Influential British music journalist Penny Valentine, born of Jewish and Italian ancestry, was a huge booster of the Beatles in print and elsewhere. Slovakian-Jewish photographer Dezo Hoffman was their “official photographer” for a number of years in the mid-1960s filmmaker Richard Lester (born Richard Lester Liebman) directed their two comedy films, “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” and Jewish hairdresser Leslie Cavendish - who learned his craft from Anglo-Jewish hairstylist Vidal Sassoon and who volunteered in Israel in June 1967 in the wake of the Six-Day War - styled the Beatles’ tresses in the mid-to-late 1960s. They were a corporation, and other than record producer George Martin, almost all the significant corporate roles were filled by Jews, from manager Brian Epstein to lawyer David Jacobs to concert promoter Sid Bernstein to New York City DJs Murray the K (Kaufman) and Cousin Brucie (Meyerowitz).

The Beatles were more than just the Fab Four. Feinberg in the Catskills) and Mort Dixon’s “Bye Bye Blackbird.” Ringo shared his stepfather’s enthusiasm for the music of that era, whose influence would be made manifest on Starr’s debut solo album, “Sentimental Journey,” which featured Starr – previously known for singing such Beatles novelties as “Yellow Submarine” and “Octopus’s Garden” – tackling pre-rock pop standards, including “Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing” by Sammy Fain (the son of a cantor, born Samuel E. Seeing how much Ritchie was devoted to music and particularly to the drums, Graves gave Ritchie his first drum kit as a Christmas gift in 1957. His stepfather Graves was an ardent fan of big-band music and vocals one of his favorites was Dinah Shore, born Fannye Rose Shore to Russian-Jewish immigrant shopkeepers in Winchester, Tenn. His love of drums was an outgrowth of a stint playing in a hospital band. Even today, Beatles-themed bus tours of Liverpool that take fans to all the Beatles’ childhood homes skirt the area where Ringo grew up, with guides just pointing down a long street, curtly noting, “Ringo lived down there.”Ī sickly child, Ritchie spent much of his youth in hospitals and convalescent homes, having variously contracted appendicitis, peritonitis and tuberculosis. Ritchie grew up in Dingle, one of the poorer, rougher neighborhoods in Liverpool. His mother, Elise Gleave, remarried to a Jewish man named Harry Graves when young Ritchie, as he was called to distinguish between him and his ne’er-do-well father, was 14 years old. His biological father, Richard Starkey, only stuck around for a few years and then disappeared, presumably in a haze of alcohol and gambling. The Liverpool-born drummer and member of the Beatles, born 82 years ago on July 7, 1940, did in fact have a Jewish stepfather.

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