Stars of David: Rock 'n' Roll's Jewish Stories Book

Reading Stars of David: Rock 'n' Roll's Jewish Stories, the first book by music journalist Scott R. Benarde, was a bit of a letdown. Benarde clearly has huge enthusiasm for the subject'many short profiles of Jews in the rock and roll industry, whether performer or songwriter'but in sum, this enthusiasm partially backfires on him.

Admittedly, many of the musicians and songwriters profiled'most notably, in my opinion, Janis Ian, David Lee Roth, and Evan and Jaron Lowenstein'have a reasonably strong connection to Judaism, by their own admission in interviews given to Benarde. Indeed, Stars of David works best when the profiled individuals illustrate their very different, often very interesting experiences with Judaism in their own words. And that's the key'in their own words. While the information on, say, Bob Dylan, is enlightening, none of it comes directly from Dylan himself, and it feels a bit superficial; when a musician such as Johnny Clegg'who, while truly pioneering in his home country of South Africa, never really made it in the United States'gets similar treatment, given his tenuous connection at best to yiddishkeit, it feels as if Benarde got so excited to find another Jewish performer'particularly one You May Not Have Heard Of'that someone else with a more interesting Jewish story got the short shrift. (Billy Joel, whom the book notes only even put on a yarmulke for the first time in his forties, falls somewhere in between Dylan and Clegg, yet whose profile is equally disappointing.)

And therein lies the chief difficulty with Stars of David. So many of the profiles are either sparse on Judaic information, or alternatively of creators who are comparatively obscure in the world of rock music, that I as a reader felt as if Benarde missed an opportunity. Nowhere is this more obvious as when, for every single profile, even for household names such as Dylan and Joel, Benarde insists on devoting a significant portion to basic biographical and career details. Given that each profile begins with a one-page identifier of career highlights, one would think that sufficient, but no; too many of the artists and songwriters described have what feel like abridged entries in the The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia Of Rock & Roll, which is a far better publication for such purposes. If the focus of Stars of David is ostensibly Rock 'n' Roll's Jewish Stories, then perhaps Benarde should have focused on that.

Overall, Benarde conveys the impression of overenthusiasm, which backfires insofar as this: When everyone in the book gets roughly the same treatment, deserved or not, the book feels more like a list of hey-isn't-this-cool moments rather than a serious discussion of identifiably Jewish artists; I would've preferred much more on, say, Kinky Friedman, newly-Orthodox Kenny Vance of Jay & the Americans, or David Lee Roth, the alleged inspiration for Stars of David, and less on, say, Johnny Clegg. Perhaps the book excels in individual, here-and-there moments'and it does, hence the ultimately positive rating'but Stars of David would have benefited from being more than just that.