Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Gore Vidal and the Jew He Loved
Even before the novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright Gore Vidal, who died on July 31, is buried in Washington, D.C’s Rock Creek Cemetery alongside his life companion Howard Austen, bloggers have hastily called Vidal an anti-Semite. The reality is more complex. Vidal will be remembered not for his political views, but his historical novels such…
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The Schmooze Salmon Maimon: 18th Century Thinker
In George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” the eponymous hero purchases “that wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon.” The British author Israel Zangwill concurred, paraphrasing passages from Maimon’s life story in chapters of his 1898 “Dreamers of the Ghetto.” Maimon’s 1793 classic also impressed Franz Kafka, who described it in one…
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Books A Catalan Jew’s Concise Wisdom
“Tell a blind man his house is on fire and he will reply, ‘I wish I could see that!’” “I don’t like having white hair but I like even less when it falls out. Isn’t it sad to worry about the loss of something one dislikes?” “My son, I prefer to see you hunting lions…
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The Schmooze Willie Howard, More Than Just a Sunshine Boy
Although London’s hit revival of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” starring Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths closed on July 28, a possible fall transfer to Broadway has been announced. That’s a good excuse to shine light on a neglected Jewish vaudeville great who inspired Simon’s play. In his 1996 “Rewrites: a Memoir” Simon describes how…
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Culture From Rabbi’s Daughter to World-Shocker
The subject of a new documentary, “Love and Politics,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, actress and director Judith Malina is internationally celebrated for startlingly unconventional theater, such as her 2011 play “Korach: The Biblical Anarchist.” A rabbi’s daughter who turned 86 on June 4, Malina has long been invigorating and scandalizing…
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The Schmooze Their Pen-Pal Adolf
Understanding how a nation can embrace anti-Semitic tyranny is a complex problem. “Letters to Hitler”, out in May from Polity Books, helps explain the matter. Historian Henrik Eberle, co-author of “The Hitler Book,” has selected from thousands of letters written by Germans of all ages from 1925 to 1945 from a collection found in Moscow’s…
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Culture No Straight Path From Dogma to Dissent
Vasily Grossman has received many well-deserved tributes as a dissident writer who dared state what is now the obvious — that when reviewing the wreckage inflicted upon humanity by such dictators as Stalin and Hitler, there are more similarities than differences to be found in their legacies. Paying tribute to this conclusion, and to the…
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Culture Not Your Grandmother’s Grandmothers
The Story of a Life: Memoirs of a Young Jewish Woman in the Russian Empire By Anna Pavlovna Vygodskaia, translated by Eugene Avrutin and Robert Greene Northern Illinois University Press, 202 pages, $22.95 Journal (1918-1920) By Nelly Ptachkina, translated into French by Luba Jurgenson Les Éditions des Syrtes, 267 pages, $29.39 All too often, accounts…
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