Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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News François Jacob, French Nobel-Winning Jewish Scientist, Dies at 92
The French Jewish biologist François Jacob, who died April 19 at age 92, braved imminent death to arrive at explanations of the essence of life. He was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in medicine, along with his co-workers Jacques Monod and André Lwoff, for a discovery that explained how, by using DNA and RNA, cells…
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Culture Nothing Beat the Spa for Wealthy 19th Century Jews
The upper crust of Eastern and Central European Jews in the 19th century had a solution when their lives became too stressful. They opted for health cures in spa towns, especially at one of three tourist paradises built around local natural mineral waters full of dissolved carbon dioxide that were considered particularly salubrious. In the…
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Culture Swiss Jewish Thinker Jean Starobinski Isn’t Slowing Down Even at 92
Jean Starobinski, the 92-year-old Swiss literary theorist and Jewish historian of ideas, is still a productive bundle of energy. With three compelling new books out recently, “The Ink of Melancholy,” “Accusing and Seducing: Essays on Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” and “Diderot: a Fiendish Babble,” the man whom poet Michael Butor called a “prince of reading” is not…
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Culture ‘Yip’ Harburg’s All-American Lyrics Came With a Heaping Helping of Yiddishkeit
Yip Harburg: Legendary Lyricist and Human Rights Activist By Harriet Hyman Alonso Wesleyan Univeristy Press, 332 pages, $28.95 The tragic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” the idealistic “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the raucous “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” were all co-written by the same American Jewish lyricist, E. Y. Harburg (1896–1981), and all owe…
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The Schmooze A Guide To Upcoming Classical Concerts In New York
For Manhattan classical concertgoers in search of Yiddishkeit, the upcoming month will offer a tasty mix of melodies, Mahler, and modernism. On February 17 at the 92nd street Y, the scintillating Taiwan-born pianist Jenny Lin performs arrangements of music by Gershwin, Rodgers, and Arlen. Selections may be previewed on Lin’s latest CD, “Get Happy.” (Steinway…
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The Schmooze The Love Song of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
The American historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who died at age 77 in 2009 was author of “Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory”; “Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable”; and “Haggadah and History,” among other key texts. Yerushalmi was particularly appreciated in France, where Sylvie Anne Goldberg of l’École des Hautes Études organized a 2011 colloquium…
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The Schmooze Author Ascending A Staircase
In 1940-1941, as part of the American journalist Varian Fry’s rescue of anti-Nazi European intellectuals, artist Marcel Duchamp fled to New York, with a brief stopover in Morocco. This visit is the focus of a new novel by Serge Bramly, a Frenchman of Tunisian Jewish origin. The title of “Orchidée fixe” cites a virtually untranslatable…
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The Schmooze Remembering Freudians and Cannibals
The Cairo-born French Jewish ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan previously published a novel, “Who Killed Arlozoroff?” about the 1933 murder of left-wing Israeli political leader Haim Arlosoroff, as well as a book-length essay last year criticizing Sigmund Freud’s 1899 “Interpretation of Dreams.” Now the ever-iconoclastic Nathan, born in 1948, has written his memoirs “Ethno-Novel,” to explain how…
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