QOTD

Wilfrid Sheed, from his new book The House that George Built, quoted in the November 19th Weekly Standard:

Music is not produced by whole groups, but by one genius at a time, and it may be significant that the two families that gave us Irving Berlin and George Gershwin both fled Russia on the same great wave of czarist pogroms, only to find in America black people not only singing about a similar experience, but using the Hebrew Bible as their text.