Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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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The Schmooze Wait ‘Till the Sun Shines, Nelly Sachs
Anyone traveling through Germany this month has until June 27 to see a landmark exhibit at the Jewish Museum Berlin, “Flight and Metamorphosis: Nelly Sachs, Writer, Berlin/Stockholm.” The exhibit, which opened March 25, pays homage to Nelly Sachs, the only German-language poet ever given the Nobel Prize. In 1966, Sachs shared the Nobel with Israeli…
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The Schmooze German Jewish Athletes Belatedly Recognized
As summer approaches, sports fans may worry about the progress of the Mets’ rookie first baseman Isaac Benjamin “Ike” Davis, of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry, and use Sandy Koufax’s recent White House visit to remind everyone that the “only Jewish left-hander not named Sandy Koufax to toss two no-hitters” was Ken Holtzman. The overpowering passion for…
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The Schmooze The Assaf Kehati Trio Jazzes Up The Beehive and The Blue Note
Music lovers preoccupied with the question of “whither Jewish jazz?” will want to attend the June 19 performance by the Assaf Kehati Trio at Boston’s The Beehive, in anticipation of their scheduled sets at New York’s The Blue Note on August 1. The trio consists of guitarist Assaf Kehati, an Israeli-born resident of Boston, veteran…
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The Schmooze Paul Celan’s Lover Emerges From the Shadows
The Suhrkamp Verlag series of the great Romanian-born Jewish poet Paul Celan’s letters has received worldwide attention. Among the avid readers was an 81-year-old Austrian-born historian of anthropology, Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, long resident in France, where she publishes on ethnology and related subjects. Eisenreich recently decided to speak up about her own secret nine-year love affair,…
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The Schmooze Whatever Happened to Jack Hamesh?
A new literary mystery has emerged with the publication by Suhrkamp Verlag in Germany of 11 love letters, dated 1946-47, by Jack Hamesh, a young Viennese Jewish émigré, to the noted Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, who was then 18. Hamesh, born c. 1920, had fled Vienna in 1938 on one of the Kindertransport to England,…
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