Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Quintessential British Actor’s Jewishness Not ‘Gone With the Wind’
In Portugal in 1943, shortly before his plane was shot down during a wartime propaganda mission, the actor Leslie Howard replied smilingly when he was described as a quintessential Englishman (he even seemed British in “Gone With the Wind”): “I suppose we do not have to tell them that I began as a Hungarian.” Born…
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Culture How Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Music Survived Dictators
There are few more intense pleasures for music lovers than to see a long-underrated composer finally receiving a deserved place in the sun. Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a Russian composer of Polish-Jewish origin who died in 1996, has long flown under the radar as one of the most accomplished of modern composers. Usually lost in the shadow…
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The Schmooze ‘Tis the Season to Be Classical: Unmissable December Concerts
While Hanukkah preparations and aftermath can overshadow every other human activity in December, ‘tis also the season for classical concerts, especially although by no means exclusively, in the New York area. These can include much Yiddishkayt, despite the seeming omnipresence of Handel’s “Messiah.” Mahler-lovers will not want to miss the much-loved British conductor Sir Colin…
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Culture A Little Paris Just Outside Warsaw
When art lovers think of the early 20th-century movement known as École de Paris, such Eastern European Jewish superstars as Marc Chagall, Moïse Kisling and Chaïm Soutine come to mind. All these celebrated artists went to France for inspiration, instruction and exaltation. Their contemporaries, however, included dozens of infinitely less famous Jewish artists of real…
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The Schmooze Helena Rubinstein’s Face Cream and Chutzpah
In the world of beauty, Helena Rubinstein is still a legend, yet the details of the tycoon’s life, from her birth as Chaja Rubinstein in the Jewish Kazimierz district of Kraków, to her death in her mid-90s in 1965, are comparatively little-known. A new biography from Les éditions Grasset in Paris, “Helena Rubinstein: The Woman…
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The Schmooze Celebrating Coherent Worlds in Sound: Musicologist Michał Bristiger
For a musicologist born in 1921, Michał Bristiger is going great guns. With two new books out and an evening of vocal and keyboard music in his honor on October 23 at the Warsaw Opera, Bristiger enjoys unusual cultural resonance. Born to a Polish Jewish family in the small shtetl of Jagielnica in Ukraine, Bristiger…
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The Schmooze Stephen Sondheim’s Little Night Kvetching
Culminating over a year of 80th birthday commemorations, the Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim recently had a Manhattan theater named after him. Yet a self-annotated volume of his lyrics due out October 29 from Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, “Finishing the Hat,” still seethes with resentment. The book’s subtitle, “Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments,…
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The Schmooze French Jews, and Zionism as ‘Crystallization’
The Moroccan-born Israeli historian Michel Abitbol is a possibly surprising source for savvy perspectives on the strained relations between Jews and France. Up until now he has produced cogent, concise works about North Africa such as “The Jews of North Africa during the Second World War” from Wayne State University Press as well as others…
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