Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Film & TV For Ronit Elkabetz, Being Human Was the Only Option
The Israeli actress and director Ronit Elkabetz, who died on April 19 at age 51, was noted for her masterful portrayal of tragic figures with few or no exit options. Yet in life she retained powerful optimism about the restorative value of drama for bringing people closer together. When she died prematurely of cancer, leaving…
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Culture What Arnold Wesker Talked About When He Talked About Jerusalem
Arnold Wesker, the British Jewish playwright who died on April 12 at age 83, might have been the most ardent explorer of the kibbutz ethos in English theatrical history. In his explicitly back-to-the-land play, “I’m Talking about Jerusalem” (1960), Ada Kahn, daughter of the Jewish family featured in an earlier play, “Chicken Soup with Barley,”…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Nostradamus
This July 2 will mark the 450th anniversary of the death of Nostradamus (1503–1566), the French apothecary and supposed seer of Jewish origin. Born Michel de Nostredame in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, his most famous work was “The Prophecies,” a collection of four-line texts that purported to tell the future. A recent translation by Richard Sieburth reminds…
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Culture Remembering the Indomitable Jewish Spirit of Imre Kertész
The Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész, who died on March 31 at age 86, was ferociously uncompromising in his identity as a Jewish writer. In novels such as “Fatelessness,” (1975) expressing his experiences as a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, as well as “Dossier K: A Memoir,” (2006) an unfettered self-interview, Kertész situated himself in…
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Culture Remembering the Inspirational Legacy of Aharon Megged
The Israeli writer Aharon Megged, who died on March 23 at age 95, was paradoxically multifaceted. His parents made Aliyah from their native Poland in 1926, changing the family name from Greenberg. Megged was part of a generation of pioneers who were ostensibly critical of the Diaspora, yet nourished culturally by European roots. As his…
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Culture Remembering the Heyday of Yiddish Theater
‘New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway” is published to coincide with an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. Its editor is the exhibit’s curator Edna Nahshon, professor of theater at the Jewish Theological Seminary and senior associate at Oxford University’s Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Recently the…
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Art Legendary Jewish Civil Rights Photographer Bob Adelman Meets a Tragic End
There is tragic irony in the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death on March 19 of American Jewish Civil Rights photographer Bob Adelman. An ongoing police investigation will attempt to explain how Adelson, 85, was found dead with a head injury in his Miami Beach home. During arduous years as the national photographer for the Congress…
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Culture Leah Garrett on the Greatest Generation of American Novelists
Leah Garrett, author of “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel,” is great-great-granddaughter of Baruch Charney Vladeck, long-time manager of the Yiddish “Forverts.” She is professor of contemporary Jewish life and culture at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. An expert on Yiddish travel writing and the effect of Richard Wagner’s music on…
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