Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Rediscovering the Author Who Was Dismissed as a Stalinist Harpy
The French author Elsa Triolet (1896–1970), born Elsa Kagan to a Russian Jewish family, has been decried by some critics as a Stalinist harpy. This year, “Le Figaro Magazine” faulted Triolet’s “steely egotism and and equally unerring political blindness.” Triolet and her husband the poet Louis Aragon were devotees — sometimes partially critical ones —…
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Culture Marshal Petain’s Jewish Speechwriter
The French Jewish author Henri Raczymow, born in 1948, has written books combining a fascination with family, literature, and history. From “Heinz,” about his uncle who was murdered at Majdanek concentration camp, to “Swan’s Way,” about Marcel Proust’s character Charles Swann, Raczymow offers personal insights into expressions of Judaism. His latest book, “Emmanuel Berl’s Melancholy”…
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Culture How Debbie Reynolds Became the Perfect Jewish Mother
The witty, multitalented performer Debbie Reynolds, who died on December 28 at age 84, surprisingly found herself associated with Judaism both on- and off-screen. From celebrity notoriety as the decidedly non-Jewish spouse of Jewish singer Eddie Fisher, Reynolds survived her marriage’s breakup and went on be cast onscreen as Jewish or crypto-Jewish mothers in later…
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Culture A Close Encounter With Asia’s Anti-Semitic Capital
On a recent stopover in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a cemented-over pile of ugly skyscrapers and canyons strewn with street beggars, I strolled through the garish Twin Towers Shopping Mall. In an underground supermarket, I passed an employee at the fish counter — a short, squat young man who stared at me with violent hatred. I…
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Culture Remembering Lillian Vernon, the Jewish Queen of Catalogues
The song “Sugar Daddy” from John Cameron Mitchell’s musical “Hedwig & The Angry Inch” extols the thrills of sponsored shopping: “a Waterpik, a Cuisinart/ and a hypo-allergenic dog./ I want all the luxuries of the modern age,/ and every item on every page/ in the Lillian Vernon catalogue.” Like Hedwig, much of America kvelled from…
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Culture Pierre Birnbaum on the ‘Israel-ization’ of French Jews
The French Jewish political sociologist and historian Pierre Birnbaum, born in 1940, is an emeritus professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. His books include ; “Jewish Destinies”; and “The Idea of France” and “Two Houses: Essay on the Citizenship of Jews (in France and the USA)” His most recent work, “The Confusions of a Government Jester,” applies…
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Culture A Journey From Auschwitz to Rwanda
Born in 1949, the French author Jean Hatzfeld has focused with sustained attention on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, during which some half a million to a million Rwandans were killed between April and July. The victims belonged to the Tutsi population division, as well as some moderate members of the Hutu majority. Hatzfeld has assembled…
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Culture Revisiting the Work of Yehuda Amichai, Israel’s Unofficial Poet Laureate
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai Edited by Robert Alter Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $35 Among readers of the hugely popular Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (born Ludwig Pfeuffer, in Würzburg, Germany), perhaps the most acutely perceptive was the American poet Anthony Hecht. Reacting to Amichai’s “Open Closed Open”, included in the present collection, Hecht…
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