Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze The Madness of Cultural Historian Aby Warburg
The creative legacy of the Hamburg-born Jewish cultural historian Aby Warburg, born Abraham Moritz Warburg to a family of German bankers, still thrives. When London’s Warburg Library was threatened last fall with dispersal, a general outcry was heard to preserve the documentation first gathered by Warburg, who died in 1929, and later augmented by his…
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The Schmooze Is Dan Shechtman Artistic as Dylan or Philip Roth?
So rumored honorees Bob Dylan and Philip Roth were shut out of the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. “Zol zein mit mazel,” as the Yiddish equivalent of “Don’t worry, be happy” goes. The newly-announced crop of recipients by the Nobel Committee includes an indisputably worthy and artistically inspiring awardee in the field of Chemistry,…
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The Schmooze Gertrude Stein, Fascist Love Thief?
The author who wrote “a rose is a rose is a rose” is being honored and vilified in equal parts. She is being honored by “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” out from The University of California Press on June 22 to commemorate an exhibit at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, which moves and opens on…
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The Schmooze Walter Hautzig and Other Cherished Musical Mentors
There are many kinds of music teachers, but the most memorable seem to be either the beloved saints or the abusive nightmares. On October 2, one of the former, Vienna-born pianist Walter Hautzig, who will be 90 on September 28, will be honored with a concert at New York’s Steinway Hall, as well as with…
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Culture T.S. Eliot’s On-Again, Off-Again Anti-Semitism
Reading T.S. Eliot in high school, we stumbled over his sneering references to Jews. And with the 1989 publication of “T.S. Eliot and Prejudice” (University of California Press) by Christopher Ricks, and 1995’s “T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form” by Anthony Julius (Thames & Hudson), poetry lovers have a clear account of how Eliot, author…
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The Schmooze The Arty Semite Guide to Fall’s Classical Music Lineup
One poet called autumn the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” but some New York concerts redolent with Yiddishkeit focus on the pleasant shock of the new, not misty mellowness. On September 16 at The Austrian Cultural Forum, a new arrangement of the Adagio movement from Mahler’s unfinished Tenth symphony will be conducted in two…
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The Schmooze Robert Badinter and Symbols of the Victory of Justice
French government officials are rarely known for their sense of poetic justice, but the French Jewish statesman Robert Badinter, born in 1928, is an exception to the rule. Former Minister of Justice in François Mitterrand’s government, Badinter published a Mitterrand-related memoir with Les éditions Fayard in March, with the wry title “Thorns and Roses” (Les…
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Culture Notorious Anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the Jews Who Read Him
Fifty years after his death on July 1, 1961, French modernist author and ferocious anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline is still causing controversy. Last January, an attempt by France’s Ministry of Culture to “celebrate” Céline on this anniversary ran aground after noted Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld pointed out that Céline was not merely the author of such…
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