Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Why Tobie Nathan Is the Opposite of Freud
Born in Cairo in 1948, the French Jewish author Tobie Nathan and his family were expelled from Egypt in 1957, during the anti-Jewish persecutions of the Nasser regime. Nathan is an ethnopsychiatrist, a specialist in mental illness in different cultures. He has published books on Sigmund Freud and on the Zionist leader Haim Arlosoroff, among…
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Culture Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize Is Tribute to Her Fight Against Anti-Semitic Belarus Tyrant
Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature October 8, is a banned author in her homeland of Belarus, as she explained in a 2013 interview with Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster. Her books are neither published nor discussed in the media there. Due to government persecution, she left Belarus from 2000 to…
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Culture Frank Sinatra’s Love Affair With the Jewish People
“Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World,” by the American Jewish poet and anthologist David Lehman, will appear in time for the centenary of Ol’ Blue Eyes, on December 12. The icon who belted out “Come Fly With Me,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Kind of Town,” and “New York,…
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Art Ben Shahn Was a Propagandist and Proud of It
Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene By Diana L. Linden Wayne State University Press, 184 pages, $44.99 Albert Einstein disembarking in America alongside anonymous impoverished refugees. Prescient views in 1939 of concentration camp prisoners in Nazi Germany. These are just two of the indelible images created on a monumental scale…
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Music Pianist James Rhodes and the Keys to Survival
Born in 1975, the British Jewish musician James Rhodes has experienced a fairly dramatic trajectory, which he described in his recent autobiography, “Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music.” As Rhodes revealed in a blog in the Daily Telegraph: “When I was at school I was sexually abused. Let me clarify: I was serially…
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Culture Why the Blood Libel Won’t Die
In “The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe,” Emily Rose, a historian who has taught at Johns Hopkins, Princeton and Baruch, among other universities, explores long-standing false accusations that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in ritual ceremonies. From the Middle Ages to the present,…
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Film & TV Ingrid Bergman’s Lifelong Love Affair With the Jews
Ingrid Bergman, whose centenary is being celebrated on 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 Oliver Sacks, ‘Old Jewish Atheist’ With a Great Brain and Even Greater Heart
The English Jewish neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, who died on August 30 at age 82, was famed for such studies as “Migraine,”; “Awakenings”; “A Leg to Stand On”; and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales” These imaginative accounts of maladies ranging from sleeping-sickness to nervous tics increasingly…
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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?
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Fast Forward All the Jewish NHL players to watch in the 2024-2025 season
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