Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture “He really is Jewish” — Little Richard’s lifelong love affair with Judaism
Little Richard, the rock and roll pioneer who died on May 9 at age 87, brought a galvanic charge to live performances of such songs as “Tutti Frutti,” “Heebie Jeebies” and “Lucille,” drawing sustained inspiration from what he considered to be a Jewish identity. This self-definition went beyond what some writers have identified as emotional…
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Culture The Joan of Arc of Irish sex — and her Jewish acolytes
In mid-April, The Irish Times alerted its readership to an “astonishing hatchet job” of a national icon, the novelist Edna O’Brien. The offending article, a condescending and nit-picking profile, had appeared some months before in The New Yorker, but took some time for its venom to percolate as far as Europe. O’Brien, who will be…
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Culture Ravi Shankar at 100: Jewish mentor, sitar master
April 7 marks the centenary of the Indian Sitar Master Ravi Shankar (1920– 2012), whose interactions with Western musicians, such as the Beatle George Harrison, have been celebrated, although the full extent to which Jewish musicians were part of Shankar’s influential career remains relatively little known. In 1950s middlebrow American Jewish culture, Shankar was already…
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Culture For lifelong scholar Carl Rheins, nothing Jewish was alien
Carl Rheins, who died on March 30, began his “Jewish Almanac” (1980) coedited with Richard Siegel, with a quote from Franz Rosenzweig: “Nothing Jewish is alien to me.” The almanac’s subject matter ranged from Regina Jonas (1902-1944), the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi, who was murdered at Auschwitz, to such comparatively light-hearted…
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Culture Tony Randall at 100 — Once a Rosenberg, always a Rosenberg
The American Jewish actor Tony Randall, beloved star of the TV sitcom “The Odd Couple,” whose centenary is celebrated on February 26, was an example of a professional façade covering a persistent search for Yiddishkeit. Born Aryeh Leonard Rosenberg in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Randall was the son of Mogscha Rosenberg, an antique and objet d’art dealer…
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Culture Susan B. Anthony’s Jewish Sisters
February 15 marks the bicentenary of the American social reformer Susan B. Anthony. Deemed an “incomparable organizer” by historian Eleanor Flexner Anthony grew up in a Quaker family that possessed only a handful of history books. Yet these included two different editions, in two and six volumes respectively, of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who…
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Culture How Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott identified with the Jews
Editor’s Note: Derek Walcott would have turned 90 today. In honor of this date, we’re revisiting this essay written on the occasion of the poet’s death on March 17, 2017. Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning poet from the West Indies who died March 17 at age 87, was long inspired by Jewish culture, history and…
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Culture The secret Jewish history of Muhammad Ali
Editor’s Note: The boxer and civil rights icon Muhammad Ali, who died on June 3, 2016, at the age of 74, would have turned 78 today. On this occasion, we return to this story about the champ’s complex relationship with the Jewish people. Muhammad Ali was accused of having “frequently clashed with the Jewish people.”…
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