Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Ezra Mendelsohn Expressed Hope in Humanity’s Potential
The historian Ezra Mendelsohn, who has died of cancer at the age of 74, infused esthetics into the study of Jewish history to an unusual degree. As Rachel & Michael Edelman professor emeritus of European Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, he produced compelling books in which modern Jewish history is informed by…
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Breaking News Remembering Historian and Freud Biographer Peter Gay
The intellectual historian and trained lay analyst Peter Gay, who died on May 12 at age 91, won renown as an admiring, if not uncritical, biographer of Sigmund Freud, to whom he devoted several thought-provoking books analyzing how Freud’s status as an atheist German Jew may have led to his achievement. Gay’s persuasive arguments were…
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Culture Remembering More Than a Century of M.H. Abrams
Many people forget their English professors as soon as the last exam has been passed, but Meyer Howard Abrams, who died on April 21st at the age of 102, was an exception to this and other general rules. Abrams, who signed his books M. H. and was known to friends and colleagues at Cornell as…
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Culture ‘The King’ and Us
“It is a puzzlement,” as Yul Brynner used to crow onstage, how Rodgers and Hammerstein, two American Jewish musical theater titans who promoted ethnic and racial tolerance, created such an insensitive spectacle as 1951’s “The King and I.” Now in its umpteenth Broadway revival, the musical comedy purports to show the historical figure of King…
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Culture Was Our Greatest Composer-Critic an Unrepentant Anti-Semite?
Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles 1940-1954 By Virgil Thomson Library of America, 1,200 pages, $45 Kansas City, Missouri-born composer Virgil Thomson is called “America’s greatest composer-critic” in this collection, which addresses the issue of Thomson’s relationship with rival Jewish composers. Brought up in a Southern Baptist family in Missouri, Thomson produced some admirable works such as…
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Culture Alice in Anti-Semitic Land
● Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle By Edward Wakeling I. B. Tauris, 480 pages, $49 Most biographies of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the English logician and Anglican deacon who signed “Alice in Wonderland” with the pen name Lewis Carroll, misunderstood their subject entirely. In his new book, Edward Wakeling persuasively argues that Carroll was…
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Culture The Joy of Gene Saks
Gene Saks, who died on March 28 at age 93, has understandably been chiefly identified for having helmed such Neil Simon hits as “Brighton Beach Memoirs,”; “Prisoner of Second Avenue”; “Last of the Red Hot Lovers”; and the screen versions of “The Odd Couple” and “Barefoot in the Park,”, among others. Yet Saks was more…
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Culture Jerusalem Cinematheque and Film Festival Founder Lia Van Leer Dies at 90
Lia van Leer, who died on March 13 at age 90, was a mighty pioneer who ensured that future generations in Israel will appreciate film as an art form. Founder of the Haifa Cinematheque, the Jerusalem Cinematheque, the Israel Film Archive and the Jerusalem Film Festival, she was born Lia Greenberg in the Russian-speaking Bessarabian…
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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Fast Forward Was the viral Ta-Nehisi Coates interview a hit piece or fair play? A journalism ethics expert weighs in.
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Culture How my odious cousin Roy Cohn was responsible for creating Donald Trump — and me
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Opinion This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
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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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