(RNS) — America’s greatest musician of the 20th century was born on Aug. 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Mass. When he died 72 years later, The New York Times called him a “Musical Monarch.” And indeed, Leonard Bernstein, a man of extraordinary emotion and energy, was all that and more.

To honor Bernstein during his centennial year, there have been 3,000 musical and cultural events in more than 30 countries, including performances in Iran, Kuwait and Malaysia.
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The world will forever remember his classic Broadway musicals, “West Side Story,” “On The Town,” “Wonderful Town” and “Candide.” Bernstein also composed music for the ballets “Fancy Free” and “ Dybbuk,” the Yiddish term for a tormented spirit that enters a person, and he wrote the music for the film “On The Waterfront.” Of course, Bernstein was a gifted pianist, a creator of classical music, an acclaimed educator, a political activist and a world-class symphony orchestra conductor.

The centennial of the renowned maestro Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) is currently being celebrated around the world with more than 3,000 musical performances and museum exhibits. More than 30 countries are hosting concerts featuring Bernstein’s music, including the U.S., Canada, France, Britain, Israel, China, Russia, Iran, Malaysia, and Kuwait.

Most widely known for the Broadway hit musical West Side Story, Bernstein was a gifted pianist, composer, and conductor.
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He was born in Lawrence, MA, on August 25, 1918, to parents who immigrated to the United States to escape the anti-Semitism of their native Ukraine. They were active members of Boston’s Mishkan Tefilacongregation.

In Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), literary critic and poet Adam Kirsch presents us with a collection of 270 letters spanning the period from 1924 to 1975, the year of literary critic Lionel Trilling’s death at the age of 70. The letters are organized in chronological order rather than thematically, juxtaposing love letters to his wife Diana (an important literary critic in her own right) to discourses on his favorite British authors, to dealings with his psychoanalysts. 


Trilling’s father was a tailor from Bialystok, Poland, and although Lionel’s mother was born in England and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, her family’s Jewish roots were also in Poland.   
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Lionel was born in Queens, N.Y., in 1905 and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He entered Columbia University at age 16 when, as Trilling wrote 50 years later, the university was “pretty far along toward its Jewish coloration.” He earned both his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia and made history when he overcame embedded academic anti-Semitism to become the first Jew to gain professorial tenure in Columbia’s prestigious English department.

Nearly 40 years have passed since Dan White, a disgruntled political rival, shot and killed San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, and Mayor George Moscone in their City Hall offices.

At his trial, White ’s lawyers claimed his mental capacity was diminished as a result of severe depression, and he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. Two years after his release from prison, White committed suicide in 1985.
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Since those murders, the mists of legend have enveloped Milk, who had served as supervisor for only 11 months before his murder at age 48. A 2008 film bears his name as does a New York City high school. Time magazine included Milk on its list of the hundred most influential individuals of the 20th century, Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2009, and the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor in 2014.