Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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News A Romanian Jewish Writer Rediscovered
The mission of any historical museum is to recuperate what might be lost or forgotten by posterity, and Paris?s Shoah Memorial, which bills itself as a ?research, information, and awareness-raising center,? succeeds brilliantly with a new exhibit about Romanian-French poet, critic and filmmaker Benjamin Fondane. An eponymous exhibit about Fondane, Benjamin Fondane, which opened on…
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Culture Greek Jews Remembered: Resilient, Passionate, Variegated
The history of Greek Jews is dizzyingly complex. Comprising both the Greek-speaking Romaniotes and the exiled Sephardim of Thessaloniki, some of whom spoke Ladino, the differing cultures are expertly distinguished in K. E. Fleming’s “Greece: A Jewish History” (Princeton University Press) of which a paperback edition is due this spring, and Steven Bowman’s new “The…
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Culture A Painter of Rabbinic Primal Screams: Boston Expressionist Hyman Bloom
Art lovers have until January 24 to catch a compelling exhibit at the Yeshiva University Museum, “Hyman Bloom: A Spiritual Embrace.” Originating at Massachusetts’s Danforth Museum of Art the show focuses on Bloom, one of the key Boston Expressionists examined in “Boston Modern: Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism” by Judith Bookbinder (University of New Hampshire…
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Life Kohelet à la française: French poet Charles Juliet Meditates on “Ecclesiastes”
Apart from historically being a nation of skeptics, France has been hampered in its literary appreciation of the Old Testament by the problem of translation. After a solid start in 1902 with the “Rabbinate Bible” overseen by then-Chief rabbi of France Zadoc Kahn with the assistance of such eminent 19th century scholars as Mayer Lambert…
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Culture Dizengoff and the City
An urbanist discourse is alive and well in Israel, as evidenced by the cultural critic Tamar Berger, who studies Israeli — especially Tel Aviv — space in her acclaimed book “Dionysus at Dizengoff Center” (1998), newly translated into French as “Place Dizengoff” by Actes Sud Publishers by the remarkable Turkish-born writer Rosie Pinhas-Delpuech and long…
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Life Zamenhof Days: December 15 and the Polish Jewish inventor of Esperanto
What are you doing on Zamenhof Day? To the uninitiated, that means December 15, the birthday of Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof (born Eliezer Samenhof in 1859) a Polish Jewish ophthalmologist and inventor of Esperanto, the most popular constructed language ever. Although opinions differ widely on how many people actually speak it today Wikipedia quotes the Universal…
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Culture ‘Alas, Poor Andrzej’: The Strange Case of Tchaikowsky’s Skull
The admission by London’s Royal Shakespeare Company that, despite previous disavowals, a production of “Hamlet” featured not only Dr Who actor David Tennant, but also a real human skull onstage — as Hamlet’s deceased friend the jester Yorick — brings the donor of that skull back into the limelight. The Polish-Jewish pianist Andrzej Czajkowski (who…
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Life Frummer Crows: Jewish Birdlover Esther Woolfson
Admirers of Israeli novelist Meir Shalev’s “A Pigeon and a Boy,” a tragic romance of two pigeon handlers, will recall the human drama inherent in birds. Even so, the degree to which the Glasgow-born Jewish writer Esther Woolfson is devoted to Corvidae, the bird family which includes crows, ravens, rooks, et al. may surprise some…
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