Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Praising Sacred Places: Richard Howard’s Jewish Roots
For a half-century, the poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard has been an expert investigator of artistic motivations and inspirations, yet his own roots, as a product of Cleveland’s Jewish middle class, have rarely been explored. On Feb 8, Howard will give a reading at New York’s Metropolitan Museum to introduce the new Pierre Bonnard…
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Culture György Kurtág: Great Hungarian Jewish Composer, No Monk
Music generally eludes accurate verbal descriptions, but rarely as often as in the case of 82-year-old Hungarian Jewish composer György Kurtág. On February 1, Kurtag will perform a recital of his piano music with his wife, Márta, at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. (At that same venue, a day earlier, Peter Eötvös will conduct a concert…
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Culture Victor Borge, Now More Than Ever
Back in the days of great Jewish classical musical virtuosi like Jascha Heifetz and Vladimir Horowitz, parents put grim pressure on their children to attain equivalent stardom. Sometimes, the careerist stress attached to childhood music lessons resulted in the unintended creation of musical comedians, like the giddy French-Jewish cabaret pianist Jean Wiéner (1896–1982), who melded…
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Culture Jokes and Other Things the French Find Funny
In France, Christmastime just might not seem the same without a new antisemitic jape, and the performer Dieudonné (born Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, just outside Paris in 1966, of Breton-Cameroonian origin) provided one on schedule during a Paris show. In what noted Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld later described to RTL radio as a deliberate, publicity-seeking “provocation” and…
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Culture Inner Fire, Outer Ice: The Willful Magic of János Starker
Legend portrays some Hungarian-Jewish musicians as belligerent extroverts, like the late conductors Georg Solti, nicknamed “the screaming skull” by his Chicago Symphony musicians, and George Szell, dubbed “Doctor Cyclops” by his Cleveland Orchestra ensemble. Yet, the mighty cellist János Starker, born in 1924 to a Hungarian-Jewish family in Budapest, has always looked impassive, in total…
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Culture Art, Truth, Beauty in Schapiro’s Letters
Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks Edited by Daniel Esterman Getty Publications, 280 pages, $39.95 The much-beloved art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996), born in Šiauliai, Lithuania, immigrated with his family to New York when he was a toddler. In his decades of varied research, on subjects from Romanesque art to Picasso, from…
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News It’s Rosenberg vs. Goldberg in Cleveland
It’s Rosenberg vs. Goldberg, and the world of classical music criticism is trembling. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s classical music critic Donald Rosenberg filed suit this month, several weeks after he was taken off the Cleveland Orchestra beat after writing about the ensemble for 18 years. Rosenberg’s suit names the newspaper and the Musical Arts Association,…
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Culture No Fear For Veil: France’s Newest Academician
On November 20, when the French-Jewish politician Simone Veil (pronounced Vay), 81, was elected to the prestigious Académie Française, her family took the news with typical self-deflating humor. Her husband, Antoine, exclaimed: “First she’s in the Grévin wax museum and now the French Academy. I hope all this isn’t leading to the Panthéon!” Veil, known…
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