Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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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Culture Dr. Strangelove’s Jewish Set Designer Dies at 95
Ken Adam, the German Jewish motion picture production designer who won immortality for conceiving the sets for James Bond films in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as well as the Pentagon War Room in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), proved that fantasy can heal historical wounds. Born Klaus Hugo Adam, he died on March 10 at age…
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Culture How Martin Buber Lost Friends and Irritated People by Being a Happy Jew
Fifty years after his death in Jerusalem in 1965, Martin Buber, the Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher has “left an ambiguous impression,” as Walter Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem in 1936 about Buber’s appearance at a French philosophical gathering. Buber’s “I and Thou” about human relationships to people and things, is famously cited in Martin Luther…
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Culture Jews of the Caribbean
A relatively small number of Jews have lived in the Caribbean since the time of the Spanish Expulsion in 1492. As refugees from fascist Europe in the 1930s and ’40s, they formed what has been called a Calypso shtetl. A new study from Columbia University Press, “Calypso Jews,” investigates how contemporary Caribbean authors have been…
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Culture Bernard Werber Sees a Sci-Fi Future — and It’s All About Ants
In a series of best-selling novels about ants, miniature human beings and other creatures, the French Jewish author Bernard Werber has won millions of readers worldwide with what he calls philosophy-fiction. Blending science fiction, whodunits, spirituality, biology and mythology, his latest work, “The Sixth Sleep,” was published. Recently, the Forward’s Benjamin Ivry spoke with Werber…
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