Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Israel’s Keshet Eilon: a Musical Center for Greats and Beginners Alike
The Keshet Eilon Music Center, founded in the Western Galilee at Kibbutz Eilon in 1990, is known internationally for its three-week Summer International Violin Master Course, a benefit concert for which will be held at New York’s Zankel Hall on April 24. Recent students at Keshet Eilon have confronted a terrifyingly vigorous teacher, octogenarian violin…
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The Schmooze Singing Despite Tyranny: The German Jewish Culture Association
Readers of the moving family memoir “The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany” by Martin Goldsmith (Wiley, 2001) will recall how in 1933, a German Jewish Culture Association (Kulturbund Deutscher Juden) was formed with Nazi permission, which two years later was renamed the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture Association), omitting…
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Culture Spark Flies
Muriel Spark: The Biography By Martin Stannard W.W. Norton & Company, 656 pages, $35 The Scottish novelist Muriel Spark is mostly famous for a single book, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” made into an Oscar-winning film, and for her 1954 conversion to Catholicism. Now, a new biography by Martin Stannard offers fascinating new information…
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The Schmooze Krauthammers Answering “Great Ignorance” with Jewish Classical Music
Years ago, if a French composer had too many Jewish associates, it was assumed he was Jewish too. Thus Maurice Ravel, of Basque origin, was included in “Judentum und Musik,” a 1937 Nazi publication, as noted in the well-researched “The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich” by Michael H. Kater. A…
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The Schmooze French Actor Sami Frey: or ‘Beckett Judaizing Beckett’
The other evening, a solo performance of Samuel Beckett’s “First Love” (Premier Amour) at New York’s French Institute Alliance Française had an unexpected Jewish aura to it. The French Jewish actor Sami Frey, born Samuel Frei in 1937 to Polish Jewish parents deported from Paris and killed during World War II, will also perform it…
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The Schmooze Remembering French Jewish filmmaker Claude Berri
Just over a year ago, Kaddish was recited over the grave of French Jewish film director and producer Claude Berri at the suburban Bagneux Cemetery, known for its large Jewish section. More up-to-date recognition is overdue, and Berri’s longtime companion, the glamorous French Jewish novelist Nathalie Rheims, recently produced a memoir, “Claude” from Editions Léo…
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The Schmooze Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the French Jews Who Did Not Surrender
May 17 will be a landmark date in the family of actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Her grandfather Pierre Louis-Dreyfus will be 102. Beyond a highly lucrative career as a banker, Pierre is a noted war hero, one of the 42 still-living Compagnons de la Libération, a lofty distinction for war resisters. Like Louis-Dreyfus, a number of…
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The Schmooze Véra Belmont: A Jewish Piaf Who Grew Up to be a Filmmaker
On April 27, at New York’s French Institute/Alliance Française, the noted French Jewish film director and producer Véra Belmont will introduce one of her films as the culmination of a three-week festival in her honor, running from April 6 to 27. At 77, Belmont has just published with Les Éditions Stock in Paris a touching…
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