Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Are Michelangelo’s Drawings Anti-Semitic?
Ancestral Torpor: Jews and Christians in the Sistine Chapel By Giovanni Careri Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 325 pages, $36 The American Jewish writer Irving Stone (born Tannenbaum) aptly titled his 1961 novel about Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling paintings “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” For centuries, ecstatic tourists have admired the…
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Culture Remembering More Than a Century of Bel Kaufman’s Rebellious Charm
Bel Kaufman, who has died on July 25 at the age of 103, once told an audience at Iona College in 2011: “You’re laughing. It’s a very good sound, the sound of survival.” Born Bella Kaufman in 1911, she is best known as author of the 1965 bestseller “Up the Down Staircase” a fictionalized version…
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Culture Lee Grant Said Yes to Everything — Except McCarthyism
I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir By Lee Grant Blue Rider Press, 480 pages, $28.95 Oscar-winning American Jewish actress Lee Grant is one of the rare performers (along with Zero Mostel) to have eventually triumphed over the Hollywood blacklist during McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt. She did so through a combination of fierce determination, zesty…
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Culture The Jewish Life and Times of Nadine Gordimer
The South African Jewish author Nadine Gordimer, who died on Sunday, July 13, at age 90, expressed an even-handed humanism throughout her literary career. This is far from the case for every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which Gordimer was accorded in 1991. Her scrupulous sense of fairness, which motivated her to oppose…
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Culture Why Jewish Artists Continue To Be Inspired by The Bible
Art historian Samantha Baskind, author of, among others, “Raphael Soyer and the Search for Modern Jewish Art” and the Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists, now tackles thorny problems of identity and representation in her latest book. “Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America” asks why several modern American Jewish artists were inspired by biblical…
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Film & TV Remembering the Life and Films of Paul Mazursky
The critic Irving Howe was not thinking of the writer-director Paul Mazursky, who has died at the age of 84, when he wrote of Jewish humor: “Laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relation between the two.” Yet he might as well have been. Born Irwin Mazursky…
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Culture Carla Laemmle, First Voice of ‘Dracula,’ Dies at 104
The American Jewish actress Carla Laemmle, who died on June 12 at the age of 104, was long celebrated for her appearances in some early key horror films. Yet her chief role may have been as witness to the benevolence when confronted with real-life historical horrors of her uncle, Universal Pictures studio founder Carl Laemmle….
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Culture Marcel Gotlib’s Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Moses clutches the Ten Commandments in one hand and tries to hail a taxicab with the other; Yahweh greets Jesus with a “Shalom,”and the latter replies: “Shalom yourself!” These are typical japes from the French comics artist Gotlib (born Marcel Mordekhaï Gottlieb in 1934 to a Romanian-Hungarian Jewish family). “The Worlds of Gotlib,” an exhibit…
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