Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture The Wittgensteins and the Waughs: A Tale of Two Unhappy Houses
Very few people can claim to understand all the ideas that Vienna-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) advanced in logic, mathematics and language, but thanks to definitive books like Ray Monk’s “Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius” (Penguin, 1991) and Norman Malcolm’s “Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir” (Oxford University Press, 2001), the man and philosopher is getting…
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Culture Murray Perahia: An Eternal Sephardic Jewish Recital
A New York native who relocated to London a couple of decades ago, pianist Murray Perahia is about to launch his latest American recital tour. At 61, Perahia remains a lifelong student with a quest for emotional depth that has expanded steadily over the years. Unlike other pianists who merely record Beethoven, he is preparing…
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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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