Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze A Maccabee Among Translators
The great poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934) also produced translations that helped re-energize Modern Hebrew. Bialik’s renditions of Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 drama “Wilhelm Tell” and Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” are examples, as detailed in “The Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture, 1917-1937.” Yet Bialik’s “Quixote” was unfaithful to the original, according to an essay by Marianna…
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The Schmooze A Guide To The Fall Classical Music Season
As this fall’s concert season kicks off, Manhattanites in search of classical performances with a dollop of Yiddishkeit will have a delightful array of choices, starting with the genial ghost of beloved Austrian Jewish violinist Fritz Kreisler, which presides over the New York Philharmonic’s Opening Gala. On September 27 at Avery Fisher Hall, Itzhak Perlman…
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The Schmooze Memoir of An Algerian Jewish Prostitute
“Locked Rooms: the Story of an Algerian Jewish Prostitute,” released on Amazon Kindle by Nouveau Monde editions, is the work of Germaine Aziz, who died in 2003 at age 77 after having survived daunting challenges. Aziz’s memoir, which originally appeared from Les éditions Stock in 1980 and was reprinted in 2007 by Nouveau Monde, is…
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The Schmooze Maurice Halbwachs: A Kaddish From Baudelaire
Sociologists have honored the Frenchman Maurice Halbwachs for his ground-breaking works such as “On Collective Memory.” A new volume of private letters and other previously unpublished material, “Writings from America,” adds insight into Halbwachs’ relationship with his Jewish wife Yvonne (née Basch). Halbwachs’ in-laws were the Budapest-born French Jewish politician and philosophy professor Victor Basch…
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Culture Good Night, Vienna
Vienna-born potter Lucie Rie, who is the subject of Emmanuel Cooper’s biography “Lucie Rie: Modernist Potter,” shows how a Jewish artist can express Yiddishkeit in creativity despite repeated assimilations. Rie, who lived from 1902 to 1995, was the daughter of Dr. Benjamin Gomperz, an ear, nose and throat specialist and a friend of Sigmund Freud….
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The Schmooze Catching Up With Claude Lanzmann
Claude Lanzmann, director of the film “Shoah,” has been busy of late. In February, his documentary, “Karski Report,” about how a Polish resistance fighter tried to warn American officials of the Holocaust as it was happening, was released on DVD. Also in February, Lanzmann, who will turn 87 on November 27, encountered some resistance on…
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The Schmooze The Einsteins of Sex
More than just spiritual forefathers of the sex therapist and ex-Haganah sniper Ruth Westheimer, a trio of German Jewish sexologists preceded Sigmund Freud in innovations. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935); Iwan Bloch (1872–1922); and Albert Moll (1862–1939) are no longer household names, but they star in Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850-1930. Its…
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Culture Composer Who Rocked the ‘Cradle’
A brilliantly researched new biography by Howard Pollack, “Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World,” out soon from Oxford University Press, is shining light on how one 20th-century American Jewish composer expressed his identity as a politically active leftist without abandoning Yiddishkeit. Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, who was born in Philadelphia in 1905 and died…
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