Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze A Portuguese Diplomat in the Kingdom of Heaven
The diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who is the subject of a new biography by French author Eric Lebreton (Le Cherche Midi Editions), was the only Portuguese citizen ever recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. “Visas for Life: Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Righteous Man of Bordeaux” relates how in 1940,…
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The Schmooze Belgian Jewry, in Posters
Posters can be a form of performance art. This is one conclusion to be drawn from “Public Notice: Jewish History in Posters,” a new exhibit at Brussels’ Jewish Museum of Belgium which opened June 18 and runs until October 3. The items in the exhibit range from anonymous 19th century anti-Semitic images like The Wandering…
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The Schmooze Susannah Heschel Versus the Aryan Jesus
As the daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Susannah Heschel, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, knows the importance of interfaith dialogue, as well as what happens when it breaks down. While there have been no shortage of rocky episodes in Jewish-Christian relations, few are as dark as the Nazi era. Heschel’s most…
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Culture A Swede Among the Sprites
Beyond Saab, Volvo, ABBA and Ikea, the English-speaking world is relatively ignorant of Swedish culture, but 19th-century Swedish-Jewish painter Ernst Abraham Josephson, although still under-celebrated outside Scandinavia, is increasingly being seen by academics and art historians as a key figure in European modernism. William Butler Yeats, in “The Bounty of Sweden” (1925), a literary thank-you…
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The Schmooze Café Culture in Weimar Berlin
In the 1920s, Yiddish was more than just a lingua franca for East European Jewish émigrés; it was also a language of high culture, as demonstrated by a brilliant new book, “Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture” (Legenda Books), edited by New York University Yiddish scholar Gennady Estraikh and…
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The Schmooze A ‘Degenerate’ Composer at Bard
Franz Schreker, an Austrian composer of Jewish descent who was hounded to an untimely death by the Nazis, has long been considered an unjustly forgotten genius. In recent years, however, Schreker’s works have received some long-overdue attention. In 2005 American music director Kent Nagano conducted a darkly impressive revival of Schreker’s 1918 opera “The Marked…
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The Schmooze When French Was the Mameloshen
The Middle Ages were no holiday in the Catskills for the Jews of France. Yet a new study by Kirsten Fudeman, a professor of French at the University of Pittsburgh, conveys an unexpectedly upbeat message. “Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities” (University of Pennsylvania Press), details medieval Jews’ persistent love of…
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Books An Advertising Pioneer Who Predicted Israel’s Publicity Woes
Today, the name of pioneering advertising executive Albert Lasker is mostly associated with the Lasker Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports medical research. But as a forthcoming biography by Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz points out, Lasker himself was more likely to self-identify as a “propagandist” than as a philanthropist. “The Man Who Sold America:…
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