Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture When Jews were kings (and opium lords) in Shanghai
Author of “A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe” and “Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America” Jonathan Kaufman teaches at Northeastern University. His new book, “The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China” tells of two Iraqi Jewish…
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Culture ‘Quiz Show’ Whistleblower Herb Stempel was a symbol of Jewish struggles
On May 31, it was announced that Herbert Milton Stempel had died the previous month at age 93. Depicted in Robert Redford’s film 1994 “Quiz Show,” the Bronx-born Stempel won notoriety as a TV game show contestant and whistleblower on the fraudulent nature of the industry, in what became known as the 1950s quiz show…
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Culture For Larry Kramer, AIDS was the second Holocaust
For people of their time, appreciating a biblical prophet of doom such as Jeremiah or the Roman satirist Juvenal depended on whether things were really seen as dire. The 1985 play “The Normal Heart” by Larry Kramer, who died on May 27 at age the age of 84, combines Jeremiah and Juvenal in ways that…
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Culture Jerry Stiller was so much more than a sitcom star
Gerald Isaac Stiller, adored by millions of sitcom fans as Jerry Stiller, who died on May 11 at age 92, proved that actors are human beings who sometimes must make choices between family and artistry. Stiller was born in Brooklyn to a family of modest means. His father was a bus driver and his mother…
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Culture “He really is Jewish” — Little Richard’s lifelong love affair with Judaism
Little Richard, the rock and roll pioneer who died on May 9 at age 87, brought a galvanic charge to live performances of such songs as “Tutti Frutti,” “Heebie Jeebies” and “Lucille,” drawing sustained inspiration from what he considered to be a Jewish identity. This self-definition went beyond what some writers have identified as emotional…
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Culture 50 years later, how should we remember the Kent State massacre?
As the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970 approaches, the question arises, what should the Jewish response be today to what was, in some ways, a Jewish tragedy? Three of the four students fatally shot on May 4, 1970, by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in Kent,…
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Culture The Joan of Arc of Irish sex — and her Jewish acolytes
In mid-April, The Irish Times alerted its readership to an “astonishing hatchet job” of a national icon, the novelist Edna O’Brien. The offending article, a condescending and nit-picking profile, had appeared some months before in The New Yorker, but took some time for its venom to percolate as far as Europe. O’Brien, who will be…
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Culture Ravi Shankar at 100: Jewish mentor, sitar master
April 7 marks the centenary of the Indian Sitar Master Ravi Shankar (1920– 2012), whose interactions with Western musicians, such as the Beatle George Harrison, have been celebrated, although the full extent to which Jewish musicians were part of Shankar’s influential career remains relatively little known. In 1950s middlebrow American Jewish culture, Shankar was already…
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