Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Remembering Charlotte Delbo on the 100th Anniversary of Her Birth
August 10 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the non-Jewish French writer Charlotte Delbo, who was deported to Auschwitz and survived to bear witness. Delbo’s prose and verse writings were reprinted by Yale University Press under the title “Auschwitz and After,” while her plays — including some never previously printed — were recently…
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News Journalist Henri Alleg, Warned of Torture Dangers, Dies at 91
After 9/11, when the legitimacy of waterboarding and other torture methods during interrogations became a topic of fierce media debate, the French Jewish journalist Henri Alleg, who died July 17 at age 91, seemed uncannily prescient. Alleg, a newspaper editor in Algeria in the 1950s, was imprisoned and tortured by French authorities for supporting Algerian…
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Culture How Dogs Went From Feared Enemy to Jew’s Best Friend
‘If you are already a dog, at least do not be a pig.” “A cantor in his old age barks like a dog and eats like a pig.” “A wife is like a dog in the house.” These and other Yiddish proverbs may be seen as objectionable today, but all reflect the complex and contradictory…
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News Mikhl Herzog, Columbia Professor and Yiddishist, Dies at 85
Marvin (Mikhl) Herzog, who passed away on June 28 at age 85, exemplified the lexicographer’s belief that by genial attention to minutiae, a life’s work can be constructed. Toronto-born Herzog was a longtime professor of Yiddish at Columbia University as well as director and editor-in-chief of the Yiddish Atlas Project which co-published with YIVO the…
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Culture Jewish Artist Who Once Called Chagall’s Art ‘Crappy’ Finally Gets His Due
The French Jewish painter Sam Szafran is the subject of an exhibit, “Sam Szafran, 50 Years of Painting,” at the Pierre Gianadda Foundation in Martigny, Switzerland, and a new book, [“Sam Szafran: Entretiens avec Alain Veinstein” (“Sam Szafran, Conversations With Alain Veinstein”)][3], that sheds further light on the artist’s inspirations. Born Samuel Berger in Paris…
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Culture Edgar Feuchtwanger Recalls Living Across The Street From Adolf Hitler
When we call someone a “nightmare neighbor from hell,” we usually mean that phrase hyperbolically, but some of those who lived in the vicinity of Adolf Hitler decades ago in Germany and Austria found the term remarkably apt. The French publisher Les éditions Michel Lafon has published the German Jewish historian Edgar Feuchtwanger’s “Hitler My…
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News Geza Vermes, Hungarian Bible Scholar Who Returned to Jewish Roots, Dies at 88
The renowned Hungarian Jewish biblical scholar Geza Vermes, who died of cancer May 8 at age 88, disproved the old canard “You can’t go home again,” at least when it comes to Judaism. Born in the town of Makó in southeastern Hungary in 1924, Vermes was 7 when his family converted to Catholicism in what…
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News Joyce Brothers, Brought Jewish Sensibility to Suburbia Through TV, Dies at 85
The Jewish psychologist Joyce Brothers, who died May 13 of respiratory failure at age 85, was a peacemaker in the emotionally fraught field of pop media therapeutic counseling. Born in Brooklyn as Joyce Bauer to a married couple of attorneys, Brothers became a primary authority on how to live in the mid-century suburban age. Although…
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