Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture How Marvin Miller Led Players Union and Changed Baseball Forever
Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary By Robert F. Burk University of Illinois Press, 352 pages, $35 This stately, well-researched study raises the question of which is more enduring, anti-Semitic hatred or the loathing — even after death — felt by plutocrats forced against their will to treat their workers fairly. Robert F. Burk, an emeritus professor…
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The Schmooze Lesley Gore’s Defiant Jewish Voice Stilled
Lesley Gore, the singer best known for ‘It’s My Party,’ has died after a battle with lung cancer. Benjamin Ivry took a look back in 2010 at her very Jewish career. From her earliest hits, like 1964’s defiant “You Don’t Own Me,” Gore was at once independent, self-assured, and linguistically gifted, as evidenced by her…
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Culture Philip Levine Was Working-Class Poet Inspired by Yiddishkeit
Philip Levine, the Jewish poet who died on February 14 at age 87, was a feisty writer inspired by working class roots and a family tradition of bubbe-meises (grandmother’s fables). In “Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections” (2000) Levine analysed his poem “The Old Testament”: “My twin brother swears that at age thirteen I’d…
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Culture Was Helmut Schmidt ‘Contaminated by Nazi Ideology’
● Helmut Schmidt and the Crap War: the Biography from 1918 to 1945 By Sabine Pamperrien Piper Verlag, 352 pages, $25.36 Born in 1918, Helmut Schmidt, who served as chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, has been enjoying cultural prestige in his old age, in part for having recorded works by Bach and…
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Culture Remembering Chicago Critic and Arts Maven Andrew Patner
Andrew Patner, the Chicago arts maven who died at age 55 on February 3, looked to Jewish elders for inspiration about what culture can signify. His “I. F. Stone: A Portrait” (1988) featured a sustained interview with the radical journalist born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia, ranging from current politics to ancient Greek civilization. Patner was…
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Culture How Franz Schubert Found Himself in Shul
Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs By Graham Johnson Yale University Press, 3,000 pages, $300 A few months before he died in 1828 at the age of 31, Franz Schubert produced a setting of the 92nd Psalm, Tov Lehodot La’Adonai. Yet, as Graham Johnson asks in his massive new compendium about the Austrian composer, “How many…
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Culture Bernice Gordon, Jewish Crossword Maven, Dies at 101
Readers who try to solve a crossword puzzle with the clue “One of the Marxes” (answer: KARL) or “Old Broadway title beau” (answer: ABIE) are enjoying the concise wit of Bernice Biberman Gordon, a constructor of crosswords or cruciverbalist, as puzzle writers like to be called nowadays, who died on January 29 at age 101….
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Culture How Iranian-Jewish Women Started a Writers’ Revolution
The Jews of Iran: The History, Religion and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World Edited by Houman Sarshar I.B. Tauris, 264 pages, $99 Of the 80,000 or so Jews still living in Iran when the 1979 Islamic revolution occurred, the vast majority have fled, leaving a community of about 20,000 to 25,000, according…
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