Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Film & TV The Secret Jewish History Of Sam Shepard
The playwright and actor Sam Shepard, who died on July 27 at age 73, was to all outward appearances as non-Jewish as may be imagined. Yet his writing hovered around such American Jewish creative spirits as Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan and Joseph Chaikin, among others. In such plays as the “Curse of the Starving Class”…
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Culture Remembering Jeanne Moreau — Who Wore A Yellow Star In Solidarity With Jews
The French actress Jeanne Moreau, who died at age 89 on July 31, won immortality as a screen actress of uncommon sensitivity and grace for a long list of major directors, in films such as Jacques Becker’s “Hands Off the Loot” (1954); Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows” (1958) and “The Lovers” (1959); François Truffaut’s…
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Culture Remembering the Jewish Voice Behind Cindy Lou Who and Rocket J. Squirrel
The American Jewish voice actor June Foray, who died on July 26 at age 99, proved that being a mensch could be a prerequisite for creating a legacy of memorable animated cartoon characters. As she noted in her memoirs, she was born June Forer in Springfield, Massachusetts, of Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jewish ancestry. She would…
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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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