Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Where Diamonds Are A Londoner’s Best Friend
What 47th street is to New Yorkers, Hatton Garden, a street and area in the district of Holborn, has long been for Londoners a place to buy and sell jewelery. “Diamond Street: The Hidden World of Hatton Garden,” an anecdotally discursive, impressionistic history, was published by Hamish Hamilton. Its author, artist and writer Rachel Lichtenstein,…
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The Schmooze Tales From The Schmatta Trade
Fashion mavens treasure the memory of a 2006 Yeshiva University Museum exhibit, “A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry, 1860-1960,” which inspired a slim catalogue. Earlier this year, Texas Tech University Press published an augmented new book featuring high drama, as in a chapter by economist Bernard Smith about the growth of the…
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The Schmooze Liz or Dick: Who Was More Jewish?
Who was more Jewish — Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton? This question was the basis for squabbles between the married Hollywood superstars, according to Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger’s “Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century.” Taylor was a celebrated convert to Judaism, but Burton was proud of having a…
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The Schmooze A Guide To November Classical Music
A November of concerts featuring fall colors and Yiddishkeit is available to Manhattan music lovers. On November 3 & 4 at New Brunswick’s State Theatre in New Brunswick and Newark’s NJPAC respectively, explosively expressionistic colors will be conveyed by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and conductor Augustin Dumay in Arnold Schoenberg’s stirring “Transfigured Night.” Also…
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Culture Architect Rafi Segal’s Understated Approach
In the coming days, after contracts have been duly signed, architect Rafi Segal will be formally declared the winner of an international competition to design a new National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, near the Knesset and the Israel Museum. Segal, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1967, is contractually unable to speak in…
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The Schmooze Roxy of Radio City
Cole Porter’s 1930s song hit “You’re the Top” declares: “You’re romance, / You’re the steppes of Russia, / You’re the pants on a Roxy usher.” The aforementioned pants owed their existence to Samuel Lionel Rothafel (1882-1936), known as “Roxy,” an entrepreneur, theatre builder and radio personality, honored by “American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the…
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The Schmooze Martin Buber’s Biblical Translation
The Vienna-born Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) is best remembered by English readers for such texts as “Tales of the Hasidim,” “Between Man and Man,” and “I and Thou.” Yet German readers also relish Buber’s skill as a translator, notably in his mighty version of the Bible, in collaboration with the German Jewish theologian and…
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Culture Confronting Father’s Mountain of Exaggerations
Born in Lyon, France, in 1919, the legendary mountaineer Maurice Herzog was the leader of a 1950 expedition that was the first to conquer Annapurna, a peak that is part of the Himalayas in north central Nepal. Returning with frostbite that necessitated the amputation of his fingers and toes, Herzog wrote “Annapurna: First Conquest of…
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