Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze A Tale of Two Prisoners
The historian Jean-Noël Jeanneney is mostly known as the author of “Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe” (University of Chicago Press), a 2006 attack on the search giant’s book digitization project. But Jeanneney, who is the former president of France’s notoriously user-unfriendly Bibliothèque nationale, is also the author of many…
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The Schmooze University of Provence Disinvites Israeli Writer Esther Orner
The septuagenarian Israeli novelist and poetry translator Esther Orner would hardly seem threatening to anyone. Yet Orner, who has translated Yehuda Amichai and Aharon Shabtai into French, has become the center of a frantic dispute in France. The University of Provence, based in Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles, has just canceled a March 2011 colloquium, “Writing Today…
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The Schmooze Frederica Sagor Maas, Hollywood’s ‘Shocking Miss Pilgrim’
On July 6, the New York-born screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas celebrated her 110th birthday in La Mesa, California. Maas was born into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants named Zagorsky — anglicized to Sagor at Ellis Island — who placed a solid emphasis on culture, despite their humble social status. In addition to subsidizing the…
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The Schmooze Hedy Lamarr, Queen of Hollywood Chutzpah
During her lifetime, even personal friends were unaware that film star Hedy Lamarr was Jewish. Now two new biographies — “Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr” by Stephen Michael Shearer, due out in September from St Martin’s Press and “Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film” by Ruth Barton, just out from The University…
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The Schmooze Munich Photographers in Palestine
From February 10 through May 23, “Unexposed: Munich Photographers in Exile,” a compelling exhibit at Munich’s Jewish Museum, focused on the art and fate of three photographers who fled Germany for Palestine in the 1930s, thereby remaining mostly unknown in their native land. Alfons Himmelreich (1904-1993), Efrem Ilani (1910-1999), and Jakob Rosner (1902-1950) all became…
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The Schmooze Who is Itta Shedletzky, ‘Kafka Specialist’?
A scrum of Israeli lawyers and Swiss bank clerks crowded a Zurich bank vault recently, after a Tel Aviv family court ordered the opening of four safe deposit boxes belonging to the heirs of Max Brod’s secretary containing manuscripts by Franz Kafka. A similar crowd had already visited safe deposit boxes in a Tel Aviv…
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The Schmooze Frédéric Chouraki’s Yom Kippur Comedy
France’s Frédéric Chouraki is one of Europe’s most frivolous and insouciant young Jewish novelists. Chouraki’s 2008 “Ginsberg and Me” (“Ginsberg et moi”), from Les Éditions du Seuil, is a fictional jape about Simon Glückmann, an observant young French Jew who meets and seduces the elderly American poet Allen Ginsberg in a Paris gay sauna. Hijinks…
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The Schmooze Alain Elkann Remembers Mama
Alain Elkann, born in 1950, is perhaps best known for his “Life of Moravia,” in which he was the chosen interlocutor of the famed novelist Alberto Moravia.The Jewish Italian author and journalist has also published two books of conversations with the chief rabbi emeritus of Italy, Elio Toaff, “To Be A Jew” and “The Messiah…
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