Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture At 90, Elaine May remains a deceptively and defiantly Jewish artist
The Jewish quotient in the creative works of director, screenwriter and actress Elaine May, whose 90th birthday will be feted April 21, remains oddly misunderstood. Yet May, as recent recipient of a Tony award, honorary Oscar, and National Medal for the Arts, is widely esteemed in the showbiz community. The Academy Award is a trifle…
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Culture She typed up Schindler’s list — and, in so doing, showed how a secretary could become a hero
Mimi Reinhardt, who died April 8 at age 107, proved that administrative assistants can be powerful forces for good or evil, depending on their own personal qualities. As Austrian Jewish secretary to the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, she typed clean copies of the celebrated list of around 1200 Jews who were claimed as essential workers…
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Culture Playing Yentl’s father, Billy Wilder’s gangster and Papa Mousekewitz, he was a Jewish actor of unparalleled resourcefulness
When Barbra Streisand sang the Oscar-nominated song “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” in her film “Yentl,” she was singing it to Nehemiah Persoff’s character, Rebbe Mendel. Persoff, who died April 5 at age 102, also starred as Papa Mousekewitz in the “American Tail” movie series. Yet Persoff’s varied work on stage, film, and TV proved…
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Culture Mother to George Costanza, wife of Mr. Potato Head, Estelle Harris had a comic style all her own
Estelle Harris (born Nussbaum) who died April 2 at age 93, proved that sources of laughter in American Jewish television sitcoms are incisive self-awareness and time-honored tribulations. Harris was paired with two of the loudest, most obstreperous Jewish comedians of the modern era, Jerry Stiller in TV’s “Seinfeld” and Don Rickles in Disney’s “Toy Story”…
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Culture A paragon of erudition and a vital poet, he captured the American gay Jewish experience
The American Jewish poet and translator Richard Howard, who died March 31 at age 92, proved that in a literary career, timing is of paramount importance. To be born less than two weeks before the 1929 stock market crash to an impoverished Jewish family in Cleveland might have seemed unlucky. Yet Howard was promptly adopted…
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Culture Does Goliath deserve his bad reputation? A new spin on an old villain
Does Goliath, the giant notorious for his biblical confrontation with David, deserve sympathy? The latest book by Jonathan Friedmann, professor of Jewish music history at the Academy for Jewish Religion California, explains why he may be getting some. “Goliath as Gentle Giant” examines the recent phenomenon of humanizing depictions in popular culture of David’s opponent….
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Culture How Madeleine Albright downplayed then came to embrace her Jewish heritage
Albright eventually came to terms with her Jewish past past, while remaining an observant Episcopalian
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Culture The surprisingly Jewish history of the Rorschach inkblot test
April 2 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Hermann Rorschach, the Swiss psychoanalyst who propounded the Rorschach inkblot test, still used as a means of evaluating mental conditions. The Rorschach test immediately attracted strong support from Jewish clinicians. These included Françoise Minkowska-Brokman, of Polish ancestry, who introduced the test in France as well…
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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Culture A Jewish prophet of the 1980s would be horrified to see that we didn’t heed his warnings
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Opinion With killing of Hezbollah’s chief, Israel occupies the inarguable moral high ground
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Opinion This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
In Case You Missed It
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Film & TV How Leonard Cohen — and a Yom Kippur prayer — inspired a coming-of-age epic
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Opinion A year after Oct. 7, Israel has the chance to remake its future — for better or worse
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Opinion Campus protests defined the year since Oct. 7. Could they actually change U.S. policy?
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Special Report At the kibbutz hit hardest on Oct. 7, a wrenching debate over how to rebuild
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