Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
-
The Schmooze Dreaming of Arthur Schnitzler
The Viennese Jewish doctor Arthur Schnitzler, whose 150th birthday was on May 15, 2012 wrote dozens of plays, including “Professor Bernhardi,” about a Jewish doctor, and “Round Dance,” adapted by the German Jewish director Max Ophüls into the 1950 film classic “La Ronde.” Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” inspired the 1999 Stanley Kubrick film “Eyes Wide Shut”…
-
The Schmooze A French Jewish Statesman
In the 140th anniversary year of his birth on April 9, 1872, the French Jewish statesman Léon Blum is more timely than ever. In April, during France’s latest presidential election, Les éditions Albin Michel reprinted a short exhortatory text, “In Order to be a Socialist,” which Blum wrote in 1919 when he was 42. It…
-
Culture Broken Glass And Insufficient Metaphors
November 9–10, 1938, lives tragically in historical memory for the coordinated attacks against Jews in Germany and Austria by paramilitary forces and locals. A new book, “The Night of Broken Glass: Eyewitness Accounts of Kristallnacht,” argues that to sum up events in which some 400 Jews were murdered “or driven to suicide,” and 30,000 were…
-
The Schmooze Why The Organ Is The Most Jewish Instrument
To some lovers of classical sounds, organ music seems irremediably goyish, despite outstanding achievements by such Jewish composers as Aaron Copland and Arnold Schoenberg in writing for the so-called “king of instruments.” For these, “The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture,” recently published in paperback, will be a real ear-opener. Its author, musicologist Tina…
-
The Schmooze Suddenly Suzman
The South African Jewish actress Janet Suzman, who last year was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to drama, has rabble-rousing in her genes. She was born in Johannesburg in 1939, niece of the heroic anti-Apartheid activist Helen Suzman (née Gavronsky; 1917-2009) and granddaughter of Max Sonnenberg, a…
-
The Schmooze Sonny Berman: The Jazzing Jew
Earlier this year, the Library of Congress website analyzed an unpublished 1946 jazz recording which the Library acquired last year of a jam session in Oklahoma City featuring trumpeter Sonny Berman, a talent well worth remembering. Born Saul Berman in New Haven in 1925, Sonny was sassy, no-holds-barred, and witty, blithely adept at be-bop as…
-
The Schmooze Irritated by Koestler, Nauseated by Sartre
The Polish Jewish author Yuli Borisovich Margolin wrote the gulag memoir “Trip to the Land of Ze-kas,” translated into French in 2010. Its title refers to the Soviet secret police term “Ze-Ka” (or Z/K) for doomed prison laborers who were worked to death in the early 1930s. Margolin, a resident of Palestine who was arrested…
-
Culture Stephen Spender’s Jewish Roots
For most of his life, London-born poet Stephen Spender (1909–1995) felt close ties to the Jewish people; he himself was one-quarter Jewish (his mother, Violet Schuster, was from a Jewish family originally from Frankfurt), but his 1941 marriage to Natasha Litvin, a pianist from a Lithuanian Jewish refugee family, strengthened the connection. This is affirmed…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward ‘Murdered for speaking truth’: Netanyahu and US Jewish leaders mourn Charlie Kirk
- 2
Opinion In the rush to vilify Israel, genocide scholars ignored the truth
- 3
Fast Forward Coldplay welcomed Israeli fans onstage ‘as equal humans.’ Why are some Jewish people mad?
- 4
Fast Forward Trump lawyer who praised ‘Mein Kampf’ is now accusing Harvard of antisemitism, report says
In Case You Missed It
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
