Sidney Finkelstein (1909–1974) was a writer of music who specialized in jazz and was best known for his books Jazz, A People's Music (1948) and How Music Expresses Ideas (1952). Along Charles Seeger (father of Pete Seeger), Finkelstein is considered "one of two American Marxist musical theoreticians of consequence." He has also been compared to British jazz writer "Francis Newton," pseudonym for British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn.