
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
James Merrill: Life and Art Langdon Hammer Knopf, 944 pages, $40.00 On the 20th anniversary of his death, this massive funerary stele of a book pays tribute to an American poet much inspired by Jewish friends and mentors. Merrill was born in 1926 to a WASP family in New York – his father was a…
The British Jewish actor Ron Moody, who died on June 11 at age 91, will be remembered for making Charles Dickens’ harshly anti-Semitic character Fagin into someone loveable. In stage productions and the 1968 film of the musical Oliver!, Moody, who was born Ronald Moodnick, became the definitive interpreter of the role, despite the reservations…
Social Concern and Left Politics in Jewish American Art: 1880-1940 by Matthew Baigell Syracuse University Press, 280 pages, $39.95 This ambitious, meticulous cultural history examines how and why Jewish artists and art critics cared about social upheavals in American life. Focusing on the years of abundant immigration of European Jews to the USA until the…
Anne Meara, who died on May 23 at age 85, was considerably more than one-half of the beloved comedy act Stiller and Meara. Born into a Roman Catholic family, she converted to Reform Judaism in 1961, as she told “People Magazine” in 1977, because she “wanted my children to know who they were.” Those children,…
Earlier this year, Alan Gilbert, music director of the New York Philharmonic, announced that he would step down from his job in 2017. With Avery Fisher Hall, the orchestra’s home, scheduled to close in 2019 for two years of renovation, fevered speculation has ensued about his successor. Music directors should quit more often, as such…
Robert Solomon Wistrich, who died in Rome on May 19 of a heart attack at age 70, was more than an eminent historian of anti-Semitism. As Neuburger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and head of its Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Wistrich drew on…
The historian Ezra Mendelsohn, who has died of cancer at the age of 74, infused esthetics into the study of Jewish history to an unusual degree. As Rachel & Michael Edelman professor emeritus of European Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, he produced compelling books in which modern Jewish history is informed by…
The intellectual historian and trained lay analyst Peter Gay, who died on May 12 at age 91, won renown as an admiring, if not uncritical, biographer of Sigmund Freud, to whom he devoted several thought-provoking books analyzing how Freud’s status as an atheist German Jew may have led to his achievement. Gay’s persuasive arguments were…
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