Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze How Ernst Kantorowicz Escaped The Nazis
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…
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The Schmooze Perach Adom Performs Greek-Turkish Music, Israeli Style
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…
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The Schmooze Two Old Jews Squabbling About Art at the Met’s ‘The Old Masters’
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…
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The Schmooze Photographer Alfred Stieglitz, ‘Jewish Mystic’
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…
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Culture Music for Murder
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…
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Culture Building a Collective Consciousness on a National Scale
French-Jewish historian and publisher Pierre Nora is renowned for editing the monumental series of volumes “Lieux de Mémoire” for the French publisher Gallimard. Literally, the title means, “Places of Memory,” and the series is the ultimate repository of modern Gallic concepts of national identity. Its brilliant scholarship was recognized by Columbia University Press, which, from…
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The Schmooze Physicist Steven Weinberg, Not Just Another Lady of Shalott
A high point of this year’s World Science Festival will be the June 4 lecture by American Jewish physicist Steven Weinberg, “The Future of Big Science” at the NYU Kimmel Center. Predicting the future is always parlous, but Weinberg, 1979 Nobel Prize co-laureate for, as the Nobel Committee put it, “contributions to the theory of…
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The Schmooze France’s Favorite TV Comic Host Examines his Jewish Roots
With the demise of Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman, Jewish comic story-tellers have mostly vanished from American TV, but they are alive and well in France, in good part due to the raconteur, compère, and interviewer Philippe Bouvard, born in 1929 in Coulommiers, north-central France. Although Bouvard has broadcasted since the 1950s, his ongoing program…
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