Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Who Killed Haim Arlozoroff?
The Cairo-born French Jewish ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan is a man of many talents. A prolific novelist as well as teacher, Nathan recently published “My Patient, Sigmund Freud” with Les Éditions Perrin. Nathan’s new novel, “Who Killed Arlozoroff?” from Les Éditions Grasset reveals other fields of knowledge. It starts with a French journalist with Egyptian Jewish…
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The Schmooze James Levine: First the Bad News…
The news, announced today, that Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor James Levine is bowing out of his scheduled concerts at this summer’s Tanglewood Music Festival to continue recovering from back surgery, raises the time-honored question, more often asked about baseball than classical music: “What does it mean for the Jews?” Tanglewood, long the stomping grounds of…
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The Schmooze How ‘Oyfn Pripetshik’ Traveled the World
Anyone observing the past century of Russian music may wonder why, in spite of all discouragements, so many Jewish overachievers managed to compose and perform immortal music? This basic question is masterfully addressed in a forthcoming book, out today from Yale University Press, “The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire.”…
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The Schmooze Willy Ronis, France’s Photographer of the Working Poor, Exhibited at the Mint
The great French Jewish photographer Willy Ronis died last year at age 99, and until August 22, his centenary exhibit “Willy Ronis: the Poetics of Engagement” (“Willy Ronis, une poétique de l’engagement”) can be seen, oddly enough, at the Paris Mint, la Monnaie de Paris. Whereas Ronis was a left-wing defender of the downtrodden working…
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The Schmooze Leon Levinstein’s Powerful, Pitiless Street Photography
Some Jewish photographers embrace subject matter which plays better overseas than in the United States. One example is Weegee, born Usher Fellig in Złoczów, whose photos of low class nightlife and crime were infused with a raucous gusto that charmed Europe decades before he received adequate recognition in America. Leon Levinstein, an even more difficult…
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The Schmooze Mike Nichols Nabs the AFI Life Achievement Award
After the honorifics at last year’s MOMA festival and the 2003 Kennedy Center Honors, someone must have decided director Mike Nichols has not been praised enough lately. Riding to the rescue is the American Film Institute, which will present Nichols with its 38th AFI Life Achievement Award today. Nichols will thereby be placed alongside great…
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The Schmooze ‘Keeping it From Collapse’: The Sculptural Visions of Dina Recanati
Until June 16, Manhattan art lovers will have the unusual experience of visiting a gallery exhibit by a banker’s widow who also happens to be an evolving, gifted artist. Dina Recanati, born in Cairo in 1928, married the banker and philanthropist Raphael Recanati in Tel Aviv in 1946, after which she pursued art studies in…
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The Schmooze Jurek Becker: Forget the Films, Read the Books
Judging any author by the film adaptations of his books is perilous, but few examples are as unfair as Jurek Becker (1937-1997), a German-language Polish Jewish writer who survived the Łódź Ghetto, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen. Becker’s most famous novel, 1969’s “Jakob the Liar” (Jakob der Lügner) still merits rereading, despite the uneven 1999 movie adaptation…
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