Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Life Isaiah Berlin at 100
Commemorations continue apace for the hundredth birthday of the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). Born in Riga to a Russian Jewish family, he is being honored by the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Toronto (Sept 3-6); a Harvard conference from September 25-26 and other academic events. Yet much remains also for general…
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Culture Photographs That Are Deserved
French-Jewish photographer Willy Ronis, born in 1910, has never been more popular. Honored at a special exhibit at this summer’s Rencontres d’Arles photography festival on view in Southern France until September 14 (alongside such counterculture stars as America’s Nan Goldin), Ronis has recent books out from a flurry of international publishers, including Taschen, Phaidon, Gallimard…
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Culture Genesis Continues
Those who accuse the French arts world of lacking a moral compass should consider the magnetic north of Ariane Mnouchkine. Her Parisian avant-garde ensemble, Théâtre du Soleil (Theater of the Sun), has just completed a short engagement at New York’s [Lincoln Center Festival]( An invitation that recognized both her current virtuosity and her achievements over…
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Life Amos Gitai Finds Inspiration in Josephus
Opening this year’s ongoing Avignon Festival in southeastern France, “The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness” is a production inspired by Josephus’s “War of the Jews,” conceived and staged by Israeli director Amos Gitai. Gitai’s uncompromising films include “Kadosh” (1999), “Kippur” (2000), “Alila” (2003) and “Free Zone “(2005). Possibly misleadingly,…
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Life Mme. Veil Gets the Wax Treatment
The French lawyer and politician Simone Veil (born 1927), profiled in The Forward last November on the occasion of her election to the Académie française, keeps going from strength to strength. Her latest honor is to have her wax effigy displayed at Paris’s Musée Grévin, as of July 9. The typically imperturbable Mme. Veil, who…
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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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