Tablet Magazine » Jody Rosen

Visionaries

Long Story Short — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:00:55 +0000

What makes a movie Jewish? A Jewish director, screenwriter, cast? Overtly Jewish themes? Can non-Jews make Jewish films? And is there even such a thing as a Jewish movie?

These are more than mere parlor-game musings: They open up a discussion about culture, identity, history, and the considerable Jewish contribution to what is perhaps modernity’s only true indigenous art form.

A.O. Scott, chief film critic for the New York Times, and Jody Rosen, music critic for Slate, a Tablet contributing editor, and co-author of the magazine’s list of the greatest 100 Jewish films of all time, spoke to Long Story Short host Liel Leibovitz about Woody and Mel, the Brothers Marx and the Brothers Coen, and everything in between.

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Queen of Pop

Vox Tablet — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:00:20 +0000

In the late 1950s, Florence Greenberg was a housewife in Passaic, N.J., with an itch to get into the music business. A tip from her daughters led her to a quartet of young African-American singers. Under Greenberg’s tutelage, the women became the legendary Shirelles, the group behind such hits as “I Met Him on a Sunday” and “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Greenberg’s name in the business was made. She formed three record labels—Tiara, Scepter, and Wand—and had a hand in the successes of talents including Dionne Warwick and the Isley Brothers.

As the curtain rises on Baby It’s You, a new musical celebrating Greenberg’s life and work, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with Slate Magazine music critic Jody Rosen about the obstacles Greenberg might have faced as a pioneering woman, about her ability to identify voices and styles that others didn’t think America was quite ready for, and about the real meaning of the song “Say a Little Prayer for You.” [Running time: 20:05.]

Sundown: Syria Faces Upheaval

Marc Tracy — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 21:00:25 +0000

• Unrest in Syria. [WP]

• God had a wife. Yes, that God. [Discovery News]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Eddy Portnoy has a children’s treasury of Yiddish fight terms. [Shtetl Montreal]

• Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is interested in a New York City satellite campus. [NYT]

• iGrogger [iTunes]

• Contributing editor Vanessa Davis’s workspace is at least as wonderful as you’d suspect. [From the desk of …]

• The doll that got a bar mitzvah. [The Daily]

According to contributor Jody Rosen, 100 years ago today Irving Berlin—one of the heroes of David Lehman’s A Fine Romance—received a copyright for “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

Beck, the Schlemiel

Liel Leibovitz — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:00:31 +0000

Is there a more fitting song with which to seal our list of the 100 greatest Jewish songs of all time than Beck’s “Loser”? While the list’s authors, Jody Rosen and Ari Y. Kelman, acknowledge that Beck is barely Jewish—his maternal grandmother is a member of the tribe—they’re spot-on about the particular charms of his break-out debut hit. “Often described as a song of Gen X malaise,” Kelman and Rosen write, “’Loser’ is actually a headier concoction: some folk, some hip-hop, and some Dylanesque doggerel, all mashed-up with the nebbishy neurosis of Alexander Portnoy and Alvy Singer. It’s not a ‘slacker anthem’; it’s a schlemiel’s lament.” Here, then, is the man himself…

Dylan’s Christmas Album Out

Allison Hoffman — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:00:21 +0000

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 listen to Dylan growl his way through the more saccharine numbers without thinking of Krusty the Clown, but, you know, it’s the thought that counts.) Tablet contributing editor Jody Rosen notes on Slate’s culture blog, Browbeat, that the best way to think about the album is as a piece of good old Americana, more in the vein of Alan Lomax than, say, David Archuleta. “Christmas in the Heart is less a joke or a provocation than a polemic,” Rosen argues. “Dylan is the haggard, haunting voice of the musical collective unconscious—our Ghost of Christmas Past.”

I Dreamed I Saw St. Nicholas [Slate/Browbeat]
Related: A Fine Romance [Nextbook Press]

Guy From the North Country

Hadara Graubart — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:56:02 +0000

Upon hearing the news that Bob Dylan is recording a Christmas album, our first questions were “why?”, and “hasn’t he already done that?” Of course the answer to the latter is no, but we forgive ourselves for wondering, as there is a long history of Jews making Christmas music, which Tablet contributing editor Jody Rosen documented in his book White Christmas. (And, after all, the man was briefly Christian.) As for the first question, while no answer is immediately forthcoming, we might go further and ask why, specifically, two of the songs Dylan has already recorded for the album are the childish and musically unmoving “Must Be Santa” and “Here Comes Santa Claus”? The answer, obviously, is that Dylan knows a good opportunity for subversion when he sees one: according to David Mamet in his Nextbook Press book The Wicked Son, “The Santa Claus myth is a straightforward account of child sacrifice,” and contemporary parents’ reluctance to shatter their children’s belief in the magical gift-bearer mirrors “the anguish of a family in antiquity, knowing the tribe will choose, at the winter solstice, some child to be sacrificed.”

“Hang your stockings and say your prayers,” indeed!

Bob Dylan Recording Christmas Album [Bully Pulpit]
Related: A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs by David Lehman, coming soon from Nextbook Press

Minstrel Show

Sara Ivry — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 03:04:13 +0000

Irving Berlin, the man responsible for “God Bless America,” was also the brains behind “Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollar,” a 1916 number which sent up the stereotype of the tight-fisted Jew. It was one in a slew of Tin Pan Alley minstrel songs that made fun, often affectionately, of greenhorns and their slightly savvier predecessors.

Jewface, a new album from Reboot Stereophonic, introduces several of these songs to listeners far removed from the immigrant experience and the Yiddish inflections that infused it.

Jody Rosen, the music critic for Slate, is the album’s curator. He talks with Nextbook about discovering these scratchy wax-cylinder recordings and what audiences a century ago thought of songs like “When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band” and “That’s Yiddisha Love.”