Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze The Love Song of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
The American historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who died at age 77 in 2009 was author of “Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory”; “Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable”; and “Haggadah and History,” among other key texts. Yerushalmi was particularly appreciated in France, where Sylvie Anne Goldberg of l’École des Hautes Études organized a 2011 colloquium…
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The Schmooze Author Ascending A Staircase
In 1940-1941, as part of the American journalist Varian Fry’s rescue of anti-Nazi European intellectuals, artist Marcel Duchamp fled to New York, with a brief stopover in Morocco. This visit is the focus of a new novel by Serge Bramly, a Frenchman of Tunisian Jewish origin. The title of “Orchidée fixe” cites a virtually untranslatable…
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The Schmooze Remembering Freudians and Cannibals
The Cairo-born French Jewish ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan previously published a novel, “Who Killed Arlozoroff?” about the 1933 murder of left-wing Israeli political leader Haim Arlosoroff, as well as a book-length essay last year criticizing Sigmund Freud’s 1899 “Interpretation of Dreams.” Now the ever-iconoclastic Nathan, born in 1948, has written his memoirs “Ethno-Novel,” to explain how…
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Culture Turn-of-Century Vienna Artists Deserve Second Look
When writing of great Viennese artists, influential historians such as Carl Schorske in his landmark “Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture” do not even mention sculptor Teresa Ries (1874-1956), Impressionist landscape painter Tina Blau (1845-1916), and figurative artist Bronica Koller (1863-1934). But posterity can play strange tricks. And now, in “The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women…
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The Schmooze Sygmunt Stein: A Spaniard in the Works
Sygmunt Stein, a humble Paris button-maker of Polish-Jewish origin, left a compelling account of his volunteer service fighting Fascism during the Spanish Civil War. Stein (1899-1968) first published his recollections in 1950s articles in the Yiddish “Forverts,” as prepared for publication by the paper’s then-Paris correspondent, Avrom (Abraham) Shulman, better known by the pen name…
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The Schmooze Alma Gluck: A Jew in Blackface
Paradoxically, the first recording by a classical artist to sell over one million copies was “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” the minstrel version of a folksong cut in 1916 by a Romanian Jewish soprano who knew bupkis about Old Virginny. As we learn from a cogent chapter in “The Arts of the Prima Donna…
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The Schmooze Dreaming of Arthur Schnitzler
The Viennese Jewish doctor Arthur Schnitzler, whose 150th birthday was on May 15, 2012 wrote dozens of plays, including “Professor Bernhardi,” about a Jewish doctor, and “Round Dance,” adapted by the German Jewish director Max Ophüls into the 1950 film classic “La Ronde.” Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” inspired the 1999 Stanley Kubrick film “Eyes Wide Shut”…
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The Schmooze A French Jewish Statesman
In the 140th anniversary year of his birth on April 9, 1872, the French Jewish statesman Léon Blum is more timely than ever. In April, during France’s latest presidential election, Les éditions Albin Michel reprinted a short exhortatory text, “In Order to be a Socialist,” which Blum wrote in 1919 when he was 42. It…
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