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Born into a Jewish family in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in Flushing, Queens, New York, Bock studied the piano as a child. While a student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he wrote the musical Big As Life, which toured the state and enjoyed a run in Chicago.
The show made Bock world-famous for his lilting, instantly familiar Jewish melodies and catchy rhythms. There was consummate artistry in the way he could set to music even so banal an exchange...
Whether Bock was writing music about a Jewish community in a shtetl in Russia in the late 19th century -- like he did for Fiddler on the Roof-- or New York of the 1920s and '30s -- like he did...
When composer Jerry Bock started work on a musical about a rural Jewish community at the turn of the century, few expected the show to have much commercial appeal. But Mr. Bock was penning a...
With a book written by Mr. Stein and based on stories by Sholem Aleichem, “Fiddler” was a musical portrait of a Jewish community under threat of expulsion by the Russian czar.
NEW YORK ( JTA) — Ever since Zero Mostel imagined himself as a rich man in the original 1964 Broadway production, “Fiddler on the Roof” has been a cultural landmark on Broadway and in the Jewish...
This interview originally aired on June 21, 2004. Jerry Bock, the composer who wrote the score for some of Broadway’s most popular musicals, including Fiddler on the Roof and Fiorello!, died...
