Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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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The Schmooze David Broza Brews Up a Concert at Le Poisson Rouge
For over 30 years, the star Israeli singer-songwriter David Broza, who performs at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge on June 14, has been entertaining audiences with real talent and just a dollop of chutzpah. The grandson of Wellesley (Pinchas) Aron, Chaim Weizmann’s political secretary and co-founder of the Habonim movement as well as the Arab-Israeli…
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The Schmooze Who Was Modern Earliest, Ashkenazim or Sephardim?
Behind the ever-abiding divisions between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews is the widely-held belief that Ashkenazim, as leaders of the Haskalah, or Enlightenment movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, were pioneers of modernity. Now David Ruderman, a Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania, hurls a well-researched grenade into such presuppositions. Ruderman,…
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The Schmooze Italian Jews and ‘Fascist Imbecility’
Especially while it is still a matter of living memory, the recent revelations about the wartime experience of Italy’s Jews are of urgent importance. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini, who turned 101 on April 22, describes what she calls the “imbecility” of antisemitic edicts promulgated by Italian Fascists during the Second World War. Barred…
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The Schmooze The Pioneering Film Theory of Béla Balázs
The Hungarian poet Béla Balázs (1884–1949), born Herbert Bauer to a German Jewish family in Szeged, is best remembered for his libretto to Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle and the scenario for Bartók’s ballet The Wooden Prince. Yet he was also a pioneering film theorist, as a compelling new publication from Berghahn Books, “Béla Balázs:…
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The Schmooze How Yves Klein Was Inspired by Moshe Dayan
A compelling new exhibit of the French artist Yves Klein at Washington, D. C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which opened May 20 and runs until September 12, is a good occasion for reevaluating this artist’s unexpected link to the Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan. Despite claims on many websites, Klein was not himself Jewish,…
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