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 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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Culture The Secret Jewish History of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’
Every generation gets the film version of “The Great Gatsby” it deserves. Ours will be a 3-D “Gatsby” directed by Baz Luhrmann — he of the hyperactive, swooping camera of “Moulin Rouge!” and the highly stylized, gaudy adaptation of “Romeo + Juliet.” But like every previous “Gatsby” adaptation, this one will speak with just the…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of David Bowie
David Bowie died of cancer on Sunday after a glittering five-decade career in pop music. The rocker won millions of fans across several generations by constantly reinventing himself, but who knew he had such a strong link to the Tribe? Madonna had nothing on David Bowie when she came out as a devotee of Kabbalah…
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Culture Lights, Camera, Allen Ginsberg!
All photos: © 2012 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved. Somewhere, there is a snapshot of Allen Ginsberg and me sitting next to each other on a sofa — capturing us both in a rare moment of clean-shavenness — taken in 1981, when the poet visited Williams College for a reading. I don’t recall…
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Culture Of Hobbits and The Golem
Sometimes, a bearded, money-grubbing dwarf is just a bearded, money-grubbing dwarf and not an evil, anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews. Undoubtedly some will view “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” — the first in a trilogy of films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book “The Hobbit,” directed by Peter Jackson — and find in Tolkien’s mythical creatures not-so-subtly…
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Culture Jakob Dylan Has Been Born Again
Jakob Dylan may have had his fate set in (rolling) stone when his father immortalized him in song when he was still a child. When Dylan, who turns 43 this December, was 5 years old, old man Bob rewrote the Friday night Sabbath blessing over the children, turning it into a folk hymn that became…
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