Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Celebrating Purim Early with Delectable Concerts
New York music lovers need hardly wait for Purim to feel the springtime party mood. From February 3rd to 6th, a City Center Encores! production of Kurt Weill’s 1949 musical “Lost in the Stars” can be seen in New York. A prescient argument against South African apartheid, Weill composed his score after studying Zulu music,…
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The Schmooze Jean-Pierre Melville: Resistance Fighter and Filmmaker Who Made the Right Choices
The French Jewish film director Jean-Pierre Melville (born Grumbach; 1917–1973), famous for films about crime and France’s wartime Résistance, is being rediscovered by cinema addicts. A remake of Melville’s 1970 heist film “Le Cercle Rouge” is currently in development as “The Red Circle” starring Orlando Bloom while Melville’s equally influential 1967 “Le Samouraï,” about a…
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Culture The Escape Artist.
During his life, American modernist painter Philip Guston’s artistic styles ranged from 1930s social realism to 1950s–60s Abstract Expressionism to his deceptively simple-looking last style, which has often been reductively described as cartoonlike. Despite being written off by such high-profile critics as Robert Hughes and Hilton Kramer, Guston’s work has endured. And even though the…
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The Schmooze Jean Ferrat: France’s Musical Voice of Holocaust Remembrance
When the leftist French Jewish singer/songwriter Jean Ferrat (born Tenenbaum) died last March at the age of 79, the outpouring of affectionate tributes surprised some. After all, Ferrat had been retired to an Ardèche village in south-central France for a number of years. A detailed new biography has appeared from Les éditions Fayard, “Jean Ferrat:…
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The Schmooze Yehuda Lancry’s Memoir Written in the ‘Ink of his Tears’
The diplomatic career of Yehuda Lancry includes postings as Israel’s Ambassador to France in the 1990s, followed by service as a member of the 14th Knesset, and in 1999, as Israel’s representative to the United Nations. Yet before these lofty responsibilities, Lancry, who was born in Bujad, Morocco and emigrated to Israel in the 1960s,…
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The Schmooze Ludwik Hirszfeld: Great Medical Researcher in the Warsaw Ghetto
Readers do not expect witnesses to historical tragedy to be supremely intelligent, producing gimlet-eyed conclusions about executioners and victims. Yet Ludwik Hirszfeld, a Polish Jewish microbiologist and serologist (expert in blood serum) who died in 1954, did just that in a book issued last August to no fanfare from University of Rochester Press. “Ludwik Hirszfeld:…
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The Schmooze Leon Kirchner, a Sometimes-Grumpy, Permanently Inspired Composer
Contemporary American composers have few able defenders, and once out of sight, composers are often forgotten, so it is good to have a biographical tribute, out in November, from University of Rochester Press to Leon Kirchner, who died in 2009 at age 90. “Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, & Teacher” by Robert Riggs recounts the life…
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News A Chameleon on Show
December 2, 2010, marked the 30th anniversary of his death, but the French-Jewish novelist Romain Gary, born Roman Kacew in Vilnius in 1914, has never been more current. And as if to prove it, an insightful new biography, ?Romain Gary: A Tall Story? by David Bellos, appeared recently from Harvill Secker. Bellos, an expert translator…
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