I found my way via a footnote in the Jan. 9, 2014, issue of “The New York Review of Books” to an essay by jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, “Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Beethoven and God.” With a title like that, how could I not read it?
The essay, …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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2/13/14
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A striking irony in the 1927 movie “The Jazz Singer” is that Al Jolson, who plays Jakie Rabinowitz, a cantor’s son who wants to move into the world of mainstream popular music, …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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5/3/18
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I have known Mark Binder – author, story-teller, longtime resident of Providence’s East Side – for decades. During my 33 years as rabbi of Temple Habonim, in Barrington, Binder …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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11/7/21
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While Rabbi Rosenberg is recovering from back surgery, he has chosen a past column to run in this space. This column originally appeared on April 3, 2009.
Ever since I first …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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12/8/17
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Though its authors insist that “Road to Valor” is “a work of nonfiction,” the book reads like a novel. Its pages are filled with vivid descriptions and the pacing …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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6/22/18
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Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) is Israel’s best-known contemporary poet; his work has been translated into 40 languages. In my bookcase stand several of Amichai’s volumes in the Hebrew …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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12/2/22
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“Family Werth” is the title of Providence writer Ronald Florence’s most recent novel, self-published earlier this year. The title is a pun, for time and time again the characters call into question the worth of families in general and the …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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8/2/13
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My undergraduate years at Columbia, 1962-1966, corresponded with the height of the folk-singing craze which, centered in New York City’s Greenwich Village, spread throughout the land. Armed with my guitar and my long-neck 5-string banjo, I was a …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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10/23/14
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“Hold fast to dreams/For if dreams die/Life is a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly.” So begins an eight-line poem by Langston Hughes (1902-1967), one of America’s most …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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11/11/16
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“My father went to sleep in his skin in the sun-flushed morning, in the flatlined morning / That shoveled a pit into my 35th year spadeful by spadeful and the sky collapsed over …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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3/3/23
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