Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Sweet Sounds for Spring: Music Roundup
Many gifted young musicians live professional lives outside the framework of the troubled CD industry. Alexander Fiterstein, a preternaturally poised and mature young clarinetist who emigrated to Israel at age two from Belarus, was awarded a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant last year. When he is not busy tweeting to his fans, Fiterstein’s artistry may…
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The Schmooze It’s hard To Be a Rock-Drummer: Max Weinberg’s Fate in the Balance
Rumors are swirling furiously on entertainment blogs about whether Max Weinberg, Conan O’Brien’s longtime drummer and comedic foil, will be rehired for Conan’s upcoming TBS cable show. The kerfuffle started when Weinberg’s fellow Jewish rock musician Al Kooper (born Alan Kuperschmidt) told an interviewer that Weinberg had been “fired” because of conflicts with Weinberg’s performing…
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The Schmooze Antisemitic Riots in Oslo: Part of a Trend?
According to “The Anti-Jewish Riots in Oslo,” a cogent new book by Norwegian historian Eirik Eiglad, the riots of January 2009 in Oslo, ostensibly against the war in Gaza, actually followed “age-old patterns of antisemitic hatred.” Himself beaten, kicked, and spit on by demonstrators, Eiglad, who had not joined any side, recounts how a deranged…
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The Schmooze Sanford Friedman’s ‘Heroic or Meritorious Achievement’
A brave alternative to 1950s “Stoolpigeon Culture,” as described in Joseph Litvak’s influential “The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture,” the novelist Sanford Friedman, who died April 20 at age 81, proudly assumed his membership in several minority groups. Leftist, gay and Jewish, Friedman was a Horace Mann School student, where he became friends…
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The Schmooze Claude Sarraute: A Disobedient Daughter
The French Jewish journalist Claude Sarraute, 82, is the daughter of the noted Russian Jewish novelist Nathalie Sarraute (born Natalia Tcherniak). A new memoir from Éditions Plon, “Before You Forget Everything!” explains how Sarraute consciously avoided following in her mother’s footsteps. The elder Sarraute was the author of abstract, sober philosophical narratives such as “Do…
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The Schmooze An Exceptional Jew: Jesus as Seen by Jewish Historians
Before 1970, writings about Jesus by Jewish scriptural authorities were relatively rare, apart from the widely known works of Lithuanian-born Joseph Klausner. But as the Swiss New Testament scholar Daniel Marguerat writes in a preface to Dan Jaffé’s informative “20th century Jewish Historians on Jesus,” Christianity is the “only world religion whose founder is not…
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The Schmooze Alberto Moravia’s Artistic Activism
Art is its own form of activism, we are reminded by a major new biography of the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, published by les éditions Flammarion in Paris. Born Alberto Pincherle (his father was a Jewish architect) in 1907, Moravia was a cousin of Carlo and Nello Rosselli, the Jewish anti-fascist activists who were murdered…
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The Schmooze News from Uncle Siggy: Freud’s Ever-Present Influence
In May, Viggo Mortensen, an actor of Danish-Canadian ancestry, will start filming David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method,” in the role of Sigmund Freud. Gentile actors have frequently played Freud: Max von Sydow in “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” (1993); Alec Guinness in “Lovesick” (1983); Montgomery Clift in “Freud” (1962); and Farley Granger in “The Wound…
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