Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Remembering Gretel Bergmann, Holocaust Survivor And Champion High Jumper
The German Jewish athlete Gretel Bergmann, who died on July 25 at the age of 103, proved that for some Holocaust survivors, there were limits to postwar reconciliation. Barred as a Jew from participating in Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics and forced into exile, Bergmann made a new life in America, starting out as a cleaning…
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Culture In The AIDS Pandemic, William Hoffman Saw Parallels To The Holocaust
The American playwright and editor William Moses Hoffman, who died on April 29 at age 78, expressed his Judaism through dramatizations of the tragic AIDS pandemic. As Jonathan Friedman’s “Rainbow Jews: Jewish and Gay Identity in the Performing Arts” notes, “Among the first dramatists to write plays about AIDS were gay Jews.” At a time…
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Culture Shobha Nehru, A Quiet Witness To History, Dies At 108
Shobha Nehru, who died on April 25 at age 108, proved that humanistic ties to family roots never fade. Born Magdolna Friedmann in Budapest in 1908, she witnessed Hungarian anti-Semitism, which led her father to change the family name to the less Jewish-sounding Forbath. This new appellation led to a school nickname, Fori, which she…
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Culture Remembering The Man Who Fixed The Legendary ‘Quiz Show’ Of 1956
Albert Freedman, the game show producer featured in “Quiz Show” (1994), the Oscar-winning film by Robert Redford, died on April 11 at age 95. Although he was a secondary character in Redford’s film, played by Hank Azaria, in real life he was at the heart of a maelstrom of TV scandals during the Eisenhower era…
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Culture Gershom Scholem — Prophet, Provocateur And Prude
George Prochnik has published studies of Stefan Zweig; noise pollution and Sigmund Freud’s contribution to the development of psychology in America. His latest book, “Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem,” was recently published by Other Press. Recently Mr. Prochnik took time to speak with The Forward’s Benjamin Ivry about Scholem,…
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Culture Remembering Jesse Zel Lurie, Witness To A Century Of History
Jesse Zel Lurie, who died in Florida on April 10 at age 103, proved that there was nothing like being on the spot to advance a journalistic career. New York-born in 1913, he made Aliyah in the 1920s and attended high school in Haifa. In 1935, he started writing for The Jerusalem Post, then known…
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Culture For Better And Worse, Don Rickles Embodied American Discourse
Don Rickles, who died on April 6 at age 90, weathered over a half-century of comedic trends, seeing his insult humor absorbed into everyday conduct. He was not always an insult comedian. Raised in the Jackson Heights area of Queens by his parents, Max Rickles and Etta Feldman, Rickles studied at the American Academy of…
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Culture Why Yevgeny Yevtushenko Made Jews Wary
In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who died on April 1 at age 84, published the poem “Babi Yar” in Russia’s “Literary Newspaper” (Literaturnaya Gazeta). The poem objected to Soviet refusal to recognize that Jews were the principal target at Babi Yar in present-day Kiev, Ukraine, where thousands of Jewish men, women and children were murdered by…
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