The Jewish War and Rome’s Urban Renewal
This essay is published in connection with the Rome Lab and the exhibition The Arch of Titus: From Jerusalem to Rome and Back presented at the Center for Jewish History…
Essays
Surviving the Ghetto
Serena di Nepi, Sopravvivere al ghetto. Per una storia sociale della comunità ebraica nella Roma del Cinquecento, Viella, Roma, 2013 Serena di Nepi’s new book presents a vast, all…
The Music of the Jews of Rome
The history of Jewish music in Italy is long, fascinating, and filled with contradictions. Its length is due to the very history of Italian Jewry, whose origins go back more…
History and Art as Means of Universal Dialogue
Among the always impressive roster of exhibitions on display in Rome, La Menorà: Culto, Storia e Mito (The Menorah: worship, history, and myth), stands out for its far-reaching symbolic, cultural…
Venice and its Minorities
Before dealing with specific minorities in Venice, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by a minority. As a broad working definition for this essay, I would suggest…
Devising Resistance
Donald J. Trump’s election, inauguration, first appointments, and presidential decrees, have caused extreme disquiet to those who foresee the country drifting toward authoritarianism and a systematic undermining of the democratic…
Yesterday and Today
The way our societies confront the plight of the millions of refugees from various areas of the world escaping famine, ethnic, religious and political persecution, hopelessness and war, will be…
Paper Lives
“My humble request to Your Excellency”. Brief accounts of life and death in Italy. Based on archival documentation on “foreign Jews” interned by the Fascist Regime. In 1938 the Racial…
A Chronicle of Jewish Life Under Fascism
A compelling new approach to the chronicle of Jewish life in Italy under Fascism From the very first pages of John Tedeschi’s Italian Jews Under Fascism 1938-1945, A Personal and…
Arnaldo Momigliano
On July 22, 1955, the Times Literary Supplement welcomed the appearance of a new scholarly book with an enthusiasm rarely matched in its gray, closely printed pages. Pride of place,…