Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Books Jewish Impostors, Past and Present
Although Shabbetai Zevi naturally gets most of the attention, Jewish history has been marked by a series of impostors. On February 16, Bloomsbury USA publishes a collection by the late New Yorker reporter St. Clair McKelway, “Reporting at Wit’s End,” which includes the complete 1968 book “The Big Little Man from Brooklyn” about the Jewish…
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The Schmooze Misdiagnosing a Russian Jewish Mathematician
The highly eccentric, reclusive 43-year-old Russian Jewish mathematician Grigori Perelman devised proofs for a number of important problems, most famously the Poincaré Conjecture, a longstanding topology puzzler, only to abandon mathematics just as fame and prizes exploded around him. To write about this curious character, the publishers of a recent book, “Perfect Rigor: a Genius…
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The Schmooze The Humiliations and Triumphs of Imre Kertész
/> At 80, the Hungarian Jewish Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész is battling Parkinson’s disease while laboring on two new autobiographical works. Best known for his fiction-like “Detective Story”, “The Pathseeker”, and especially “Fatelessness”, Kertész pensively, with verbal virtuosity (he has translated many German-language authors, including Freud and Joseph Roth, into Hungarian), expresses his experiences…
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Books Too Gross for the 21st Century? Jewish American Cartoonist Milt Gross
On February 7, at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, a new publication from New York University Press, “Is Diss A System? A Milt Gross Comic Reader” edited by Ari Y. Kelman, will be presented. Gross (born in 1895) of Russian Jewish ancestry, drew comic strips of wild slapstick energy, following in the violence-for-laughs tradition…
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The Schmooze George London, a Singer of Russian-Jewish Majesty
On February 7, the George London Foundation will present a special recital at the Morgan Library in New York, with pianist Jeffrey Cohen accompanying singers June Anderson and Sean Panikkar, as prelude to this year’s George London Competition Finals on March 19 also at the Morgan Library. The family of Canadian-Jewish baritone George London (born…
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The Schmooze Funny Nazis? The Return (In Bulk) of Hogan’s Heroes
The CBS Home Entertainment/Paramount Release of a 28 DVD-set, “Hogan’s Heroes: The Komplete Series, Kommandant’s Kollection” reminds us of this early effort to find belated humor in Hitler’s war machine. Writer/director Billy Wilder’s much-admired 1953 film “Stalag 17,” was adapted from a play of the same name by two former POWs, and subtitled: “a comedy…
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The Schmooze Elliott Erwitt: An American Jewish Photographer’s Fierce Wit
Photography lovers who will be in Italy should try to see “Elliott Erwitt’s Rome,” an exhibit which opened in November 13, 2009 and remains on view until January 31. An accompanying volume published by teNeues sheds light on Erwitt. Born in Paris in 1928 to a Russian-Jewish family which moved to Milan but fled Mussolini…
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The Schmooze Admiring Blum: A Great French Jewish Statesman Celebrated on Film
For visitors to the New York Jewish Film Festival, a must-see on January 18-20 is a new hour-length documentary, “Leon Blum: For All Mankind” about the French socialist politician. Written by Blum’s grandson Antoine Malamoud and directed by University of Alabama Professor Jean Bodon, the film offers a mere sketch of an eventful life, and…
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