Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Death in Petrópolis
Viennese-born Jewish author Stefan Zweig and his second wife, Lotte Altmann, committed suicide together as refugees in Brazil in February 1942, but Zweig’s works, whether fiction, biographies or letters, have never seemed more alive. Seventy years on, the former home in Petrópolis where he died, now known as Casa Stefan Zweig, is scheduled to [open…
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The Schmooze For Yo-Yo Ma, Glick Was Worth Hearing
On June 7, Toronto’s Beth Tikvah Synagogue will host a special concert to honor the tenth Yahrzeit of Canadian composer Srul Irving Glick. Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple already did the same on April 22, five days after his actual passing a decade ago. Son of a cantor, Glick (1934-2002) grew up to be a composer…
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The Schmooze Letters from a Dying Hungarian Architect
Instructional letters from parents to children, such as those from Lord Chesterfield or Madame de Sevigné, can make delightful reading. But few have the emotional charge of “Paper Kisses: Letters of a Jewish Father from Prison 1942/43,” published in February by Klett-Cotta Verlag. They were written by the Hungarian Jewish architect Pál Meller (known as…
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The Schmooze Lizzie Doron, Novelist of Tel Aviv’s Bitzaron
Some urban areas can inspire literary careers. Lizzie Doron, born in Tel Aviv in 1953, was raised in that city’s Bitzaron neighborhood, where traumatized Holocaust survivors lived in a “kind of refugee camp,” speaking a macaronic blend of languages in which Yiddish featured prominently. When at age six, Lizzie and her friends were sent to…
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The Schmooze Denying Robert Faurisson
French anti-Semitism is a recurrent struggle, most recently shown by the Cannes Film Festival’s abrupt cancellation of “The Anti-Semite” — a film starring Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, a French comic with a history of anti-Semitism. Dealing with another strand of the trait, French historian Valérie Igounet’s useful “The Story of Holocaust Denial in France,” from Les…
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The Schmooze Stephan Mendel-Enk, Swedish Jewish Novelist
Though celebrating a Eurovision Song Contest win with their compatriots, Swedish Jews (a minority of around 18,000 people in a country of 9 million) are confronting a grim recent upswing in anti-Semitic violence. At this time of hostility, riding to the rescue is the Swedish Jewish author and journalist Stephan Yigal Mendel-Enk. Born in 1974…
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Culture Evolutionary Biology After Auschwitz
May 20 marks the 10th anniversary of the death, at age 60, of evolutionary biologist and popular author Stephen Jay Gould. That’s an excellent excuse to relish seven paperback reprints of his work, out last fall from Harvard University Press. Included are “Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History” and “I Have Landed: The…
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Culture Vidal: A Jewish Soldier of the Hair Salons
The hairstylist Vidal Sassoon, who died on May 9, reportedly of leukemia, was more than just a fashion legend. Born in London in 1928 of Ukrainian-Greek Jewish background, Sassoon created an architectonically geometric updating of the short women’s haircut known as the “bob” for such 1960s celebrities as the English model Twiggy, dress designer Mary…
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