Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Was Helmut Schmidt ‘Contaminated by Nazi Ideology’
● Helmut Schmidt and the Crap War: the Biography from 1918 to 1945 By Sabine Pamperrien Piper Verlag, 352 pages, $25.36 Born in 1918, Helmut Schmidt, who served as chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, has been enjoying cultural prestige in his old age, in part for having recorded works by Bach and…
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Culture Remembering Chicago Critic and Arts Maven Andrew Patner
Andrew Patner, the Chicago arts maven who died at age 55 on February 3, looked to Jewish elders for inspiration about what culture can signify. His “I. F. Stone: A Portrait” (1988) featured a sustained interview with the radical journalist born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia, ranging from current politics to ancient Greek civilization. Patner was…
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Culture How Franz Schubert Found Himself in Shul
Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs By Graham Johnson Yale University Press, 3,000 pages, $300 A few months before he died in 1828 at the age of 31, Franz Schubert produced a setting of the 92nd Psalm, Tov Lehodot La’Adonai. Yet, as Graham Johnson asks in his massive new compendium about the Austrian composer, “How many…
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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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