Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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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The Schmooze Hanna Maron: Mother Courage of the Israeli Stage
The widely reported demise of the last Ziegfeld girl, Doris Eaton Travis, sent entertainment historians rushing to the dwindling list of surviving silent film actors, of whom the late Ms. Travis was one. Another name on that list ranks as a survivor on more than one account: the beloved Israeli actress Hanna Maron. Born Hanna…
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The Schmooze From Feet to Flowers: The Artistic Trajectory of Jonathan Singer
How did a nice Jewish podiatrist from Bayonne, New Jersey become an internationally famous glamor photographer of flowers? That question may be mulled over by visitors to the exhibit of photos by Jonathan Singer, which opened May 14 and runs until June 4 at the Legends Gallery in Chatham, New Jersey. Last year Abbeville Press…
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The Schmooze The Joys of Pan-Mizrahi Music
Whatever naysayers may claim, Middle Eastern people (and others) delight in Middle Eastern-sounding music. This is one thesis behind a sympathetic new study from Wayne State University Press, “Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic” by Amy Horowitz. From the 1950s to the 1990s, Horowitz explains, North African and Middle Eastern immigrants to…
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The Schmooze Old Jewish Divas and Some Casting Advice for Dustin Hoffman
Yesterday’s announcement that 43 years after playing a quintessentially confused Jewish college graduate, Dustin Hoffman plans to make his directorial debut, may raise some eyebrows. Hoffman has chosen to adapt “Quartet,” a 1999 play by Cape Town-born Jewish playwright Ronald Harwood (né Horwitz). In the bittersweet “Quartet,” ancient opera singers in a retirement home lip…
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The Schmooze Uncarnal Love: Fictionalizing French Socialist Léon Blum
Ilan Greilsammer, who teaches political science and French culture at Bar-Ilan University, is the author of a 1996 biography from Les Éditions Flammarion of the French Jewish Socialist leader Léon Blum, as well as a 1998 “New History of Israel” (Gallimard). After editing Blum’s “Letters from Buchenwald” (2003; also from Gallimard), Greilsammer has just published…
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