More in ‘Bob Dylan’

The Jewish Review of Books just published its inaugural issue, and the new quarterly journal looks to be worth bookmarking. In name, content, and even look, its clear inspiration is the New York Review of Books; like that venerable publication, it consists of extended essays on books and ideas by leading intellectual lights. Only, you ...

David Lehman, author of Nextbook Press’s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, went on the popular WNYC radio show Soundcheck to discuss the Jewish roots of American popular music. You can listen to his conversation, which touches on the Brothers Gershwin, Bob Dylan, and more, below:

“I Gotta Right To Sing the Blues?”—a concert inspired ...

Iraq will reportedly demand that Israel pay reparations for bombing its nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. A member of the Iraqi parliament told a local paper that his country will lodge its claim with the United Nations and cite a contemporaneous resolution that strongly condemned Israel’s air strike. (The raid is retrospectively credited with ...

• Slate’s Jack Shafer examines the New York Times’s proclivity, evidenced in its weekend story about Montana (which we covered yesterday), for “hey-folks-we’ve-found-some-Jews-living-in-a-strange-place moments.” [Slate]
• “Is there jockeying?” a Jewish Democratic consultant says of the White House Hanukkah party guest list. “Oh my God, jockeying is a polite word.” [WaPo]
• Heeb magazine compares the two ...

The latest addition to the Bob Dylan chronicles is an exclusive interview the singer gave The Big Issue, a British magazine, about his new album, Christmas in the Heart, profits from which are going to charitable organizations that feed the hungry. His generally terse answers (How does he spend the week between Christmas and New ...

Seth Rogovoy, author of Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, joins a long tradition of people reading whatever the heck they want into the life and works of the elusive musician. (Some people are tired of hearing about him altogether.) Jews have a leg up on this practice—after all, the artist was formerly known as Robert ...

The one book Jews read most often probably isn’t the Torah or Talmud, but the siddur, or prayer book. Yet as regularly as it is paged through—many Jews recite certain prayers three or more times every day—the siddur’s typical readers attend very little to the literary and historical nuances of the text. Or so the proliferation of guidebooks to the liturgy suggests. The latest entry in this tradition, joining works by Adin Steinsaltz and Reuven Hammer, is Brandeis professor Reuven Kimelman’s The Rhetoric of Jewish Prayer: A Literary and Historical Commentary on the Prayer Book (Littman, November), which emphasizes the complex literary structure of each individual prayer.

Guess what, kids? Christmas is here early—and, it’s a Jew that brung it. Or, rather, an erstwhile Jew: Bob Dylan, whose new holiday compilation CD Christmas in the Heart was released earlier this week. It’s a pretty schlocky selection—everything from “Here Comes Santa Claus” to “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” (Yes, it’s sometimes hard to ...

• A supermarket chain in Israel is committed to “maximizing the shopping experience”—not with low prices or expanded merchandise, but with in-store synagogues. [Ynet]
• Why aren’t Jewish Democrats grabbing the kind of city-wide political offices in New York that they once held? Shrinking demographic? Low turnout? Switching parties? Or maybe Jewish interests dovetail enough with ...

• The New York Times pays some attention to a drink from Barbra Streisand’s childhood: the “guggle-muggle,” or Gogol Mogol, made from some combination of egg yolks, milk, and liquor, which the paper calls “the Jewish echinacea: no one really knows if it works, but that doesn’t stop people from taking it.” [NYT]
• A secular ...