Seth Rogovoy is a contributing editor at the Forward. He is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet (Scribner, 2009) and the forthcoming 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 Tax Day
Like it or not — and who among us actually likes it — come April 15, you will need to have filed your 2013 income tax return with the Internal Revenue Service. Perhaps one way to feel better about the painful and often inconvenient process is to recognize that it has roots in the biblical…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of the Super Bowl
On Sunday, February 2, all across the nation, worshippers will gather around their TV sets to take part in the annual ritual of that highest of American holidays: Super Bowl Sunday. While outside of Sid Luckman, Jews have yet to make much of an impact on the gridiron, the Super Bowl itself is a lot…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Cher
In the beginning, there was Cher. And the Lord saw that Cher was good, and so He made Madonna. And Britney. And Gaga. And Miley. And then, exhausted, spent, and depressed about twerking, He went back to the drawing board and breathed new life into Cher… again. We’re on the verge of yet another Cher…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Aerosmith
The band Aerosmith is riding high on the global release of “Aerosmith: Rock For The Rising Sun,” a documentary that recounts the story of the rock band’s tour of Japan in the wake of the devastating March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami that caused the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant. The movie follows the…
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Culture Secret History of Paul McCartney, the Jewish Beatle
Sir Paul McCartney recently released “New,” his first album of original rock songs since 2007’s “Memory Almost Full.” Given the 71-year-old McCartney’s love affair with all things Jewish for the past half-century — including collaborators, business associates, girlfriends and wives — the title could well be meant as a transliteration of the all-purpose Jewish word…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Steve Jobs And Apple
Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs – who is currently being portrayed by Ashton Kutcher in the biopic “Jobs” — was the biological child of a Syrian-born father and a Swiss-American Catholic mother who gave him up for adoption at birth. He was raised in northern California by a working-class couple — Paul Reinhold Jobs and his…
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Culture Allan Sherman Was Once Bigger Than the Beatles
● Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman By Mark Cohen Brandeis University Press, 320 pages, $29.95 I loved visiting my maternal grandparents in the Elmhurst section of Queens. Although they lived in a modest, two-bedroom apartment on a side street tucked between Broadway and Roosevelt avenues, the place seemed exotic, as I…
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Culture How Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce Changed Judaism Forever
● Jewhooing the Sixties by David E. Kaufman Brandeis University Press, 360 pages, $36 The final week of September 1961 proved to be an auspicious one in American Jewish history — or, at least, in the history of Jewish-American celebrities. Within a matter of just a few days, Sandy Koufax set his first National League…
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