Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze The Arty Semite Guide to Fall’s Classical Music Lineup
One poet called autumn the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” but some New York concerts redolent with Yiddishkeit focus on the pleasant shock of the new, not misty mellowness. On September 16 at The Austrian Cultural Forum, a new arrangement of the Adagio movement from Mahler’s unfinished Tenth symphony will be conducted in two…
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The Schmooze Robert Badinter and Symbols of the Victory of Justice
French government officials are rarely known for their sense of poetic justice, but the French Jewish statesman Robert Badinter, born in 1928, is an exception to the rule. Former Minister of Justice in François Mitterrand’s government, Badinter published a Mitterrand-related memoir with Les éditions Fayard in March, with the wry title “Thorns and Roses” (Les…
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Culture Notorious Anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the Jews Who Read Him
Fifty years after his death on July 1, 1961, French modernist author and ferocious anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline is still causing controversy. Last January, an attempt by France’s Ministry of Culture to “celebrate” Céline on this anniversary ran aground after noted Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld pointed out that Céline was not merely the author of such…
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The Schmooze Recreating Eden, The Brazilian Landscapes of Burle Marx
Fans of landscape architecture will have enjoyed the four month stay of an exhibit which opened in March at Paris’s Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (Center for Architecture and Patrimony), honoring Roberto Burle Marx. Son of a German Jewish émigré to Brazil, Burle Marx lavished his fertile imagination on applying modernist abstract art approaches…
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The Schmooze Star-Gazing, Optimism and Courage From Italy’s Jewish Partisans
Isacco Levi, who turned 87 in July, a distant relative of Primo Levi who fought as a wartime anti-Nazi partisan, is the sole survivor of a family of thirteen from Saluzzo in northwest Italy; the rest were murdered in Auschwitz. In 2005, a Berlin war claims conference bizarrely denied Levi any compensation for this loss…
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The Schmooze Perfectly Pitched Music From a Hungarian Fable
On September 21 at a church in Hannover, the Hungarian Jewish conductor and organist Andor Izsák will lead a concert of liturgical music under the auspices of The European Centre for Jewish Music (EZJM) which he founded in 1988 and still directs. A special zest should infuse the event, as a new biography, “Andor the…
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Culture Novelist Patrick Modiano Peers Into Moral Ambiguity
Few European writers today have been more consistently haunted by modern Jewish history than French novelist Patrick Modiano. The selection of works by Modiano available in English represent only a small fraction of his prolific fictional output. All his books, including “Dora Bruder,” (University of California Press, 1999), the brooding account of his search for…
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The Schmooze Jewish Novels From the Finnish Saul Bellow
The modern history of Finland’s Jews, who during World War II fought on the Nazi side to combat the Russians, is genuinely surreal. It seems appropriate that the leading novelist of Finland’s tiny Jewish population — today estimated at around 1,500 people — should be equally expressive of a surrealist sensibility. Daniel Katz, born in…
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