Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Are Jewish Film Festivals in Trouble?
As reported earlier this year, Berlin’s Jewish Film Festival, Germany’s only such gathering, may be shutting its doors due to funding cuts from the local government. Is Jewish culture now so well-loved and understood in Berlin that such a festival is no longer needed? On the contrary, the London-born Berlin festival director Nicola Galliner told…
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Culture A Perennial Wunderkind
Despite his mastery of the weary insomniac tone, Harold Bloom, who turns 80 on July 11, has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, youthful intellectual vigor as master of the intellectual zetz (wallop, in Bloom’s native Yiddish). Born in the East Bronx to an Odessa-born garment worker and a housewife who emigrated from near Brest-Litovsk, Bloom…
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The Schmooze Boris Cyrulnik and the Art of Creative Disobedience
Born in 1937, the French neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik has long been a media darling for his insights into such varied subjects as workplace violence, the wonders of nature, and scientific/technological progress in general. Although Cyrulnik’s public advice is sometimes leavened with lighthearted whimsy, his utterly serious understanding of the importance of psychological resilience, or surviving…
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The Schmooze Mordecai Richler: Canada’s Firebrand in Fiction
The Canadian Jewish novelist and gadfly Mordecai Richler, who died in 2001, was renowned internationally for books such as “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” “The Street,” “Solomon Gursky Was Here,” and an anthology, “Writers On World War II,” all available from Penguin Canada. Yet Richler’s fiercely outspoken personality seems to fascinate posterity as much as…
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The Schmooze When Saul Became Paul
Saul of Tarsus, a first century Pharisee, supposedly came to believe in Jesus while traveling to Damascus. Changing his name to Paul, he expressed “unparalleled animosity and hostility to Judaism,” according to the 1906 Jewish Encyclopaedia, which scorns him, like many other sources, as an apostate. Yet today, Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer of Pennsylvania’s Reconstructionist Rabbinical…
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The Schmooze Stefan Zweig: Literary Saint or Suicidal Schmendrik?
Almost 70 years after committing suicide in Brazil in 1942, the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig still divides readers. Laurence Mintz, in a preface to the reprint of Zweig’s “Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky: Master Builders of the Spirit” from Transaction Publishers, points to how Zweig’s suicide, in safety and comfort, seemed a cop-out to many émigré…
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The Schmooze Zita Carno: Defender of Free Jazz, Modern Music and Baseball
This August in Atlanta, when the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) convenes, one of the attendees will be one of America’s most accomplished, if under-celebrated, Jewish musicians. For many years, the pianist Zita Carno (originally Carnovsky) has delighted music lovers with heartfelt and elegant performances of demanding modern music, first in New York, then…
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The Schmooze Reconciling Enemies: Jazz Sax and Flute Player Lew Tabackin
Veteran sax and flute player Lew Tabackin, a product of South Philadelphia, is one of the “Jazz Jews” discussed in Mike Gerber’s new book of that name. Tabackin performs in a quartet with his wife, the noted pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi, and will appear from June 29 to July 3 at Birdland. Though Tabackin did not…
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