Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Forgotten Witness to the Gulag
If a writer’s message is unwelcome, it may not be heeded for many years. January 21 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of the Polish Jewish author Yuli Borisovich Margolin at age 70. Margolin — whose first name is also transliterated as Julius or Yuly, and was also known as Yehudah in Israel —…
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The Schmooze Are Classical Music Lovers Finally Becoming Cone-Heads?
From January 13 to 16 at different venues in the Garden State, The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra will perform alongside works by Mendelssohn and Smetana, “Dover Beach” a 1941 setting for baritone and orchestra by Edward Toner Cone, a composer and much-loved music professor at Princeton. Cone, who died in 2004 at age 87 after…
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The Schmooze A Starring Role for Efratia Gitai, Amos Gitai’s Mother
Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai, who turned 60 this year, has been investigating his roots. Last year a Tel Aviv Museum exhibit honored his father, Bauhaus-trained architect Munio Weinraub. Gitai’s 2009 film Carmel featured French actress Jeanne Moreau (star of a recent Gitai staging of a play inspired by Josephus’s “Jewish War”) reading authentic letters written…
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The Schmooze Heartwarming Classical Concerts for Cold Winter Days
The Babylonian Talmud counsels that at times of bitterest cold, it is best to say, “Such is the way of the world,” and then “observe eight days of festivity.” One such ideal post-winter solstice festivity for Manhattanites is a January 11 Carnegie Hall recital by America’s sweetheart of song, soprano Renée Fleming, in a program…
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The Schmooze Roundworms, Ridicule and the Nobel Prize
If you doubt that the life of a molecular biologist and geneticist can make for delightful reading, then you have not yet seen “Sydney Brenner: a Biography” by Dr. Errol C. Friedberg from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Friedberg, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, explains how Brenner, honored with the…
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The Schmooze Lewis J. Stadlen: Rekindling a Talented Jewish Character Actor
On October 2, BearManor Media issued a Kindle Edition of 2009’s “Acting Foolish,” an unjustly overlooked memoir by actor Lewis J. Stadlen. Born in Brooklyn in 1947, Stadlen famously appeared on TV’s “The Sopranos” as Dr. Ira Fried, a wittily dour specialist in erectile dysfunction. Yet Stadlen is basically a stage animal, as student of…
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Books Pen Pals Reunited: Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt
The friendship between the great kabbalist Gershom Scholem and the political scientist Hannah Arendt famously foundered in the 1960s after a disagreement over Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” an account, of the trial of the Nazi war criminal. Scholem reproached Arendt for a lack of “ahavath Yisrael,” to which Arendt readily concurred that she lacked “ahavath”…
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The Schmooze CDs for Your Hanukkah Stocking
Sometimes we listen to CDs for their artistry, sometimes simply to relish individual voices, and few voices are as heartening and as reaffirming about human values as the rich, exquisitely cultured speaking tones of Albert Einstein, to be heard on a reprint from British Library Publishing. In original recordings from 1930 to 1947, in English…
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