred-martinis; he who…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History Of Robert De Niro
Actor Robert De Niro, who turns 75 years old August 17, is perhaps best known for playing the roles of Italian gangsters and assorted crazies in his much lauded, 55-year career in film. An entire subgenre of his work, however, has been devoted to portraying Jewish characters: gangsters and otherwise. Far from being typecast in…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of the Rocky Horror Picture Show
“Rocky Horror,” which opened in London cinemas on this day in 1975 is the cultural phenomenon that simply refuses to die. Rather, since its first incarnation as a 1973 London stage musical, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” has been continuously reborn on the silver screen, in subsequent Broadway stage productions, and, in 2016, as a…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History Of Woodstock
This August marks the 50th anniversary of the original Woodstock festival, which took place in Bethel, N.Y., on August 15-17, 1969. Woodstock lives on in memory as the culmination of the 1960s counterculture, the greatest rock festival of all time, and just plain and simply as shorthand for “the Sixties,” as in “the Woodstock generation.”…
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Culture In the course of his 104 years, he resisted the Nazis, fought against blood libel and became a towering Jewish intellectual
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