Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture 100 years later, is this flawed man really ‘the most outstanding Jew in modern literature?’
Frank O'Connor once asserted that James Joyce was 'the greatest Jew of all'
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Culture For more than a century, a Jewish artist from Auschwitz reveled in nature and visual delight
Tova Berlinski, who died Jan. 16 at age 106, proved that where Jewish artists are born is less important than what they create from those origins. Berlinski’s hometown was Oświęcim, which then belonged to the Habsburg Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, and is now part of Poland. She later described the town to interviewers as…
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Culture How a Bronx kid with stage fright reinvented himself as the great sage of Jewish history
The French historian Sylvie Anne Goldberg is author of “Clepsydra: Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism” and “Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague.” Her “Transmitting Jewish History” collects autobiographical conversations with the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Recently, Professor Goldberg discussed with Benjamin Ivry, who translated…
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Culture No, the relentlessly ‘macho’ Norman Mailer hasn’t been canceled — should he be?
This month, Michael Wolff claimed that Norman Mailer has been “canceled” because a project to collect his political writings was discontinued by a publisher. Wolff charged that an essay by Mailer, “The White Negro,” (1957) a dated opus inspired by the Austrian Jewish psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, was deemed offensive for today’s readers. Although Wolff’s claims…
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Culture She co-wrote the soundtrack of modern Jewish America (and Barbra Streisand revered her)
The song lyricist Marilyn Bergman, who died Jan. 8 at age 93, proved that secure understanding of a Jewish cultural background can lead to empathy for a world of other human experiences. Celebrated for her songwriting duo with her husband, Alan Bergman, which produced hits such as “The Way We Were,” “The Windmills of Your…
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Culture In cricket, instances of antisemitism amid a rich Jewish history
Is cricket, passionately played in England and its former colonies, undergoing an antisemitism crisis? So asked the English Jewish barrister Daniel Lightman in a recent article in the right-wing outlet The Spectator. The cricket world was jarred after Azeem Rafiq, a former player of Pakistani origin, admitted that, as a teenager, he had posted mocking…
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Culture Wait, Robinson Crusoe wasn’t Jewish — was he?
This month marks the 300th anniversary of the death of Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor who served as inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” a novel cherished by generations of readers. The tale of the shipwrecked mariner, first published in 1719, pleased a wide readership avid for adventure stories, like the Jews who relished travel…
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Culture A mensch of an architect, full of whimsy, genius and morality
Richard Rogers, the English architect who died on Dec. 18 at age 88, proved that it can take a Jewish village to achieve architectural greatness. Cocreator of such popular buildings as the Pompidou Center in Paris, Rogers was born in prewar Florence. He was influenced by his father’s Italian Jewish family, especially a cousin, the…
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