More in ‘Rock and Roll’

What’s wrong with the intro to this op-ed?
I have always looked on Bruce Springsteen as the embodiment of lower-middle class, Jewish-American culture. He built up his career in a very Jewish way, shrewdly and carefully. He looked after himself, and never went wild on drugs or drink, just as those other New York-area Jews, Simon ...

It was the early 1950’s and America was changing. Who would serve as the vanguard of this change? You would need people eager to embrace the new, able to serve as intermediaries linking black and white, high and low, sensitive enough to hear joy where others heard only squalor, clever enough to hear opportunity where others only heard noise, alive to the mordant humor of the ghetto, heedless of existing prejudices and conventions, enterprising enough to invent an industry where none had existed before. You needed people who could operate at the bloody crossroads where commerce, art, and social change were converging. All of which is to say that you needed Jews.

Unwittingly assuming the role of simple son, Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider takes a stab at pronouncing charoset in VH1 Classic’s Matzo & Metal. He mimics Scott Ian, the Anthrax guitarist, whose equanimity and beard confer what passes here for rabbinical authority. Ian may not know what charoset signifies, but in an unadorned room outfitted ...