Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Life Patricia Highsmith: Antisemitic Stranger on a Train
Texas-born Patricia Highsmith has long attracted readers with her cunning grasp of criminal psychology in such suspenseful novels as “Strangers on a Train” (1950) and a series starring the villainous Tom Ripley, now perhaps best known for the Anthony Minghella film “The Talented Mr Ripley” with Matt Damon as the title Tom. But the full…
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Life François Mitterand Took Hitler to Bed
François Mitterrand, who served as the President of France from 1981 to 1995, has long been known to have had an ambiguous relationship with the Nazis. As a mid-level civil servant in the wartime Vichy government, Mitterrand supported the Nazi puppet Marshal Pétain until 1943 and was duly awarded the “Ordre de la francisque gallique…
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Life From Emma Lazarus to Anne Frank: Jewish Folk Artist Malcah Zeldis
The Jewish folk artist and illustrator Malcah Zeldis (born Mildred Brightman to a Bronx Jewish family in 1931) is being honored with an exhibit which opened October 20 and runs until October 18, 2010 at the American Folk Art Museum’s Lincoln Square Branch in New York. The Bronx-born Zeldis went to live on an Israeli…
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Culture The Maestro Business
Ever since conductors’ salaries began to resemble those of industry CEOs, it was only a matter of time before the worlds of music and business intertwined more incestuously. Printed reports inform us that the New York Philharmonic’s departing music director, Lorin Maazel, earned $2.8 million from that orchestra alone in 2006, and James Levine possibly…
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Culture Remembering a Great Voice from Regostan: Bukharan Jewish Musician Ilyas Malayev
Often forgotten in the upsurge of interest in Jews from the former Soviet Union, the Bukharans have claim to a grievance. But, on December 14, a gala concert, “Ilyas Malayev: Remembering the Poet Laureate of the Bukharian Jews,” will be performed at New York’s Center for Jewish History, presented by that organization’s An-sky Institute for…
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Culture Hell Hath No Fury Like a Lévy Scorned: novelist Justine Lévy’s Latest Screed.
Justine Lévy, daughter of the headline-grabbing French philosopher and “public intellectual” Bernard-Henri Lévy (known in France as BHL), is once again in the news with a new novel from Paris’ Stock publishers, “Mauvaise fille” (Bad Daughter ). Like her previous books, “Mauvaise fille” is not really a “roman à clef” because no “clef” (key) is…
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Culture Typography in the Talmudic Tradition: American Jewish Designer Herb Lubalin
Fans of splendid graphic design and typography have until December 8 to catch the exhibit, “Lubalin Now” at The Cooper Union’s Cooper Gallery. It opened November 5 to honor the highly influential Jewish typographer and graphic designer Herb Lubalin who died in 1981. Known for his work for the magazines “Avant Garde,” “Eros,” and “Fact,”…
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Culture The Quantum Leaps of an American Jewish Physicist
The American Jewish physicist and journalist Jeremy Bernstein, born in 1929 in Rochester, New York, has just produced a delightfully discursive, digressive semi-memoir, “Quantum Leaps,” just out from Harvard University Press. Bernstein’s father, Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, a fixture for almost a half century at Temple B’rith Kodesh outside Rochester, left an unpublished memoir among…
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