Well, Here's a Subject I Never Expected to Be Dealing With in This Venue

From the current issue of The Forward (or, as we authentic Red Sea Pedestrians pronounce it, The Forvard), please enjoy their hilarious and informative piece on The 150 Greatest Jewish Pop Songs of all time.

Starting with this one by Lou Reed...

The poet and writer Delmore Schwartz, who at 25 published one of the most dazzling collections of stories ever written, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants in 1913. A James Joyce obsessive (see his papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library for a look at his brilliant annotated “Finnegans Wake”), he had a remarkable and bitterly short life, dying alone in the Chelsea Hotel at 52 in a sort of cruel reversal of the immigrant son’s American Dream. But a few years before he died in 1966, he taught creative writing and literature at Syracuse University, where he was Lou Reed’s teacher.

Lou Reed, who grew up in a Jewish family in suburban Long Island, moved from the radical Velvet Underground to his solo career, carrying with him the “spirit” of Delmore Schwartz, who famously told Reed he would come back and haunt him if he betrayed his talent.

Here's the rest of it.