Robert Zimmerman’s engagement engagement with Judaism was peripheral at most and conflicted at best.

HARRY FREEDMAN
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I used to – still do – think that everything you might want or hope to know about Bob Dylan (pictured at the Bar Mitzvah of his son at the Wailing Wall, Jerusalem) is contained in his 1978 concert-diary-fantasy movie Renaldo and Clara, long since disappeared, disowned and forgotten. Enthusiasts now tend to point instead not to the recent movie A Complete Unknown, but to Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007) with its six (only six?) Dylans, one of them Cate Blanchett. There have, of course, been good books on Dylan – Aidan Day’s Jokerman, Ian Bell’s Once Upon a Time – but Bob’s own stalled Chronicles and now Harry Freedman’s apparently well-timed Jewish Roots, American Soil aren’t among the front-runners.

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