How much the styles of Swinging London in the sixties depended on the creativity of Jewish craftspeople remains to be fully appreciated. Leonard Lewis, the hairstylist known as Leonard of Mayfair, who died on November 30 at age 78, was part of the mix. Raised in the Shepherd’s Bush area of west London, Lewis explained…
By now you’ve all heard that after years of holding out, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono have struck deals with major music streaming services including Spotify and Apple Music, and have allowed the complete Beatles catalog to be available to those who stream music online. Both Spotify and Apple allow users to create playlists of…
In his 1964 autobiography, written three years before he died, at the age of 32, Beatles manager Brian Epstein recalled feeling the weight of his lineage as he sought a balance between the wishes of his Orthodox Jewish parents and the aspects of his life that were increasingly incongruent with their traditional values. “I am…
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…
Music promoter Sid Bernstein, who worked with legends from Judy Garland to Jimi Hendrix and orchestrated the Beatles’ historic concert in New York’s Shea Stadium in 1965, died on Wednesday aged 95. Bernstein, an agent and manager who according to his friend, publicist Merle Frimark, died in New York, worked with some of the biggest…
Fifty years ago, Danny Sanderson was a freshman at the High School of Music & Art, in New York City’s Hamilton Heights. He was new to Manhattan, having grown up in a Tel Aviv suburb, born to parents that had made aliyah from the States in 1948. His father had recently assumed a post as…
Henry Grossman wasn’t a fan of the Beatles when he first started photographing them in 1964, but he would become intimately familiar with the group, snapping thousands of photographs of the Fab Four over the next five years. More than 1,000 of these photos have been collected in his new limited edition book, “Places I…
WikiCommons Each week The Arty Semite connects the Torah reading — however tenuously — with a classic work of rock ‘n’ roll. In this week’s double parsha, Nitzavim-Vayelech, Moses gives his final warnings to the People of Israel about the pitfalls that await them in the Land of Israel. Leadership of the people is ceremoniously…
