Jewish Stereo Types

...and that goes for the Jewish songwriters I've highlighted on this blog too, of course. Flipping through the Wikipedia articles on a smattering of these, I find Germany, Lithuania, England, Poland, Austria, Prussia, Belarus, and of course, broadly, Russia. Often there is no mention of where their parents or grandparents came from, just that they were Jewish and lived in this or that city. But one entry leapt out at me for specifically giving the city from which his parents emigrated--Rovno, which is now Rivne, in Western Ukraine: Leonard Bernstein. Of course, Bernstein wrote a great amount of music, both for classical venues ( Jeremiah , Candide , Kaddish ) and for Broadway ( West Side Story , On the Town , Wonderful Town ), but just as evidently he was best known for conducting, and one piece that he conducted seems particularly appropriate to me, coming in the middle of an attempt to destroy Ukraine. So today I bring you the beginning of the Fourth Movement of Beethoven's

Or to put it another way, I am chasing a deadline and don't have time to write a new blog post, but it is Valentine's Day and I already posted a very good Valentine song four years ago , so I'm going to cut-and-paste, with a few tweaks here and there (because it is impossible not to find a few things to tweak when you reread your own work). So here is my Special Repeat Post about "My Funny Valentine" by Rodgers and Hart, here sung by the great Ella Fitzgerald: Video posted by YouTube for the subject Ella Fitzgerald You'll note that I chose to use a version sung by a woman, even though the Frank Sinatra and Chet Baker covers are probably the most well-known. That's because the song was written for the Broadway musical Babes in Arms , in which it was sung by a girl about her new boyfriend, a young man named Valentine. The lyrics, it seems to me, make a lot more sense when you consider that they are describing a boy, and one whom the singer considers hop