Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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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Culture An Angry Old Artist Reaches the Big Apple
The Jewish artist Gustav Metzger, longtime resident of the United Kingdom, has long been an inspired artistic equivalent of the orators seen and heard at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, uninhibited deliverers of social and political messages. Born in 1926, Metzger the artistic orator finally has his first solo American exhibit, “Gustav Metzger: Historic…
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The Schmooze Einstein and Marilyn, Together Forever?
The fascination with the 20th century’s unsurpassed brain, Albert Einstein, and starriest sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe, inspired Nicolas Roeg’s 1985 film “Insignificance” and a 2005 optical illusion made at MIT still available on the internet, in which an image of Einstein turns into Marilyn if you back away from the computer screen. Although they never…
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The Schmooze NYC’s Warm Weather Concert Sounds
As temperatures climb, some New Yorkers gather their families and head for the countryside, while others remain en ville to seek similar experiences in concerts redolent of Yiddishkeit. One such is a May 26 recital at The Austrian Cultural Forum in which Austrian soprano Ursula Langmayr performs a selection of Gustav Mahler’s outdoors-inspired songs, accompanied…
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The Schmooze Amos Luzzatto’s Fictional View of Jews in Hectic Postwar Rome
Lovers of Jewish culture know about Italy’s Luzzatto family, including the 19th century theologian Samuel David Luzzatto, known as Shadal, and (by marriage) the prolific author and teacher Dante Lattes. Shadal’s great-great-grandson, Amos Luzzatto, has followed in the family tradition. Born in Rome in 1928, he spent the war years with his family in Jerusalem,…
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The Schmooze Nostalgia and Moderns on CD for Heritage Month
For background sounds to Jewish American Heritage Month, why not investigate some nostalgic treasures of Hebrew education from a half-century ago, available from Smithsonian Folkways, such as 1958’s “Israeli Children’s Songs” sung by New York native Miriam Ben-Ezra; or a charming 1955 lecture, “The Hebrew Language: Commentary and Readings” by Theodor Herzl Gaster, a UK-born…
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Fast Forward Josh Shapiro’s Judaism was not why Kamala Harris snubbed him, new book claims
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