Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture The Mystery of Raoul Wallenberg
The Hero of Budapest: The Triumph and Tragedy of Raoul Wallenberg By Bergt Jangfeldt Translated by Harry Watson I.B. Tauris, 352 pages, $35 Next year will mark the 70th anniversary of the disappearance in a Soviet prison of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews in the darkest days of the…
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Culture Were They Heroes or Were They Collaborators?
The 1940, Nazi invasion of France turned that country’s musical scene into a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. “Music in Paris During the Occupation,”) a book recently released in France, allows readers to draw conclusions about how music world celebrities behaved in difficult times. Edited by Myriam Chimènes and Yannick Simon,…
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Culture Remembering Alain Resnais and His Complex Relationship With Jews
The French film director Alain Resnais, who died on March 1 at age 91, had a complex relationship with Jews. For many years, his 1955 film “Night and Fog” was shown in classrooms as an approach to understanding the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Yet Resnais’s aims were both more and less than this purpose,…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote
Was Don Quixote’s impossible dream a Yiddisher one? The French author Dominique Aubier, whose study “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” has just been reprinted, apparently thinks so. Aubier’s book, which originally appeared in 1966, is based on the thesis now generally accepted by literary historians that the author of “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes, likely…
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Culture Sid Caesar, Brought Jewish Humor to Middle America, Dies at 91
Sid Caesar, who has died at the age of 91, was more than just a pioneer of TV comedy. As his memoirs “Where Have I Been: An Autobiography” (Crown Publishers, 1982) and “Caesar’s Hours: My Life in Comedy, With Love and Laughter” (PublicAffairs, 2003) recount, his achievement was a blend of second generation immigrant Jewish…
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Culture Maximilian Schell, Actor Who Played Jews, Nazis — and Both
Considering that the Oscar-winning Austrian-Swiss actor Maximilian Schell, who died on February 1 at age 83, spent WWII safely in neutral Switzerland, it is remarkable that he spent his acting life portraying Nazis, victims of Nazis, and defenders of Nazis, far beyond the requirements of typecasting. Schell’s 1961 best actor Academy Award was for his…
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Culture Pete Seeger’s Yiddishkeit
The American folk singer Pete Seeger, who died on January 27 at age 94, is remembered with reverence and affection for popularizing such melodies as the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” (Seeger changed the title from the original “We Will Overcome” on the grounds that “shall” sounds better). Less celebrated is the important role…
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Culture A Storied History Among Anti-Semites in France
The French Jewish writer Pierre Assouline has long grappled with moral dilemmas resulting from the Nazi occupation of his country. In 2012, he was the first-ever Jew elected as one of the ten jurors for the Goncourt Prize, France’s top literary award meant to encourage young writers, established in 1903. Assouline’s newest novel, “Sigmaringen,” is…
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Yiddish די ייִדישע גאַסנשילד פֿונעם פּאַריזער „פּלעצל“ איז צוגעגנבֿעט געוואָרןYiddish street sign for the Pletzel, the Yiddish quarter of Paris, is stolen
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