Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze French Jewish Director Jean-Pierre Mocky Mocks On
The French Jewish film director Jean-Pierre Mocky exemplifies the bitterness at the heart of many highly original comedic talents. Delightful comic actors from Bourvil to Michel Serrault enjoyed long, if quirky, professional associations with Mocky, whose career as an actor and director has been as stormy as the best of his films. Born Jean-Paul Adam…
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The Schmooze Patrick Modiano: Writing and Rewriting Recent Jewish History
On June 9, French novelist Patrick Modiano will receive a prestigious literary prize from the Fondation Simone et Cino del Duca, previously given to Jean Anouilh, Jorge Luis Borges, and Milan Kundera. Modiano, born in 1945, is the son of Albert Modiano, an Italian Jew with roots in Salonica, who survived the war as a…
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The Schmooze Nikolaus Pevsner: The ‘Herr Professor-Doktor’ of British Architecture
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, a German-born Jew, became one of the pillars of British academia as a highly respected architectural historian. After relocating to London in 1933, he was eventually knighted in recognition of his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, “The Buildings of England” (1951–74). So the announcement in a new biography by Stephen Games,…
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The Schmooze Naïm Kattan: an Iraqi Jewish Writer in Canada
An acclaimed master of the French Canadian literary scene, novelist and essayist Naïm Kattan also offers readers a unique Iraqi Jewish viewpoint. In English, Kattan is mostly known as the author of “Farewell, Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad,” a justly praised memoir from David R. Godine. Unfortunately, few of his dozens of other…
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Books South Carolina’s Franklin J. Moses: Scalawag, But No Paskudnyak?
A scalawag may be a nogoodnik or even a paskudnyak, but in the subtitle of Benjamin Ginsberg’s brisk, informed “Moses of South Carolina: A Jewish Scalawag during Radical Reconstruction” from Johns Hopkins University Press, “scalawag” has a more precise historical meaning. Applied after the Civil War to Southern whites who joined political forces with freed…
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Culture Not Drowning But Waving
Painting whimsies for glossy magazines may be no great cultural achievement, but neither is it proof against more profound investigation. Illustrator and designer Maira Kalman is a sterling example of how an artist can do both. A major touring exhibition, “Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World),” is at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art,…
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The Schmooze Barbra Streisand To Open BookExpo America 2010
Fans of the comedian Kathy Griffin will recall her deathless account of Barbra Streisand’s visit to “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and the television host’s astonishment on discovering that Streisand had painted her microphone white as part of a recent obsession with color. Another expression of this color sensitivity is Streisand’s forthcoming “My Passion for Design”…
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The Schmooze Marianne Rubinstein: Grandchild of the Shoah
As Serge Klarsfeld wrote in his preface to a 2002 book by Marianne Rubinstein, “Not Everyone is Lucky Enough to Be an Orphan” (Éditions Verticales), only three percent of deported French Jews returned home alive after the war, leaving their surviving children with unspoken traumas which they passed on to their children in turn. The…
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