More in ‘David Lehman’

This compact book is a lucid personal response to a thick and complicated subject; how and why so many standards from the Great American Songbook came from the minds, hearts and pens of Jewish songwriters, from the Gershwins, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin to Rodgers, Hart and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Harold Arlen, and on through ...

“an appreciative, scholarly study of traditional popular song that goes into considerable and enlightening detail about the intermingling of black and Jewish popular music.”

“a poet’s witty and ruminative examination of how Jewish songwriters…used outsider status to gain perspective in forging a canon of sophisticated, quintessentially American songs in the pre-rock era”

“I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” is a 1932 pop standard by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. It was also the title of Wednesday night’s concert in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series—a night of music and commentary produced by the impresario Hal Willner and celebrating A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, David Lehman’s ...

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 ...

“The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” Philip Roth, in Operation Shylock, was referring to Berlin’s “Easter Parade” and, ...

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.

Two great things that taste great together: Moshe ben Amram and the United States of America: that’s the essence of Bruce Feiler’s America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story (William Morrow, October). Having shlepped through the Middle East for his bestselling Walking the Bible, Feiler stuck closer to home for this project, interviewing a colorful ...

It’s astonishing how many hits from the American songbook—the corpus of music written from the 1920s to the 1960s that includes Broadway hits, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Hollywood musicals—were written by Jews. These Jewish composers and lyricists included heavy hitters like Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the Gershwins, plus perhaps lesser known figures ...