Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture On Her 100th Birthday, Doris Lessing And The Jews
Doris Lessing, who died on November 17, 2013 at age 94, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature for her prolific writings ranging from autobiography to what she called “space fiction.” Sometimes overlooked was the lasting inspiration which Lessing, born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in Persia, drew from Jews and Jewish heritage. In 1925,…
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Culture Remembering Harold Bloom — Lover Of Literature, Defender Of The Western Canon
Harold Bloom, the American Jewish literary critic, has died at the age of 89. During his extremely prolific career, his audience was split between adulation and obloquy. His landmark books speak for themselves, including “The Anxiety of Influence” (1973),, “A Map of Misreading” (1975), “Agon (1982), “Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the…
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Culture Ingrid Bergman’s Lifelong Love Affair With the Jews
Ingrid Bergman, who would have turned 104 today, August 29, is cherished by film fans, especially for playing two foes of the Nazis: Ilsa Lund in “Casablanca” and Alicia Huberman in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious.” Her late-career incarnation as Golda Meir in the 1982 TV film “A Woman Called Golda” surprised some viewers. Yet her own…
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Culture Remembering Sasson Somekh, Who Insisted On Arab Literature’s Place In Israel
Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on September 22, 2012. It was republished on August 19, 2019 after Sasson Somekh’s death at age 86. Translations have the potential to communicate one culture to another, strengthening humanistic ties. Translators can be peacemakers, self-abnegatingly finding compromises in the perilous confrontation of languages. No one exemplified this…
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Culture He Costumed The Great Jewish Films Of The 20th Century — Including Some That Were Never Made
The Oscar-winning Italian costume designer Piero Tosi, who died on August 10 at age 92, proved that even the most storied showbiz careers can include unrealized projects that provide a tantalizing glimpse at lost opportunities. The Florence-born Tosi, once described by the essayist Alberto Arbasino as “modest to a pathological level,” had much to be…
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Culture Happy 80th Birthday To “The Wizard Of Oz”
“The Wizard of Oz”, which debuted in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, on August 12, 1939, remains one of the most influential musical films ever made in Hollywood, in part because of its Jewish inspiration. The film’s wide audience has always included Jewish spectators. The historian Adele Reinhartz has recalled the “religious” devotion with which her Canadian Jewish…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History Of The Village People
The French music entrepreneur Henri Belolo, of Moroccan Jewish origin, died on August 3 at age 82, reminding us how a melting pot of cultures in the Old and New Worlds has inspired émigré Jews through the generations. Belolo is best remembered for forming the American group Village People in the twilight of the disco…
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Culture The Secret Jewish History Of Roller Derby
Who would have thought that the roller derby, a roughhouse spectacle where skaters elbow and knee each other relentlessly, was really a Peaceable Kingdom of friendly violence and Yiddishkeit? The death in early July at age 87 of the American Jewish entrepreneur Jerry Seltzer, owner and manager of the last touring professional roller derby league,…
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