Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Books Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot vs. Hitler
Agatha Christie (1890–1976), has long been underestimated by readers and fellow writers alike, despite her 80 novels which have sold a reported four billion copies. For example, the astute mystery writer P. D. James, in her newly published “Talking About Detective Fiction,” complains that Christie, with her “pasteboard characters,” has not had a “profound influence…
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The Schmooze Guys & Dolls & Bagels & Animals: American Jewish Composer Frank Loesser at 100
Some Jewish Broadway tunesmiths were gifted with longevity, like Irving Berlin, the Methuselah of Tin Pan Alley, who was still around to celebrate his centenary in 1988. By contrast, the much-beloved Frank Loesser — who would have turned 100 on June 29 — died over 40 years ago at the premature age of only 59….
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The Schmooze Thomas Adès Takes Manhattan
Fans of modern music may already know the accomplished young composer, pianist, and conductor Thomas Adès. Born in London in 1971 of Syrian Jewish ancestry, Adès’s highly theatrical, sometimes quite humorous imagination is uncommon among composers of his generation. In rare interviews, Adès reveals the gravity and sobriety of a master of ironic double meanings….
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The Schmooze The Cool Vehemence of Daniel Emilfork
Even in France, where screen performers like Fernandel and Michel Simon exulted in their ugliness, the Jewish actor Daniel Emilfork (born Daniel Emilfork Berenstein in Chile; 1924-2006) remains unique. Emilfork’s startlingly bizarre appearance is best known to American film-goers from 1995’s “The City of Lost Children.” In that dystopian fantasy film, Emilfork gave an uncharacteristically…
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Culture Getting Sick of Sondheim?
‘But who needs Albert Schweitzer/When the lights are low?” (“Follies”) “Perpetual sunset is/Rather an unsettling thing.” (“A Little Night Music”) Who else but masterful Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, who turns 80 on March 22, would have found those rhymes? It’s only fitting that all-star celebrations should be plentiful, like the New York Philharmonic’s…
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The Schmooze Eli Wallach: Great Jewish Actor, Now and Forever
On February 22, this year’s annual benefit for Theater For The New City’s Emerging Playwrights Program at the National Arts Club honors acting couple Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, which seems only natural. In 2005, Wallach released his delightful autobiography “The Good, the Bad and Me: In My Anecdotage,” but at 94, Brooklyn-born Wallach is…
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Culture ‘Ai No Corrida’ Sidney Franklin, the Brooklyn Bullfighter
Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway’s Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin By Bart Paul University of Nebraska Press, 336 pages, $29.95. The concept of a Jewish bullfighter from Brooklyn seems, like that of a Jewish pirate, exotic beyond all probability. Yet Sidney Franklin, born Sidney Frumpkin in Park Slope in 1903 to a…
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Culture Bernard-Henri Lévy Gets Purim Pranked Early
Purim has come early this year for 61-year-old French “public intellectual” Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL), who just published two new books in France, “De la guerre en philosophie: Essai” (On Philosophical War: Essay) and “Pièces d’identité: Chroniques” (Identification Papers: Articles). The latter consists of over 1300 pages of Lévy’s journalism, around 300 pages of which are…
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