Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Photographer to ’30s Literary Stars
From James Joyce to Virginia Woolf, camera-shy European writers were captured on film in the 1930s by German Jewish photographer Gisèle Freund. These psychologically revealing images, in vividly tight close-up — as if the viewer were crammed into an elevator next to the great writer — are enough to guarantee Freund, who died in 2000…
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The Schmooze Emerson, Emma Lazarus and the Jews
On June 13, Harvard University Press published a luxuriantly definitive Variorum edition of poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which may cast light on a still-remembered episode in American Jewish literary history. The poet Emma Lazarus, whose “New Colossus” adorns the Statue of Liberty, knew Emerson personally, and her admiring essay “Emerson’s Personality” was collected in…
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The Schmooze Jews in Motion: The Artistry of Josef Herman
The Polish Jewish painter Josef Herman, who settled in the UK as a refugee, is best known for his monumentally blocky paintings of Welsh miners whom he depicted empathetically while living for over a decade in a Welsh mining town, starting in 1944. Now a centenary exhibit, “Josef Herman: Warsaw, Brussels, Glasgow, London, 1938-1944” traces…
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The Schmooze Paul Mazursky From ‘Curb’ to Warsaw and Beyond
At 81, Brooklyn-born screenwriter and director Paul Mazursky may be most familiar to some HBO-TV viewers as Sunshine, the ill-fated poker dealer in “The Sopranos” and Norm, strictly unamused by Larry David’s antics in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” A new book, “Paul on Mazursky,” out from Wesleyan University Press this fall, reminds us that Mazursky’s varied…
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The Schmooze In Bed with Émile Meyerson
The Lublin-born French epistemologist and philosopher of science Émile Meyerson died in 1933, but is still remembered for his dedicated Zionism and friendship with fellow Jews, such as author and activist Bernard Lazare. Yet until now, Meyerson has been little known as a man. On April 28, Les éditions Honoré Champion published “Miscellanies: Short Unpublished…
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Culture To Understand and Equate, Passionately
It says something about the fraught history of North African Jewry that one of its most vivid authors of today was inspired to write a reminiscence of her youth not by dipping a Proustian madeleine into her tea, but by almost being crushed by a train. Colette Fellous, who was born in Tunis in 1950…
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The Schmooze Herzl at the Supersol
Denis Lachaud is a multitalented French actor, playwright, and novelist. One of his previous novels for young adult readers, “I am Learning German” from Les éditions Actes Sud in 1998, investigated how, for a French boy of German extraction whose parents refused to discuss the Second World War, learning an ancestral language could be a…
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The Schmooze TV Director Charles Dubin’s Sweet Revenge
The director Charles S. Dubin, who died on September 5 at age 92, was a showbiz survivor who got himself and his family through the entertainment industry blacklist era. Born in 1919 on Hart street “in the slums of Williamsburg, Brooklyn” to a Russian Jewish family, as Dubin proudly told a 2003 interviewer, he sang…
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