Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, a fixture for almost a half century at Temple B’rith Kodesh outside Rochester, left an unpublished memoir among…
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Life The 2000 Year Old Man and the People of the Book
The November 23 release by Shout! Factory of “The 2000 Year Old Man: The Complete History,” a 3-CD and 1-DVD set, exuberantly celebrates Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s classic comic shtik. Alongside all the beloved old albums, starting in 1961, and even an animated film, is an interview filmed in August 2009. In the latter,…
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Culture Iris Apfel: a Jewish Collector of Great Style
88-year-old Iris Barrel Apfel, born to a Jewish family in Astoria, Queens, has long inspired a fashion world in-crowd with her sharp eye for mixing and matching accessories in serendipitous, joyous ways. A inspired collector and shopper, not a designer, Apfel is being honored with a traveling exhibit of her fashion finds, “Rare Bird of…
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Life Hergé, Creator of Tintin: Antisemitism for all Ages
Steven Spielberg’s 3-D Motion Capture film “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” is due for release in 2011, but already publishers are hurrying to offer books about the Belgian artist Hergé (born Georges Remi in 1907) who created its characters. The graphic tales of the blank-faced reporter Tintin, his dog Snowy, and…
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