Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture An American Landscape Architect and His Sabra Designs
In tough economic times, parents may think twice about splashing out on a once-in-a-lifetime spectacular bar mitzvah voyage. But “A Life Spent Changing Places,” a posthumously published memoir by the American Jewish landscape designer Lawrence Halprin, who died in 2009 at age 93, offers justification for wild splurging. When the Bronx-born and Brooklyn-raised Halprin’s 13th…
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Food Is Arnold Wesker, an Angry Young Playwright, Happier At Last?
British playwright Arnold Wesker, who turned 79 on May 24, is enjoying a revival of interest in his writings. “Chicken Soup with Barley,” the first play in his 1950s partly-autobiographical trilogy (the others are “Roots” and “I’m Talking About Jerusalem”) ran from June 2 to July 16 at London’s Royal Court Theatre, where it was…
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The Schmooze Should Arts Venues Honor a Nazi Hostess?
New York’s French Institute Alliance Française boasts a Florence Gould Hall while San Francisco has a Florence Gould Theater, both named after a French society hostess and philanthropist whose largesse, since her death in 1993, has been distributed by The Florence Gould Foundation. These venues were named before three histories of wartime France established that…
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The Schmooze The Madness of Cultural Historian Aby Warburg
The creative legacy of the Hamburg-born Jewish cultural historian Aby Warburg, born Abraham Moritz Warburg to a family of German bankers, still thrives. When London’s Warburg Library was threatened last fall with dispersal, a general outcry was heard to preserve the documentation first gathered by Warburg, who died in 1929, and later augmented by his…
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The Schmooze Is Dan Shechtman Artistic as Dylan or Philip Roth?
So rumored honorees Bob Dylan and Philip Roth were shut out of the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. “Zol zein mit mazel,” as the Yiddish equivalent of “Don’t worry, be happy” goes. The newly-announced crop of recipients by the Nobel Committee includes an indisputably worthy and artistically inspiring awardee in the field of Chemistry,…
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The Schmooze Gertrude Stein, Fascist Love Thief?
The author who wrote “a rose is a rose is a rose” is being honored and vilified in equal parts. She is being honored by “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” out from The University of California Press on June 22 to commemorate an exhibit at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum, which moves and opens on…
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The Schmooze Walter Hautzig and Other Cherished Musical Mentors
There are many kinds of music teachers, but the most memorable seem to be either the beloved saints or the abusive nightmares. On October 2, one of the former, Vienna-born pianist Walter Hautzig, who will be 90 on September 28, will be honored with a concert at New York’s Steinway Hall, as well as with…
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Culture T.S. Eliot’s On-Again, Off-Again Anti-Semitism
Reading T.S. Eliot in high school, we stumbled over his sneering references to Jews. And with the 1989 publication of “T.S. Eliot and Prejudice” (University of California Press) by Christopher Ricks, and 1995’s “T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form” by Anthony Julius (Thames & Hudson), poetry lovers have a clear account of how Eliot, author…
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