Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Those Scandalous Mendelssohn Siblings
1920s Berlin was a wild place, and two of its wildest celebrities were descendants of the German Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn. The biography, “‘Is There Anything More Beautiful Than Desire?’: The Siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn,” is a diverting look at two arts madcaps. Its author, Thomas Blubacher, explains how Eleonora, an actress, dissipated…
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The Schmooze The Literature Professor Who Was Duped by An Anti-Semite
Born in the Bronx to a Jewish family, Milton Hindus (1916-1998) became professor of literature at Brandeis University. Although Hindus published on subjects from poet Charles Reznikoff to the Lower East Side, he is mostly remembered for more sinister fare. In the 1930s, Hindus became a fan of the ferociously anti-Semitic French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s…
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The Schmooze Martin Luther: Hater of The Jews
The Austrian Jewish psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), author of “Man’s Search for Meaning”, an inspiring account of his concentration camp experiences, enlightened many generations of students. None more so than a budding Austrian theologian Eric Gritsch, who in 1950 was mentored by Frankl, as the former described in a 2009 memoir. Now…
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The Schmooze Hans Bethe: Great Scientist and Mensch
Must a great scientist also be a mensch? The historian of science, Silvan Schweber, who teaches at Harvard and Brandeis, has offered some ideal examples in such previous books as “Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius” from Harvard University Press and “In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of…
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Culture Marvin Hamlisch Was Top of the Pops
When the much-honored screen and stage composer Marvin Hamlisch died suddenly and unexpectedly on August 6, he was serving or had served as principal pops conductor for orchestras in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Dallas, Pasadena, Seattle and San Diego. The Philadelphia Orchestra was also considering Hamlisch for similar duties, having recently fired its longtime Philly Pops founding…
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The Schmooze Yiddishkeit on the Pampas
Although long considered a target for comedy, the concept of a Jewish cowboy has been taken more seriously after translations of “The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas,”, a 1910 story collection by the Argentine Jewish author Alberto Gerchunoff (1883-1950), became available. Gerchunoff’s Russian family moved to a settlement in Argentina, founded by philanthropist Baron Maurice…
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Culture Gore Vidal and the Jew He Loved
Even before the novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright Gore Vidal, who died on July 31, is buried in Washington, D.C’s Rock Creek Cemetery alongside his life companion Howard Austen, bloggers have hastily called Vidal an anti-Semite. The reality is more complex. Vidal will be remembered not for his political views, but his historical novels such…
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The Schmooze Salmon Maimon: 18th Century Thinker
In George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” the eponymous hero purchases “that wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon.” The British author Israel Zangwill concurred, paraphrasing passages from Maimon’s life story in chapters of his 1898 “Dreamers of the Ghetto.” Maimon’s 1793 classic also impressed Franz Kafka, who described it in one…
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