Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
-
Culture Peru’s most celebrated author was a great friend to the Jews — is he still?
The Peruvian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, recently honored by election to the French Academy, has long expressed his creative debt to Jewish writers and thinkers. More recently, some readers have asked whether Varguitas (a nickname he adopted for his fiction, reused in a memoir by an ex-wife) is a friend to be cherished…
-
Culture A baseball star and all-around mensch finally makes it to the Hall of Fame
The news that Gil Hodges, former Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman and New York Mets manager, has been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, should make the Jews already present in that hallowed spot kvell. Including the late Marvin Miller, the longtime player’s union executive who was belatedly inducted into…
-
Culture How did Bob Dole get along with the Jews? It’s complicated.
To understand the rapport with Jews and Jewish history of Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, who has died at the age of 98, a surprising number of analyses of jokes are required, worthy of the precedent of Sigmund Freud. In addition to a distinguished legislative career and splendid military record, Dole cultivated the reputation as…
-
Culture In Chile, where Jewish writers fought bigotry in search of a literary utopia
Cristián Opazo teaches literature and drama at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. In “Jewish Voices, Chilean Literature,” co-written with the Chilean Jewish author Marjorie Agosín, Opazo investigates how Jewish refugees in Latin America became literary heroes against all odds. Benjamin Ivry spoke to Professor Opazo about how these writers managed to achieve their lasting artistic…
-
Culture How an Arab Schindler saved Jews during the Holocaust but still eludes recognition
Ronen Steinke, a German Jewish lawyer and journalist at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, has worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. His books include a study of the political function of war crimes tribunals since 1945 and a biography of Fritz Bauer, the German Jewish judge and prosecutor instrumental in the postwar capture…
-
Film & TV How Dean Stockwell fought antisemitism and inspired Jewish moviegoers
Dean Stockwell, the Hollywood actor who died on Nov. 7 at age 85, is best remembered for appearances in such films as “Dune,” “Blue Velvet,” and “Married to the Mob,” in addition to the TV series “Quantum Leap” and “Battlestar Galactica.” Yet starting as a child actor at the beginning of his lengthy career, Stockwell…
-
Culture Retrying the Dreyfus case, France flirts with a Jewish candidate’s antisemitism
On Oct. 26, French President Emmanuel Macron inaugurated the Dreyfus Museum in Médan near Paris, the first such historical collection dedicated to the unjustly accused Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus. Macron’s visit underlined that you don’t have to be Jewish to be shocked by the French army’s perfidy in covering up its persecution of Dreyfus. Back…
-
Culture Will this woman be the next Jewish winner of the Nobel Prize for literature?
After the deaths of Philip Roth and Amos Oz, two perennial runners-up for the Nobel Prize in Literature, this past year’s short lists for the award included only one Jewish representative, the French author Hélène Cixous. Born in Oran, Algeria in 1937, Cixous has written repeatedly about her upbringing in a German Jewish household, which…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Music In 1964, when he was just 23, Bob Dylan wrote the prophetic anthem that encapsulates Trump’s America
- 2
Fast Forward What does the election of Mark Carney mean for Canadian Jews and Israel?
- 3
News State Department plan to deport ‘pro-Hamas’ students relies on a 1952 law that targeted Jews
- 4
News Jewish groups targeted Columbia grad Mahmoud Khalil — then ICE arrested him
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward As ICE targets a pro-Palestinian activist, some Jews are asking if this is the fight against antisemitism they signed up for
-
Fast Forward American Jewish Committee says it’s ‘appalled’ by Mahmoud Khalil’s views but does not praise his arrest
-
Fast Forward Antisemitic terror plot in Australia was fake and staged by a crime boss, police say
-
Fast Forward A bagel shop backed out of a Jewish food festival over Israel. Then regret set in.
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
