Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Remembering Lillian Vernon, the Jewish Queen of Catalogues
The song “Sugar Daddy” from John Cameron Mitchell’s musical “Hedwig & The Angry Inch” extols the thrills of sponsored shopping: “a Waterpik, a Cuisinart/ and a hypo-allergenic dog./ I want all the luxuries of the modern age,/ and every item on every page/ in the Lillian Vernon catalogue.” Like Hedwig, much of America kvelled from…
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Culture Pierre Birnbaum on the ‘Israel-ization’ of French Jews
The French Jewish political sociologist and historian Pierre Birnbaum, born in 1940, is an emeritus professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. His books include ; “Jewish Destinies”; and “The Idea of France” and “Two Houses: Essay on the Citizenship of Jews (in France and the USA)” His most recent work, “The Confusions of a Government Jester,” applies…
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Culture A Journey From Auschwitz to Rwanda
Born in 1949, the French author Jean Hatzfeld has focused with sustained attention on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, during which some half a million to a million Rwandans were killed between April and July. The victims belonged to the Tutsi population division, as well as some moderate members of the Hutu majority. Hatzfeld has assembled…
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Culture Revisiting the Work of Yehuda Amichai, Israel’s Unofficial Poet Laureate
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai Edited by Robert Alter Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 576 pages, $35 Among readers of the hugely popular Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (born Ludwig Pfeuffer, in Würzburg, Germany), perhaps the most acutely perceptive was the American poet Anthony Hecht. Reacting to Amichai’s “Open Closed Open”, included in the present collection, Hecht…
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Culture When Will Anne Frank Enter the Public Domain?
The Anne Frank Fonds was established in Basel, Switzerland, in 1963 by Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, as a charitable foundation. On October 6, the AFF informed Livres Hebdo, a French book trade publication, that the copyright on the “Diary of Anne Frank” would not expire in 2016, as had been expected to…
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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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