Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Legendary South African Jewish Athlete Dies at 103
South African Jewish cricketer Norman Gordon, who has died today at the age of 103, epitomized speed and durability in sport. Gordon was the first Test cricketer to become a centenarian (duration is a key to Test cricket itself, the longest form of the sport, which may last up to five days.). In Gordon’s day…
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Culture Was Pope John Paul II Good for the Jews?
John Paul II’s Letter to a Jewish Friend: The Heart-Rending Story of Two Polish Boys Divided by World War II, Reunited by Love by Gian Franco Svidercoschi The Crossroad Publishing Company, 108 pages, $13.13 In April, when Pope John Paul II became Saint John Paul the Great, admirers recalled the late pontiff’s affinity for the…
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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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