Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Bernice Gordon, Jewish Crossword Maven, Dies at 101
Readers who try to solve a crossword puzzle with the clue “One of the Marxes” (answer: KARL) or “Old Broadway title beau” (answer: ABIE) are enjoying the concise wit of Bernice Biberman Gordon, a constructor of crosswords or cruciverbalist, as puzzle writers like to be called nowadays, who died on January 29 at age 101….
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Culture How Iranian-Jewish Women Started a Writers’ Revolution
The Jews of Iran: The History, Religion and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World Edited by Houman Sarshar I.B. Tauris, 264 pages, $99 Of the 80,000 or so Jews still living in Iran when the 1979 Islamic revolution occurred, the vast majority have fled, leaving a community of about 20,000 to 25,000, according…
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Culture Remembering Elsa Cayat, Slain in the Charlie Hebdo Massacre
In a nervous, jittery country where one in three people pops psychotropic pills, Elsa Cayat, the French Jewish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was murdered in the Charlie Hebdo offices on January 7, was among France’s calming influences. In such books as “Desire and Whore: the Hidden Stakes of Male Sexuality” and “A Man + a…
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Culture Sacvan Bercovitch, Acclaimed Scholar and Translator of Sholem Aleichem, Dies at 81
There can be no greater left-wing yichis than being named after Sacco and Vanzetti. The Canadian Jewish cultural historian Sacvan Bercovitch, who died on December 9 at age 81, was born to Russian Jewish parents who cherished a revolutionary ideal. In his “Rites of Assent,”, Bercovitch explained that he was drawn to America’s Puritans because…
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Culture Jewish Cartoonist Georges Wolinski Among the Dead in Paris Terrorist Attack
Today’s terrorist attack in Paris on the editorial offices of the satirical magazine has left a reported twelve people dead. Among the deceased is the 80-year-old French-Jewish Georges Wolinski cartoonist who was the subject of his wife Maryse Wolinski’s 2012 memoir, “George, If You Only Knew.” According to Benjamin Ivry, writing for the Forward on…
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Culture Bess Myerson, the Bronx Beauty Who Refused To Change Her Name
The fact that Bess Myerson, whose death at age 90 on December 14 was recently announced, remains the only Jewish winner in the 90-plus year history of the Miss America pageant surely says more about that contest than it does about her. Social historians have compared Myerson’s victory in 1945 with the contemporaneous on-field triumphs…
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Culture Deconstructing the Jewishness of the Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism by Jack Jacobs Cambridge University Press, 268 pages, $90.00 Most accounts of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, the grouping of social and political thinkers briefly based at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research until Hitler’s arrival to power forced them into exile, note that they were predominantly…
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Culture Luise Rainer, Oscar-Winning German Jewish Movie Star, Dies at 104
The German Jewish actress Luise Rainer, who died on December 30 at age 104, belied the impression that to live to a great old age, tranquility of mind is essential. On the contrary, Rainer was a spitfire, who after winning two Oscars for Best Actress, for her roles in “The Great Ziegfeld” (1936) and “The…
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