Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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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The Schmooze Luise Rainer: Can an Actress’s Yellowface Be Forgiven?
At the Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, which runs from April 22 to 25, the German Jewish actress Luise Rainer will embody a still-controversial paradox. Rainer, who turned 100 in January, will introduce a screening of one of her two Oscar-winning roles, as a tragic Chinese farmer’s wife in 1937’s “The Good…
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The Schmooze Hours of Catherine of Cleves: for 15th century Jews, First the Good News…
A few weeks ago, at an absorbing lecture offered as part of the Morgan Library’s “Demons and Devotion: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves” exhibit which opened January 22 and runs through May 2, the art historian James Marrow explained the exquisite imagery found in the 15th-century Dutch illuminated manuscript on view. Included are such…
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Books Preferring SS Officers to Beach Boys: George Steiner versus Emil Cioran
Gallimard has just published, in Paris, George Steiner’s “Lectures. Chroniques du New Yorker,” a translation of the 2009 New Directions collection, “George Steiner at The New Yorker.” Steiner is notorious for his rabid anti-Zionism and his peculiar 1981 novella “The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.,” a portrait of Adolf Hitler which some call…
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The Schmooze From the Tribe of Prophets: Swiss Jewish Philosopher Jeanne Hersch at 100
Although her centenary is not until July 13, the Swiss Jewish philosopher Jeanne Hersch (1910-2000) is already being remembered as a gimlet-eyed defender of freedom. Born in Geneva to a Polish Jewish statistics professor and his doctor wife, Hersch studied with the philosopher Karl Jaspers, whose career suffered in Germany after 1933 because his own…
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The Schmooze Nazis, Mendelssohns and Music: The Mendelssohn Mishpocha on Surviving Felix
“Mendelssohn, the Nazis and Me,” a recent DVD release from Kultur International Films, reproduces a 2009 BBC TV film by UK-born writer Sheila Hayman about her eminent ancestor, the composer Felix Mendelssohn. The multi-talented Hayman is author of previous light-hearted novels and documentary scripts about robots, abortions in China, car design and other eclectic subjects….
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Books The DisUnited States: Vladimir Pozner’s 1930s America
When times are tough for capitalists, Marxists love to gloat. That is the conclusion to be drawn from an account of Depression-era America, “Les États-Désunis” (“The DisUnited States”), newly reprinted by Lux Editions in Montreal. Its author, the prolific Russian Jewish writer Vladimir Salomonovitch Pozner (1905-1992), a friend of Isaac Babel who was long resident…
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