Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze A Catalan Jew’s Concise Wisdom
“Tell a blind man his house is on fire and he will reply, ‘I wish I could see that!’” “I don’t like having white hair but I like even less when it falls out. Isn’t it sad to worry about the loss of something one dislikes?” “My son, I prefer to see you hunting lions…
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The Schmooze Willie Howard, More Than Just a Sunshine Boy
Although London’s hit revival of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” starring Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths closed on July 28, a possible fall transfer to Broadway has been announced. That’s a good excuse to shine light on a neglected Jewish vaudeville great who inspired Simon’s play. In his 1996 “Rewrites: a Memoir” Simon describes how…
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Culture From Rabbi’s Daughter to World-Shocker
The subject of a new documentary, “Love and Politics,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, actress and director Judith Malina is internationally celebrated for startlingly unconventional theater, such as her 2011 play “Korach: The Biblical Anarchist.” A rabbi’s daughter who turned 86 on June 4, Malina has long been invigorating and scandalizing…
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The Schmooze Their Pen-Pal Adolf
Understanding how a nation can embrace anti-Semitic tyranny is a complex problem. “Letters to Hitler”, out in May from Polity Books, helps explain the matter. Historian Henrik Eberle, co-author of “The Hitler Book,” has selected from thousands of letters written by Germans of all ages from 1925 to 1945 from a collection found in Moscow’s…
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Culture No Straight Path From Dogma to Dissent
Vasily Grossman has received many well-deserved tributes as a dissident writer who dared state what is now the obvious — that when reviewing the wreckage inflicted upon humanity by such dictators as Stalin and Hitler, there are more similarities than differences to be found in their legacies. Paying tribute to this conclusion, and to the…
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Culture Not Your Grandmother’s Grandmothers
The Story of a Life: Memoirs of a Young Jewish Woman in the Russian Empire By Anna Pavlovna Vygodskaia, translated by Eugene Avrutin and Robert Greene Northern Illinois University Press, 202 pages, $22.95 Journal (1918-1920) By Nelly Ptachkina, translated into French by Luba Jurgenson Les Éditions des Syrtes, 267 pages, $29.39 All too often, accounts…
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Culture Death in Petrópolis
Viennese-born Jewish author Stefan Zweig and his second wife, Lotte Altmann, committed suicide together as refugees in Brazil in February 1942, but Zweig’s works, whether fiction, biographies or letters, have never seemed more alive. Seventy years on, the former home in Petrópolis where he died, now known as Casa Stefan Zweig, is scheduled to [open…
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The Schmooze For Yo-Yo Ma, Glick Was Worth Hearing
On June 7, Toronto’s Beth Tikvah Synagogue will host a special concert to honor the tenth Yahrzeit of Canadian composer Srul Irving Glick. Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple already did the same on April 22, five days after his actual passing a decade ago. Son of a cantor, Glick (1934-2002) grew up to be a composer…
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