Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture A Jew Joins the Académie Française
In April, after the deaths in recent years of such venerable French Jewish members as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and biologist François Jacob, the Académie française increased its quotient of Yiddishkeit. That day, the author Alain Finkielkraut, born in Paris in 1949 to a family of Polish Jewish origin, was elected to join the group of…
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Culture Louis Armstrong’s Secret Lessons From Judaism
Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism By Thomas Brothers W. W. Norton & Company, 608 pages, $39.95 A massive, and massively detailed new biography, reminds music mavens that jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong assimilated lessons from Judaism and expressed them through music and writing during his long career. “Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism” by Thomas Brothers is…
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News Is Handel’s ‘Messiah’ an Anti-Semitic Screed?
I recall walking through the lobby of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel around 1978, when TVs were blasting the Israeli broadcast premiere of Handel’s “Messiah.” Sung in Hebrew and played by the Israel Philharmonic, this “Messiah” supposedly deleted every mention of Jesus. With or without Jesus, music-loving Jews tend to enjoy “Messiah,” which makes Michael Marissen’s…
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Culture A Century of Anti-Semitism on the American College Campus
Antisemitism on the Campus: Past & Present Edited by Eunice G. Pollack Academic Studies Press, 470 pages, $65 In 2012, the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise published “Israel and the Campus,” a study noting 674 anti-Israel events at 108 United States and Canadian universities during the 2011-12 academic year. It remains undetermined how many of these events…
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Culture How Darren Aronofsky and ‘Noah’ Got The Ark Wrong
● The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood By Irving Finkel Doubleday, 432 pages, $30 Darren Aronofsky’s $130 million Hollywood epic “Noah” starring Russell Crowe has displeased Christian fundamentalists with its non-literal approach to the Old Testament story. Jewish moviegoers might also find it irksome that Aronofsky and his team of designers…
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Culture Remembering Art Raymond, Who Provided Yiddishkeit in a Black Sombrero
Art Raymond, who died on February 21 at age 91 in Boynton Beach, Florida, exemplifies the fluidly shifting indentities of past generations of American Jewish performers. An esteemed radio host and nightclub emcee, Raymond (born Rosen in 1922 in Brownsville, Brooklyn) made his name as a specialist in both Jewish and Latin music. When he…
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Culture The Mystery of Raoul Wallenberg
The Hero of Budapest: The Triumph and Tragedy of Raoul Wallenberg By Bergt Jangfeldt Translated by Harry Watson I.B. Tauris, 352 pages, $35 Next year will mark the 70th anniversary of the disappearance in a Soviet prison of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews in the darkest days of the…
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Culture Were They Heroes or Were They Collaborators?
The 1940, Nazi invasion of France turned that country’s musical scene into a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. “Music in Paris During the Occupation,”) a book recently released in France, allows readers to draw conclusions about how music world celebrities behaved in difficult times. Edited by Myriam Chimènes and Yannick Simon,…
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Culture Barbra Streisand recorded here — and so did Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, John Lennon and, uh, The Village People
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Fast Forward Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to helm EPA, says he received bomb threat with ‘pro-Palestinian themed message’
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Opinion We can be thankful this year — and Jewish wisdom can help
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