Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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News Doc Paskowitz, Jewish Surfer Dude for Ages, Dies at 93
What do you get when you mix West Coast catch-a-wave surfing culture with the profoundly Jewish sensibilities of the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants? Some answers can be found in the life story of surfer Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, who died on November 10 at age 93 and introduced a measure of Yiddishkeit to a sport not…
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Culture Was Leo Tolstoy Really an Anti-Semite?
Duelling new English-language versions of the 1870s novel “Anna Karenina” are raising questions about the novelist Leo Tolstoy’s complex and contradictory attitudes toward Jews. Placed by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” among the foxes (who know many things) as opposed to the hedgehog (who knows one big…
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Books The Secret Jewish History of ‘My Fair Lady’
● Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist’s Letters Edited by Dominic McHugh Oxford University Press, 336 Pages, $39.95 Sometimes the Yiddishkeit of a creative talent comes through only in private writings. Playwright and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner won immortality with the stage musicals “My Fair Lady,” “Camelot,” and “Gigi,” which are filled with British and French…
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Culture Susan Sontag’s Not-So-Secret and Not-Always-So-Jewish History
● Susan Sontag: A Biography By Daniel Schreiber Translated from the German by David Dollenmayer Northwestern University Press, 296 pages, $35 According to this welcome biography, which originally appeared in German in 2007, the artist Joseph Cornell believed that the American Jewish essayist and filmmaker Susan Sontag was the “great-great-grandmother of [French actor] Jean-Paul Belmondo……
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Culture For Patrick Modiano, Nazi Occupation Offers Rich Backdrop to Tales of Trial and Triumph
Although London’s betting parlors had claimed the odds-on favorites for this year’s Nobel Prize for literature were Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Japan’s Haruki Murakami, the choice of France’s Patrick Modiano was good news for Jewish readers. In awkward English, the Nobel Academy referred to Modiano’s obsession with wartime France as the “art of memory…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Dr. Zhivago
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book By Peter Finn and Petra Couvée Pantheon, 368 pages, $26.95 The Russian Jewish poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was most celebrated by his compatriots for his lyric collections such as “My Sister, Life” and translations of plays by Shakespeare, Calderón and Schiller….
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Culture The 110 Jewish Women Who Changed France
● 110 French Jewish Women Who Changed France: the 19th and 20th Centuries By Michèle Bitton Les Éditions Normant, 678 pages, $38 Although overachieving Jews can transform their native lands triumphantly, the way their countries change them can often be tragic. This is one conclusion to be drawn from “110 French Jewish Women Who Changed…
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Fast Forward Jewish Comedian Joan Rivers Dies at 81
Would the caustic comedian Joan Rivers, who died at age 81 on September 4, have jested about her own sudden illness and unexpected demise? Probably, given her track record as a no-holds barred comedian in the style of Lenny Bruce, and benefiting from relaxed cable TV standards about what is sayable on entertainment programs. Indeed…
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