
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
On March 3, to commemorate the centenary of the first publication by French Jewish historian Marc Bloch, CNRS editions reprinted Bloch’s “Historical Miscellanies” (Mélanges historiques). Carole Fink’s 1991 “Marc Bloch: A Life in History” from Cambridge University Press explains how Lyons-born Marc Bloch was an admirably lucid, groundbreaking historian, as well as heroic man of…
On May 29, at the Théâtre d’Orléans, a gala concert, Hommage à Jean Zay, paid tribute to a minister of education and fine arts in the 1930s government of French-Jewish socialist Léon Blum, whose lasting impact on French culture is being newly celebrated. Son of a left-wing Jewish newspaper editor in north-central France, Zay was…
In anticipation of his eagerly-awaited new play, “Olive and the Bitter Herbs” which opens at Primary Stages on July 26, veteran playwright and actor Charles Busch continues to rake in the tributes. On June 27, The New York Innovative Theatre Foundation will present Busch with its 2011 Innovative Theatre Luminary Award at a benefit performance…
The historian Ernst Kantorowicz, born to a German Jewish family in present-day Poznań, is remembered for such magisterial studies as “The King’s Two Bodies,” still available from Princeton University Press and a study of King Frederick the Second. Kantorowicz’s dramatic life has also attracted attention, from service in World War I to his escape from…
The death, earlier this year, of the famed Greek singer/songwriter Manolis Rassoulis at age 65 was a loss for Mediterranean music in general, particularly in Israel, where Rassoulis has performed to acclaim with the skilled ensemble Perach Adom (Red Flower). Founded in 2001 by Tomer Katz, a graduate of Jerusalem’s Rubin Academy for Music and…
Devotees of the fine arts and even finer acting will hurry to the Metropolitan Museum of Art tonight or on June 27 for a staged reading of Simon Gray’s 2004 play “The Old Masters.” Gray’s opus portrays a stormy encounter between two Jewish art experts, Bernard Berenson (born Bernhard Valvrojenski in present-day Lithuania) and the…
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit “Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand” which ran from November, 2010, closed in April of this year; however, there is new reason to admire the achievement of photographer and modern art maven Alfred Stieglitz, born in Hoboken in 1864 to a family of German Jewish origin. Stieglitz’s own acclaimed photos reveal scant…
Few movie soundtrack composers are perennially contemporary household names, but New York-born Jewish musician Bernard Herrmann, whose June 29 centenary is being celebrated with a year of CD releases and live concerts from Minnesota to Bristol, England, is a noteworthy exception. Herrmann’s name is immortally linked to the oppressively ominous, churningy fear-inducing music he wrote…
די ווילנער דאָקטוירים יעקבֿ וויגאָדסקי און צמח שאַבאַד זענען אויך געווען געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע טוער.
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