Jody Rosen comments and I sincerely apologize

Earlier today I posted rather presumptuously that Jody Rosen's article in Slate Magazine echoes an earlier post of mine. Mr. Rosen is in fact an expert on Jewish jazz, vaudeville, minstrelsy, and Jewish contribution to American music... topics that I merely touched on in my amateur article. Granted, I had some good ideas, but I don't hold exclusive rights to them, and it was foolish of me to suggest that I came up with the ideas first. Mr. Rosen was kind enough to write a comment and show that I have yet a lot to learn on the topic as well as on professionalism. Again, I deeply apologize.

Jody Rosen's comment:

Hi. Jody Rosen, here.

I will admit to one sin: ego-surfing. A friend of mine wrote me an email saying that my Matisyahu piece was "causing a stir in Jewish blog land." So I did a Technorati search, which led me to your blog. For the very first time, I might add.

No, I did not "copy your post." Again: this is the first time I've visited your blog. The ideas in both our pieces are in common currency -- they're ideas that would occur to any reasonably intelligent person who's spent some time thinking about popular music history, Jews, and intersections of the two. I mean, jeez, The Jazz Singer? It's THE cultural touchstone for ALL conversations about blackface.

As it happens, I've thought (and published) a lot about Jewish minstrelsy over the years. I wrote a book about Irving Berlin and (for lack of a better term) Jewish musical assimilation (White Christmas: The Story of an American Song; Scribner, 2002) in which I ruminate at length on Jewish blackface. See:

http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/b...=7-0743218752- 3

I've been doing a lot of work recently on what I call "Jewface," the performances of vaudeville's "Hebrew comedians": a kind of Jewish equivalent of blackface minstrelsy. Here's a little synopsis of a paper I gave on the topic last year:

http://www.emplive.org/visit/edu...D=528&year=2005

By the way, I'm currently in the final stages of curating and writing liner notes for a compilation CD of these "Jewface" songs, forthcoming this summer from Reboot Stereophonic (www.rebootstereophonic.com) records. I invite you and yours to buy lots of copies; it'll make a great Chanukkah gift.

If you require more evidence that my interest in minstrelsy predates your blog post, you can check my own (infrequently updated) blog, The Anachronist.

http://theanachronist.blogspot.com

See also, my article on the front page of this coming Sunday's New York Times Arts & Leisure section.

All this by way of saying: you should be very careful about impugning the integrity of writers. I'm really not the type who relishes an internet pissing match, but I DEEPLY resent the idea that I've pilfered your ideas.

By the way, you should check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/ product...5Fencoding=UTF8

And this one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product...glance&n=283155

And, especially, this one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product...glance&n=283155

These books definitely shaped my thinking abiout Matisyahu. Not your blog, though.

The only thing that actually *is* "oddly close" (to use Mottel's portentous phrase) about our pieces is the phrase "tzitzit flying." But I promise you, it's just a coincidence. I used the phrase because that's exactly what I saw in Matisyahu's videos, such as the one I linked to in my Slate piece.

I hope this clears things up for you.

Thanks, Jody