Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Luftmenschen Take to the Airwaves
Station Identification: A Cultural History Of Yiddish Radio In The United States By Ari Y. Kelman University of California Press, 279 pages, $39.95 Now that the exuberantly noisy klezmer revival has joined the cresting domestic use of Yiddish, as well as the rise in academic studies of Yiddish language, literature and culture, it is good…
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Culture From the Kol Israel Orchestra to a Pygmy Choir
If any novelist wrote a tale about a young Israeli orchestral musician who became a world expert on the music of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa, thereby directly influencing Steve Reich, Herbie Hancock and Madonna, readers would deem the story unlikely. Yet this is exactly what happened to the veteran French-Israeli musicologist Simha Arom…
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Life The Gloved One’s ‘Jew Me, Sue Me’ Moment
Amid the media scandal-mongering over the untimely demise of Michael Jackson, only a few reports have zeroed in on the Gloved One’s infamous 1995 song “They Don’t Care About Us,” which “outraged” the Anti-Defamation League with its “antisemitic” lyrics: “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.”…
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Culture How Jews Harshed the Hilarity
In “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905), Sigmund Freud observes that a strict superego — or the conscience that punishes misbehavior — results in a correspondingly aggressive jest. As we all have found, whether at school or in the workplace, the harshest superego suppresses laughs entirely. In practical comedic terms, jokes get meaner…
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Culture Gadding About
Thirty-eight-year-old French-Moroccan Jewish comedian Gad Elmaleh is well on his way to global stardom. His latest film, “Coco,” which opened in Paris last March, is a huge box office hit, and Elmaleh earns kudos not only as an actor, but as writer and director, too. He stars as the title character, a nouveau riche North…
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Culture Sol LeWitt: A Jewish Artist’s Leap Into the Unknown
American Jewish artist Sol LeWitt, recognized as a pioneer in conceptual art and Minimalism, died of cancer two years ago, yet he is as present as ever on today’s museum scene. LeWitt opined in a 1967 issue of Artforum that the “idea or the concept is the most important aspect” of his art, and that…
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Culture Between Wordsworth and ‘Shoah’
Claude Lanzmann, born 83 years ago in a northern Paris suburb, to parents of Ukrainian-Belarusian Jewish origin, is internationally famed as the director of the 1985 film “Shoah.” This epic film’s running time, depending on its country of release, is anywhere from 503 minutes in the United States to a whopping 613 minutes (with all…
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Culture Simone Weil’s Rediscovered Jewish Inspiration
During his 1980 Nobel Prize lecture, poet Czesław Miłosz quoted French philosopher, mystic and social agitator Simone Weil, who claimed that “distance is the soul of beauty.” “Only through a distance,” Miłosz added, “in space or in time, does reality undergo purification.” February 3 marked the centenary of Weil (1909-1943), who died in England of…
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