Seth was editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Berkshire Living, a perennially award-winning regional lifestyle and culture magazine that served the greater Berkshire region of western Massachusetts, southwestern Vermont, eastern New York, and northwestern Connecticut faithfully for six years (2004-2010). He was also editor-in-chief of Berkshire Living’s spinoff publications, including BBQ: Berkshire Business Quarterly and Berkshire Living Home+Garden, as well as Berkshire Living’s online platforms and social media feeds. Seth’s regular column of music and cultural criticism, “The Beat Goes On,” that ran in every issue of Berkshire Living, garnered him four consecutive awards from the National City and Regional Magazine Association for General Criticism.

For four decades, Seth has been a rock and jazz critic, primarily for Berkshire Living magazine and the Berkshire Eagle daily newspaper. Seth’s cultural journalism – including essays and reviews on music, dance, books, theater, film, TV, and visual arts – has appeared in newspapers and magazines including Newsday, the Boston Phoenix, Chronogram, Sing Out!, Edutopia, Gastronomica, the Woodstock (N.Y.) Times, the Bennington (Vt.) Banner, the Register-Star (Columbia County, N.Y.), Leak CD Magazine, Audition, On the Tracks, the Black and White City Paper of Birmingham, Ala., Haaretz (Israel), Jewish Quarterly (UK), Jewish Press (UK), Tablet, Moment, the Berkshire Jewish Voice, and others. Seth has also written for WBUR’s online arts and culture magazine, The ARTery, and Kripalu’s wellness and yoga blog, Thrive.

Termed “American Jewry’s greatest Dylan scholar” by Religion News Service, Seth is the recipient of a 2016 Simon Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for excellence in arts and criticism, for his portrait of musician Leonard Cohen published in Hadassah Magazine in its April/May 2015 issue. Seth is also the author of The Secret Jewish History of … Everything, a promotional-only eBook published by The Forward in 2022. Since its debut in summer 2012, Seth has been the artistic director of the annual YIDSTOCK: Festival of New Yiddish Music, at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. Seth is the producer and co-creator of FROM SHTETL to STAGE: A Celebration of Yiddish Music & Culture, which debuted before a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall on April 15, 2019.

Seth is currently working on Rockin’ the Shtetl, a multi-platform project exploring the affinities between 19th-century Eastern European Yiddish songwriters and musicians and 20th-century American folk-rock poets and protest singers. This is simultaneously being created as a multimedia program with live music (which received a work-in-progress showing at CR10 Arts in Linlithgo, N.Y., in summer 2015, and at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., in summers 2016 and 2017) and as a long-form written narrative.

Seth has taught a variety of college and adult-ed courses on klezmer, Jewish music, and Bob Dylan, about whom he has written extensively.

Seth produced the eponymous debut album by Ryder Cooley & Dust Bowl Faeries, which Chronogram magazine termed “brilliantly produced.”

An amateur singer-guitarist, Seth has led several bands, including the Rolling Rogovoy Revue, Rumble Strip, and Seth Rogovoy and the Grove Street Band. Seth has performed at Club Helsinki in Hudson, N.Y., and Great Barrington, Mass.; at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England; in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass.; and at Bob Dylan tribute concerts throughout the Northeastern United States. He has also read performance poetry at The Stone in New York City’s East Village.

Seth served two terms as a member of the Board of Selectmen in Pownal, Vt., and is a past president of a food co-op and a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in Williamstown, Mass. Seth currently serves as a board member of the Hudson (N.Y.) Development Corporation (HDC).

A native New Yorker, Seth was born in Jackson Heights, N.Y., lived briefly in Bay Shore, and grew up in Islip, N.Y., where he attended public schools.

A graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., where he has taught courses on Bob Dylan and klezmer, Seth lived in the Berkshires, where he raised a family, for about three decades. His daughter is a dancer and choreographer on the faculty at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his son, based in Los Angeles, is an electronic dance music (EDM) producer who performs under the name Barely Alive.

Seth lives in Hudson, N.Y., with his wife, Linda Friedner, a media lawyer who works in book publishing.