Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze A Conflicted Conductor Under Stalinism
Some Soviet Jews, whether or not they were true believers in Communism, were forced to express gratitude to Stalin simply for not being Hitler. That is one conclusion to be drawn from “Kirill Kondrashin: His Life in Music” a recent biography of the great Russian Jewish conductor by journalist Gregor Tassie (The Scarecrow Press). According…
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Culture A Lively Musical Corpus
Although other composers are most suitably celebrated on the anniversaries of their births (July 7, 2010, marked Gustav Mahler’s 150th birthday), it seems appropriate to fete Mahler, the quintessential creator of funeral marches and meditations on death, on the centenary of his Todestag, May 18, 1911. But in Vienna — the city that sold bonbons,…
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The Schmooze The Canadian Führer
While the notorious British anti-Semites Oswald Mosley and Henry Hamilton Beamish have been discussed and analyzed thoroughly, Canada’s leading Fascist, Adrien Arcand, has not. Strongly influenced by Mosley and Beamish’s activities in England (Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists while Beamish served as the vice president of the Imperial Fascist League), Arcand spewed out…
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The Schmooze A Tale of Two Prisoners
The historian Jean-Noël Jeanneney is mostly known as the author of “Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe” (University of Chicago Press), a 2006 attack on the search giant’s book digitization project. But Jeanneney, who is the former president of France’s notoriously user-unfriendly Bibliothèque nationale, is also the author of many…
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The Schmooze University of Provence Disinvites Israeli Writer Esther Orner
The septuagenarian Israeli novelist and poetry translator Esther Orner would hardly seem threatening to anyone. Yet Orner, who has translated Yehuda Amichai and Aharon Shabtai into French, has become the center of a frantic dispute in France. The University of Provence, based in Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles, has just canceled a March 2011 colloquium, “Writing Today…
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The Schmooze Frederica Sagor Maas, Hollywood’s ‘Shocking Miss Pilgrim’
On July 6, the New York-born screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas celebrated her 110th birthday in La Mesa, California. Maas was born into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants named Zagorsky — anglicized to Sagor at Ellis Island — who placed a solid emphasis on culture, despite their humble social status. In addition to subsidizing the…
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The Schmooze Hedy Lamarr, Queen of Hollywood Chutzpah
During her lifetime, even personal friends were unaware that film star Hedy Lamarr was Jewish. Now two new biographies — “Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr” by Stephen Michael Shearer, due out in September from St Martin’s Press and “Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film” by Ruth Barton, just out from The University…
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The Schmooze Munich Photographers in Palestine
From February 10 through May 23, “Unexposed: Munich Photographers in Exile,” a compelling exhibit at Munich’s Jewish Museum, focused on the art and fate of three photographers who fled Germany for Palestine in the 1930s, thereby remaining mostly unknown in their native land. Alfons Himmelreich (1904-1993), Efrem Ilani (1910-1999), and Jakob Rosner (1902-1950) all became…
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