Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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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The Schmooze High Hopes for High Israeli Voices
In London last June, an Israeli voice of world-class beauty rang out in the storied Wigmore Hall, part a concert of Italian Baroque, Ladino, Hebrew and cantorial music. 34-year-old countertenor Yaniv d’Or, who studied at Jerusalem’s Rubin Academy and the UK’s Guildhall School of Music, “enthralled” one English critic with his “smooth toned, powerfully resilient”…
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The Schmooze Thinking and Kvelling at Advanced Study Institute
Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study has long been a center of intellectual Yiddishkeit. In 1930, American Jewish educator Abraham Flexner convinced department store magnate Louis Bamberger to donate five million dollars to build the Institute, and it soon acquired the mission of saving Europe’s Jewish thinkers from the Nazi menace. Flexner invited Albert Einstein…
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The Schmooze The Arty Semite Guide to May Classical Concerts
As summertime slowly approaches, concerts of music both minimal and maximal will enchant Manhattanites in search of aural Yiddishkeit. On April 29 at the Walter Reade Theater, flutist Claire Chase will perform Steve Reich’s “Vermont Counterpoint” in its version for flute and tape; the alternate version, for eleven flutes, would doubtless exceed even the gifted…
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The Schmooze An Artist Struck With Admiration for Herzl
The German Jewish graphic artist Hermann Struck (1876-1944), who emigrated to the Holy Land in 1922, was famed for the multiple portraits which he created of Theodor Herzl. But he was more than just a pioneering artist before Israel’s statehood was declared. A small, well-chosen exhibit, Hermann Struck in Galilee, was on view at the…
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The Schmooze Architects and Artists Building the Jewish State
The half-century before the declaration of Israel’s statehood was a time of wild artistic ferment. Some of the nuances of the feverish creativity in the realm of architecture are described by two studies from Ashgate Publishing, “Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse” edited by Haim Yacobi and “Architecture and Utopia. The…
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