Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze The ‘Jewish Mother’ of Psychoanalysis
One historian wrote: “If, metaphorically, Sigmund Freud was the father of psychoanalysis, Sándor Ferenczi was the mother.” If so, then every day is Mother’s Day for the analyst born Sándor Fränkel in northeastern Hungary to Polish Jewish parents in 1873 (the family name was later changed to sound more Hungarian). In January, Karnac Books published…
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The Schmooze An Unknown Poet Who Deserves To Be Known
In 1943, a refugee German Jewish poet wrote “A Black Woman on the Harlem Express” which apostrophizes an African-American passenger sitting opposite her on the Manhattan subway: “Do you know that we are secretly sisters?/ You, dark brown daughter of the Congo,/ and I, the pale European Jewish child.” Alluding to a shared identity as…
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Culture Benoit Mandelbrot Influenced Art and Mathematics
Born in Warsaw in 1924 to a Lithuanian Jewish family, Benoit Mandelbrot survived Nazi-occupied France to become one of the most creative thinkers of the 20th century. Mandelbrot, who died of pancreatic cancer in a Cambridge, Mass., hospice in 2010, left behind “The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick”. He coined the term “fractal” in…
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The Schmooze Where Diamonds Are A Londoner’s Best Friend
What 47th street is to New Yorkers, Hatton Garden, a street and area in the district of Holborn, has long been for Londoners a place to buy and sell jewelery. “Diamond Street: The Hidden World of Hatton Garden,” an anecdotally discursive, impressionistic history, was published by Hamish Hamilton. Its author, artist and writer Rachel Lichtenstein,…
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The Schmooze Tales From The Schmatta Trade
Fashion mavens treasure the memory of a 2006 Yeshiva University Museum exhibit, “A Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry, 1860-1960,” which inspired a slim catalogue. Earlier this year, Texas Tech University Press published an augmented new book featuring high drama, as in a chapter by economist Bernard Smith about the growth of the…
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The Schmooze Liz or Dick: Who Was More Jewish?
Who was more Jewish — Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton? This question was the basis for squabbles between the married Hollywood superstars, according to Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger’s “Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century.” Taylor was a celebrated convert to Judaism, but Burton was proud of having a…
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The Schmooze A Guide To November Classical Music
A November of concerts featuring fall colors and Yiddishkeit is available to Manhattan music lovers. On November 3 & 4 at New Brunswick’s State Theatre in New Brunswick and Newark’s NJPAC respectively, explosively expressionistic colors will be conveyed by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and conductor Augustin Dumay in Arnold Schoenberg’s stirring “Transfigured Night.” Also…
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Culture Architect Rafi Segal’s Understated Approach
In the coming days, after contracts have been duly signed, architect Rafi Segal will be formally declared the winner of an international competition to design a new National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, near the Knesset and the Israel Museum. Segal, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1967, is contractually unable to speak in…
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