Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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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The Schmooze ‘We Are Going to Pick Potatoes:’ The Shoah in Norway
Given the current stew of antisemitic hatred in Norway, it is hardly surprising that Holocaust studies from there are hardly a favored export, alongside herring and oil. Over 40 percent of Norway’s Jews were slaughtered during World War II, among the worst losses in Scandinavia at that time. While there is a modest, neglected Jewish…
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The Schmooze Oscar Niemeyer, Israel, and Two Jews Named Jacob
After a recent short hospital stay, the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer is back to work at age 102. Despite many reiterated online claims by Brazilian Jews to the contrary, Niemeyer is not Jewish. Of mixed German-Italian ancestry, Niemeyer did work with the Brazilian Jewish architect Elias Kaufman on his most famous project, Brazil’s capital city…
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The Schmooze Eva Mayer Schay: Surviving Exile and Sadistic Music Teachers
The monumentally traumatic exile of European Jews during Fascist times was paralleled in some ways by the inner trauma of Jewish music students saddled with sadistic teachers. This is the surprising conclusion of a discursive, artless new autobiography, more case history than memoir, “Of Exile and Music: A Twentieth Century Life” (Purdue University Press) by…
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