Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Leah Garrett on the Greatest Generation of American Novelists
Leah Garrett, author of “Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel,” is great-great-granddaughter of Baruch Charney Vladeck, long-time manager of the Yiddish “Forverts.” She is professor of contemporary Jewish life and culture at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. An expert on Yiddish travel writing and the effect of Richard Wagner’s music on…
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Culture Dr. Strangelove’s Jewish Set Designer Dies at 95
Ken Adam, the German Jewish motion picture production designer who won immortality for conceiving the sets for James Bond films in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as well as the Pentagon War Room in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), proved that fantasy can heal historical wounds. Born Klaus Hugo Adam, he died on March 10 at age…
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Culture How Martin Buber Lost Friends and Irritated People by Being a Happy Jew
Fifty years after his death in Jerusalem in 1965, Martin Buber, the Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher has “left an ambiguous impression,” as Walter Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem in 1936 about Buber’s appearance at a French philosophical gathering. Buber’s “I and Thou” about human relationships to people and things, is famously cited in Martin Luther…
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Culture Jews of the Caribbean
A relatively small number of Jews have lived in the Caribbean since the time of the Spanish Expulsion in 1492. As refugees from fascist Europe in the 1930s and ’40s, they formed what has been called a Calypso shtetl. A new study from Columbia University Press, “Calypso Jews,” investigates how contemporary Caribbean authors have been…
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Culture Bernard Werber Sees a Sci-Fi Future — and It’s All About Ants
In a series of best-selling novels about ants, miniature human beings and other creatures, the French Jewish author Bernard Werber has won millions of readers worldwide with what he calls philosophy-fiction. Blending science fiction, whodunits, spirituality, biology and mythology, his latest work, “The Sixth Sleep,” was published. Recently, the Forward’s Benjamin Ivry spoke with Werber…
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Culture Why We Should Applaud New York Philharmonic’s Next Director
On January 27, after the New York Philharmonic named Jaap van Zweden as its next music director starting in 2018, an outcry from local journalists and international bloggers decried the decision. One blogger confidently proclaimed: “New York Philharmonic appoints the wrong music director.” These premature judgments based on insufficient evidence ignore the fact that in…
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Film & TV Remembering Abe Vigoda, Big-Screen Gangster, TV Detective and Real-Life Mensch
The joyous, life-enhancing aspect of Abe Vigoda, the performer of Russian Jewish origin who died at age 94 on January 26, was reminding us that good acting creates an image different from reality. Beloved for such roles as the moribund, hunched-over Detective Fish in the TV sitcom “Barney Miller” and pranked by “People Magazine” which…
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Culture Rediscovering the Author Who Was Dismissed as a Stalinist Harpy
The French author Elsa Triolet (1896–1970), born Elsa Kagan to a Russian Jewish family, has been decried by some critics as a Stalinist harpy. This year, “Le Figaro Magazine” faulted Triolet’s “steely egotism and and equally unerring political blindness.” Triolet and her husband the poet Louis Aragon were devotees — sometimes partially critical ones —…
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish ווי האָבן ייִדן געהיט די ייִדיש־קולטור אױף יענער זײַט „אײַזערנעם פֿאָרהאַנג“?How did Jews maintain their Yiddish culture behind the Iron Curtain?
ייִדישע ליטעראַטן, װאָס האָבן געטרײַ געדינט די קאָמוניסטישע רעזשימען, האָבן גענוצט זײערע פּריװילעגיעס כּדי אָפּצוהיטן ייִדיש.
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Fast Forward All the Jewish NHL players to watch in the 2024-2025 season
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Opinion A two-state solution may seem like a distant dream. Here’s why it shouldn’t be
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Opinion I’m a Holocaust survivor. Here’s why I celebrated my 80th birthday protesting at an Israeli prison
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