Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Piaf’s Paramour, and Much More
The French singer-songwriter Georges Moustaki (born Giuseppe “Yussef” Mustacchi, to a family of Greek Jews in Alexandria, Egypt) is still mainly remembered outside France for his brief, stormy love affair with Édith Piaf. Although Moustaki penned the lyrics for Piaf’s resounding 1959 hit “Milord,” the song’s raucous, honky-tonk aura is far from Moustaki’s own ruefully…
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The Schmooze The Fiery Prophet Who Named Jewish Self-Hatred
The German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing was a firebrand, author of profoundly unsettling books such as 1930’s “Jewish Self-Hatred” (Der jüdische Selbsthaß), a welcome new edition of which has just appeared from Agora from Presses Pocket in France. It’s translated and introduced by Maurice-Ruben Hayoun, a Germanist who teaches Jewish philosophy at the University of…
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The Schmooze ‘Dear Little Sister Cembalo,’ the Viennese Harpsichordist Alice Ehlers
While awaiting this year’s TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood from April 28 to May 1, the Turner Classic Movie channel broadcast William Wyler’s 1939 “Wuthering Heights,” starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. Cinema fans recall that in that film, during a party, Isabella Linton (Geraldine Fitzgerald) announces to Heathcliff (Olivier): “Oh, Madame Ehlers is…
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Culture Dr. Cyclops Is Back
George Szell: A Life of Music By Michael Charry University of Illinois Press, 464 pages, $35 One of the most enduringly terrifying abusive father figures among great conductors is being honored by a revival of interest. George Szell was nicknamed “Dr. Cyclops” by his Cleveland Orchestra musicians, after a 1940s horror movie villain, and a…
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The Schmooze A Mélange of Musical May Days
As May rolls around for Manhattan music lovers, ‘tis the season for appreciating the works of George Kleinsinger, whose much-loved orchestral work “Tubby the Tuba” will be performed on April 30 in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater by The Lesbian & Gay Big Apple Corps Symphonic Band. Kleinsinger wrote “Tubby” in 1941, about the possibly…
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Culture Novel Stance for a Serial Biographer
The Book of Job has inspired English-language masterworks from William Blake’s poetry to Muriel Spark’s novels “The Comforters” and “The Only Problem,” but France — especially Bible-resistant, post-Revolutionary and secular France — has lagged behind in such inspiration. Until now, that is. Pierre Assouline, a French-Jewish biographer, novelist and journalist born in Casablanca, Morocco, in…
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The Schmooze Pink Triangles: Gays, Jews and Gay Jews
Despite such pioneering exhibits as 2003’s “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals: 1933-1945” at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, official commemorations of the Nazi mistreatment of gay men and women pose still-evolving problems, as a brilliantly researched study, “Pink Triangle: Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals and its Remembrance,” (Triangle rose. La persécution nazie des homosexuels et…
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The Schmooze Overlooking Henry Mayhew’s ‘Street-Jews’ in Dickensian London
The vivid scenes of a bustling and brutally poor metropolis at the heart of Empire make Henry Mayhew’s masterpiece “London Labour and the London Poor,” first published in 1851 compelling reading. With or without Jews. The Victorian social researcher originally published his work in three volumes and augmented it to four volumes in 1861 so…
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