Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Champion of the Jewish National Game
Chess has sometimes been termed “the Jewish National Game” due to the extraordinary number of great Jewish grandmasters. One such was Wilhelm Steinitz, who ranked as first undisputed world chess champion and who is the subject of “The Steinitz Papers: Letters and Documents of the First World Chess Champion” newly available from McFarland & Co….
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The Schmooze Home Run-Hitting Sports Psychologist
As the regular baseball season comes to a close, pressure is intensifying on those players still competing for a World Series ring. Players, coaches and agents are all taking their own steps to combat the mental challenges that this pressure causes, including visiting sports psychologists. Reports earlier this summer stated that baseball agent Scott Boras…
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The Schmooze The Furious Literary Prankster, Romain Gary
The Romain Gary French Cultural Center on Kikar Safra in West Jerusalem is named in honor of the French Jewish author, born Roman Kacew in Vilnius in 1914. His multi-faceted literary exploits have been explored in his own memoirs, in Ralph Schoolcraft’s astute 2002 study “Romain Gary: The Man Who Sold His Shadow” from University…
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The Schmooze Charlie Chaplin’s Jewish Barber
For 70 years, fans of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” now widely available on DVD, have marveled at the prescience of the comedian’s anti-Nazi satire. Filmed before America actually entered World War II, when some Hollywood movie moguls still soft-pedaled critiques of Hitler, “The Great Dictator” continues to fascinate today. Recently published by Les éditions…
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Books ?Exodus? Redux
Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel?s Founding Story By M.M. Silver Wayne State University Press, 280 pages, $29.95 Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller By Ira Nadel University of Texas Press, 376 pages, $27.95 The 1958 novel ?Exodus? by Leon Uris, and the 1960 blockbuster movie that it inspired, set to…
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Culture Turning History’s Detritus Into Gold
Being a pioneering folklorist is no picnic. Even the groundbreaking anthologies “A Treasury of American Folklore” (1944) and “Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery” (1945), both compiled by Benjamin Botkin, met with ferocious resistance from academic folklorists, according to a new study from the University of Oklahoma Press, “America’s Folklorist: B.A. Botkin…
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Culture Frum Amid the Horror
The Felix Nussbaum house, a museum that opened in 1998 and is located in Nussbaum’s native city of Osnabrück in northwest Germany, closed for renovations July 26. A two-story extension designed by the museum’s original architect, Daniel Libeskind, will provide room for a new foyer, a library and other amenities. The renovated Nussbaum House is…
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The Schmooze A German City Built by Jews
Cologne, Germany had a flourishing tradition, not just of Jewish creativity, but also of Jewish architecture. That tradition is demonstrated in “Cologne and its Jewish Architects,” an exhibition on view through September 5 at the Municipal Nazi Documentation Center of Cologne (NS-Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln). Jewish architects such as Sigmund Münchhausen contributed mightily to beautify…
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