Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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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The Schmooze Rediscovering Free-spirited Photographers Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel
At 92, Brooklyn-born Lillian Bassman and her husband Paul Himmel, who died last year at age 94, are enjoying remarkable, if belated, fame. “Lillian Bassman: Women,” a lavish new volume by Deborah Solomon, highlights Bassman’s elegantly abstract black-and-white fashion photographs from the 1940s through the 1960s for magazines like Harper’s Bazaar. Solomon also notes the…
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The Schmooze Pianist Maurizio Pollini: Perpetuating Kabbalah-based Inspiration?
An all-Chopin recital April 18 at Carnegie Hall by the Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini, who gives further performances of the same composer’s music on April 29 and May 9, contained spiritual, even mystical, depth. Chopin is not often considered the most metaphysical of composers; the Hungarian Jewish pianist András Schiff, himself a majestic Chopin interpreter,…
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The Schmooze 19th Century Jewish Soldiers Remembered
European publishers are reminding readers about Jewish soldiers who volunteered for battle. Paris’s Éditions Autrement recently published the memoir, “Jakob Meyer: Soldier for Napoleon, 1808-1813” (Jakob Meyer, Soldat de Napoléon) about a Göttingen resident who felt gratitude to Napoléon for founding the Kingdom of Westphalia in parts of present-day Germany, in which Jews gained residential…
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