Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Lustiger Counts Prostitute as ‘Righteous’
In dire times, some people are given the opportunity to display what is best in human nature. Such is the message of a new book by Arno Lustiger, author of “Stalin and the Jews” and many other historical works including “Rescue-Resistance: Europe’s Rescuers of Jews in the Nazi Era” which was published by Wallstein Verlag…
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Culture Time to Come Clean on Shoah Role
It can take 70 years for some French trains to run on time. And even then, you can’t rely on them. In February, French author Alain Lipietz reacted with scorn to the announcement that the SNCF, the French national railroad, intends to open its archives for the period of 1939–1945. He declared that the SNCF…
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The Schmooze British Literary Doyenne’s Letters to Gay Poet
Admirers of the Brooklyn-born Jewish poet Edward Field, whose “After the Fall: Poems Old and New” appeared in 2007 from the University of Pittsburgh Press, will rejoice in the role he plays in an April 16 book from W. W. Norton & Company, “Letters to a Friend” by the venerable British literary editor Diana Athill….
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The Schmooze Art-Collecting Memoirs of Isaiah Berlin’s Stepson
The poet W. H. Auden once remarked that hearing gourmets describe favorite meals made him wish he could live on pills, and reading the memoirs of some art collectors describing their acquisitions can make one want to live sans art. An exception to this trend is the art connoisseur Michel Strauss, born in France in…
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The Schmooze Eating and Drinking with Shabbetai Zvi
Leyb ben Oyzer’s “Description of Shabbetai Zevi” (Bashraybung fun Shabetai Tsvi) is a fascinating Yiddish text, apparently never wholly translated into English, but available in a sparkling new translation into French by Nathan Weinstock, published in November 2011 by Les éditions Honoré Champion. “Description of Shabbetai Zevi” first appeared in 1718 in Amsterdam, where its…
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The Schmooze Cioran and the Jews Redux
As the centenary of the Romanian-born French writer Emil Cioran winds down, further attention honors the author who died in 1995, including “All Gall is Divided: The Aphorisms of E. M. Cioran” translated by Richard Howard, due out in March from Arcade Publishing, and a hefty collected works of over 1700 pages, out from Gallimard’s…
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The Schmooze Éliette Abécassis, ‘Hereby Permitted’ to Readers
Perhaps the brainiest current romance novelist is the French Jewish writer Éliette Abécassis, born in 1969 in Strasbourg to an Orthodox Sephardic family. Her father, Armand Abécassis, is an historian of Jewish spirituality and prolific author himself. Éliette Abécassis teaches philosophy at the University of Caen and also writes middle-brow, accessible fiction about the storm…
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Culture Tragic in Novels, Lucky in Friends
A terminal alcoholic who drank himself to death in 1939 at age 44, Joseph Roth, whose ideas about Judaism were often complex and contradictory, has long been an object of fascination. With the publication of his letters, attention has redoubled on the novels and journalism of that passionately pugnacious Austrian-Jewish writer. His work, and especially…
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