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Jimmy Dorsey
Jimmy Dorsey (James Francis Dorsey), 1904-57, and his brother Tommy Dorsey (Thomas Francis Dorsey, Jr.), 1905-1956, both b. Shenandoah, Pa., American jazz musicians and bandleaders during the Big Band era. Jimmy Dorsey played the clarinet and alto saxophone, his brother the trombone. Toward the...
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Tommy Tune
Tommy Tune 1939-, American dancer, choreographer, and director, b. Wichita Falls, Tex. An unusually lanky 6 ft 6 in., Tune began his Broadway dancing career in the chorus of several mid-1960s musicals, then performed as a tap dancer in musical films, including Hello Dolly! (1969) and The Boy Fri...
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Israel Zangwill
Israel Zangwill 1864-1926, English author, b. London. He became a journalist and founded Ariel, a humorous paper. Zangwill wrote Children of the Ghetto (1892), later dramatized and performed in England and America, and Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898), a series of biographical studies. His other...
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phylacteries
phylacteries [Gr.,=safeguard], two small leather boxes worn during morning prayers by Orthodox and Conservative Jews after the age of 13 years and one day. Each box contains strips of parchment inscribed with verses from the Scriptures: Ex. 13.1-10; 13.11-16; Deut. 6.4-9; 11.13-21. One box is faste...
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Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday in the Western Church, the first day of Lent , being the seventh Wednesday before Easter. On this day ashes are placed on the foreheads of the faithful to remind them of death, of the sorrow they should feel for their sins, and of the necessity of changing their lives. The practice, ...
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Jens Peter Jacobsen
Jens Peter Jacobsen , 1847-85, Danish writer. His historical romance Marie Grubbe (1876, tr. 1917) deals with spiritual degeneration in 17th-century Denmark. Jacobsen's other works include Nels Lyhne (1880, tr. 1919), a semiautobiographical work about a dreamer unable to cope with the realities ...
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Vernon Castle, and Irene Foote
Vernon Castle, and Irene Foote 1893-1969, husband-and-wife dance team. Vernon Castle was an English dancer, who studied civil engineering before turning to the stage and making his debut in 1907. In 1911, he married Irene Foote, b. New Rochelle, N.Y. In Paris in 1912 their versions of such dances a...
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Jack Johnson
Jack Johnson (John Arthur Johnson), 1878-1946, American boxer, b. Galveston, Tex., the son of two ex-slaves. Emerging from the battle royals (dehumanizing fights between blacks for the amusement of white patrons) of his youth, he defeated Tommy Burns in 1908 to become the world's first African-Amer...
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Bernardo Bertolucci
Bernardo Bertolucci , 1940-, Italian film director and screenwriter, b. Parma. The son of poet Attilio Bertolucci and himself a published poet, he began his film career in 1961 as an assistant to director Pier Paolo Pasolini . Bertolucci made his first feature-length film the following year and sco...
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Morris Raphael Cohen
Morris Raphael Cohen 1880-1947, American philosopher, b. Minsk, Russia, grad. College of the City of New York, 1900, Ph.D. Harvard, 1906. He emigrated to the United States in 1892. At first an instructor in mathematics at the College of the City of New York, Cohen transferred to the department of p...
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