Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture How a Yiddish encyclopedia became a document of the Holocaust and Jewish culture
“The General Encyclopedia” (Di Algemeyne Entsiklopedye) was a Yiddish language publishing project created in Berlin, Paris, and New York from 1932 to 1966. It was begun optimistically in Berlin to celebrate the 70th birthday of the Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, who would be murdered in the street by Nazis in Latvia just over a decade…
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Culture In Ukraine, a long history of Russian crimes against Jews
Tragic events now unfolding in Ukraine echo a history of Russian human rights offenses against Jews in that country. Just over a century ago, between 1918 and 1921, tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were murdered, tortured and raped in hundreds of pogroms by marauders, some of them Russian. Historians place the number of people…
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Culture In painting a survivor of the Holocaust, a feeling of overwhelming and indescribable privilege
“Seven Portraits: Surviving the Holocaust,” an exhibition of paintings commissioned by Charles, Prince of Wales was previously shown in Buckingham Palace and soon may be visited at The Palace of Holyroodhouse, the official residence of the British monarch in Scotland, until June 6, 2022. In the catalogue, portraits of Holocaust survivors now living in the…
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Culture Despite 70 years as a monarch, Queen Elizabeth has had precious little time for the Jews
In this Platinum Jubilee year, should we care that the monarch has betrayed little interest in Jewish history or culture?
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Culture A lifelong lover of provocation, she survived Auschwitz and sought to make the Holocaust visible
Charlotte Delbo was a non-Jewish French writer who was active in the anti-Nazi Resistance movement during World War II, which led to her being imprisoned in Auschwitz extermination camp. Her books and plays about surviving that experience, including “Auschwitz and After”; “Convoy to Auschwitz”; and “None of Us Will Return” have won admiring readers. A…
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Culture 100 years later, is this flawed man really ‘the most outstanding Jew in modern literature?’
Frank O'Connor once asserted that James Joyce was 'the greatest Jew of all'
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Culture For more than a century, a Jewish artist from Auschwitz reveled in nature and visual delight
Tova Berlinski, who died Jan. 16 at age 106, proved that where Jewish artists are born is less important than what they create from those origins. Berlinski’s hometown was Oświęcim, which then belonged to the Habsburg Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, and is now part of Poland. She later described the town to interviewers as…
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Culture How a Bronx kid with stage fright reinvented himself as the great sage of Jewish history
The French historian Sylvie Anne Goldberg is author of “Clepsydra: Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism” and “Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague.” Her “Transmitting Jewish History” collects autobiographical conversations with the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Recently, Professor Goldberg discussed with Benjamin Ivry, who translated…
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