Henry Sapoznik
By Henry Sapoznik
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Film & TV The Yiddish radio pioneer behind Pete Seeger’s ‘Rainbow Quest’
Sholom Rubinstein was instrumental to the music show, but too often goes uncredited
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Culture Why Jimmy Cagney spoke better Yiddish than just about any other actor in Hollywood
Of all movie scenes in Yiddish, one of the most popular — that of an increasingly agitated man who vainly attempts to make a clueless Irish cop understand his desire to reach Ellis Island — is not from a Yiddish film, but from “Taxi!” a 1932 film starring Jimmy Cagney. The previous year, Cagney had…
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Culture Was Humphrey Bogart playing a famous Jewish gangster in this overlooked movie?
Eighty years ago this month, Warner Brothers released “All Through the Night,” a comedy-drama about reformed gangster “Gloves” Donahue who, upon learning the German baker of his favorite cheesecake has been murdered, uncovers, attacks and breaks up a secret Nazi spy cell in New York’s Yorkville neighborhood with the help of his colorful Runyonesque criminal…
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Culture Was Andy Griffith’s first big hit really an old Yiddish vaudeville routine?
Before he was the iconic sheriff of fictional Mayberry, the bumbling Air Force recruit in “No Time For Sergeants” or even the deranged drifter in “A Face In the Crowd,” Andy Griffith started out as a comic dialect monologist. He told colorful and droll country tales ladled out in his mellifluous “molasses in January,” North…
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Culture How a Yiddish theater mecca became ‘the church of rock ‘n’ roll’
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the closing of the Fillmore East, the iconic theater that early on was dubbed by a member of the Grateful Dead as “The Church of Rock n Roll.” And while the Fillmore is best known for the way it mainstreamed youth music, this rock ‘n’ roll church also has…
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Film & TV The Jewish Kirk Douglas film that everyone seems to have forgotten
The obituaries of Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas uniformly recount some of Douglas’s — and Hollywood’s — greatest films: “Spartacus,” “Paths Of Glory,” “Out Of the Past,” “Ace In the Hole,” “Lust For Life. Yet, when I think of a quintessential Kirk Douglas film it is not of any of those, but his now largely forgotten…
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Culture Velvel Pasternak, Champion Of Traditional Jewish Music, Dies At 86
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Velvel Pasternak, the publisher, scholar and nonpareil Jewish music historian primarily known for his expertise on the music of Hasidism, has died. He was 86 years old. Pasternak was born in Toronto, Canada into a religious family descended from the Modzitz Hasidim. At the age of 16…
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News On the Radio
Since 1922, when radio was exceedingly new, Forward business manager Boruch Charney Vladeck had dreamed of a transmitting tower atop the Forward building — already the most imposing structure on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In 1932, Charney Vladeck convinced his boss, Abe Cahan, to come up with $250,000 to bail out New York’s faltering radio…
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