Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Where Is the Next Great Child Composer?
Asked to name a Jewish child prodigy composer, most people would think of Felix Mendelssohn or perhaps even Felix’s sister Fanny. Yet a fascinating study from Scarecrow Press, “Child Composers and Their Works: A Historical Survey” by Manchester University musicologist Barry Cooper, argues that we should also think of the Swiss Jewish composer Ernest Bloch…
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The Schmooze Gustav Metzger: Staving Off Humanity’s Self-Destruction
The doughty old UK counter-culture artist and agitator Gustav Metzger is more active than ever. Last year’s exhibit, “Gustav Metzger: Decades 1959–2009,” at London’s Serpentine Gallery recently traveled to west-central France, where it was seen from March 10 to June 15 at Rochechouart’s Musée départemental d’art contemporain. Its next scheduled stop is in northern Italy,…
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The Schmooze Old Jews Not Telling Jokes
After the website and DVD “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” it can be a relief to find Jewish elders who are not trying to be adorable or cutesy. The publisher S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt, Germany has reprinted 1989’s “Jüdische Portraits” (“Jewish Portraits”), 80 interviews and accompanying photographs by Herlinde Koelbl, to go along with an…
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Culture Journalist for All Seasons
To filmgoers, Joseph Kessel is best remembered as the novelist whose spicy “Belle de jour” was adapted into a 1967 Catherine Deneuve film by director Luis Buñuel. But a more abiding image might be Kessel the academician, who, when required to carry a sword for his 1964 induction into the Académie française, used one that…
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The Schmooze Evry Schatzman: From the Earth to the Stars
When Evry Schatzman died two months ago at age 89, France paid tribute to its “Father of Astrophysics,” one of the pioneering specialists in white dwarf stars, the solar corona, novae, and the interstellar medium. In books like 1992’s “Our Expanding Universe” from McGraw-Hill Publishers and 1993’s “The Stars” from Springer Verlag, Schatzman also focused…
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The Schmooze Montreal’s First Yiddish School
With the recent rise in antisemitic violence in Montreal, Canada, such incidents are at an “all-time high” nationwide, according to B’nai Brith Canada. Even a century ago, however, Canada offered protection to Jews’ “households and rights,” to quote the French version of the Canadian national anthem. A reminder of such days recently appeared from Les…
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The Schmooze Jazz Jews in Excelsis
Those eager to hear the Latin jazz maestro Larry Harlow, whose Yiddishkeit was explored in the Forward last year, at his much-anticipated August 14 Lincoln Center concert, can stave off their impatience for “El Judio Maravilloso” with an exuberant new compendium from Five Leaves Publications, “Jazz Jews.” In the book, British journalist and indefatigable researcher…
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The Schmooze Jacques Maritain: How Righteous a Gentile?
For many years, the influential philosopher Jacques Maritain has been seen as a rare philosemite among the French Catholics of his day (Maritain died at age 90 in 1973). Robert Royal’s 1993 study, “Jacques Maritain and the Jews” (University of Notre Dame Press) is an account of Maritain’s friendship with the painter Marc Chagall and…
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