Public and Academic Programs
Public programs
Centro Primo Levi’s programs explore the diversity of the Italian Jewish experience and take inspiration from Primo Levi’s humanism and his quest to explore the past and understand different aspects of the world we inhabit.
Italian Jewish Studies Seminars
A collaborative initiative of Centro Primo Levi with the NYU departments of Italian, History and Judaic Studies and Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò to develop a context for the study of Italian Jewish history, generally absent from curricula of Italian studies and only marginally featured in Jewish Studies programs.
Primo Levi Forum
Readings, roundtables and presentation periodically connect scholars and practitioners from the many fields of the humanities and sciences that defined Levi’s intellectual horizon. Year after year, contributions from all over the world demonstrate
Memoria
Studies and research on the history of the anti-Jewish persecution in Italy, fascism and the post-war construction of memory. A collaborative effort of the Consulate General of Italy, Centro Primo Levi, the Italian Cultural Institute, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò,
CPL Editions & Printed Matter
These Thoughts of Mine
By Gury Schwarz. Emanuele Artom (Aosta, 1915–Turin, 1944) was an Italian Jewish intellectual. He experienced Italian racial persecution and in 1943 joined the resistance, dying as a result of the atrocious torture he underwent at the...
Upcoming CPL Editions’ books: The Renegade
Finally, historian Ariel Toaff’s first novel, The Renegade, is available in English from CPL Editions. It is a captivating literary debut: a meticulously documented historical mystery page-turner about the scandalous life of a 19th...
The Prescience of Alba De Céspedes’ “Her Side of the Story”
By Margarita Diaz. In 1948, Alba de Céspedes wrote to her friend, the acclaimed writer Natalia Ginzburg, of a specific kind of affliction that could befall the women of their time. They called it a “well,” a “terrible melancholy” that...
On Amelia Rosselli’s Sleep
by Taylor Yoonji Kang. “You are a stranger here” declares the opening poem of Amelia Rosselli’s slim volume Sleep (2023), “and have no place among us.” This address comes between invocations of the “cool sweet fragrance” of...
Lorenza Mazzetti Re-covered
Lucy Scholes, The Paris Review, 2020. In 1956, in a central London café, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti wrote a manifesto for what they termed the “Free Cinema” movement. Among the aims of these...
The Eternal Tendency Toward Fascism
Stanislao Pugliese. Levi was strongly attracted to the radical new ideology of Giustizia e Libertà. GL was the only movement that arose directly in response to Mussolini’s regime. It was a heterogeneous group of intellectuals; both a...
Truth of Dare?
Farah Abdessamad. The new English translation of Impostures from Basra-born Al-Harīrī (aka the Arab poet known as Abū Muhammad al-Qāsim ibn Alī ibn Muhammad ibn Uthmān al-Harīrī)revives the “eloquent rogue” genre of classical Arabic...
The Heretical Origins of the Sonnet
Ed Simon. Kleinhenz writes: “For centuries the sonnet has remained the most popular and the most difficult poetic form in Western literature,” with few canonical poets since the Renaissance completely avoiding them. The endurance of...
Italy and the Jews Beyond the Borders
Michele Sarfatti’s new book I confini di una persecuzione (The Borders of a Persecution-Fascism and the Jews outside of Italy 1939-1943,) examines the treatment reserved by the Italian regime to Italian and foreign Jews in Italian...
Night on Earth
Rodogno paints a broad picture of Western humanitarian organizations’ activities in the Near East after World War One, in particular those from the United-States, Great Britain, France, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. The focus of their...
The Last Muslim of Italy
David Abulafia During Dante’s lifetime, the only Muslim city on the Italian peninsula ceased to exist. Dante does not mention Lucera Saracenorum (a Latin placename meaning “Lucera of the Saracens”) in his writings, despite his...
Bashing Micól
It is never easy to reconcile literary works with their theatrical adaptations. Even more so when the work in question is a delicately complex novel like Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, with its symbolic layers,...
La iente de Zion
La iente de Zion is a Jewish liturgical poem composed for the observance of the fast of the 9th day of the month of Av (Tisha B’Av). It appears in two prayer books of the Roman rite compiled in the 14th and 15th centuries. It was...
My Betrayed Garden
But what most displeased me, personally, was that my characters were used so freely, with so little reference to my work, in a way that would have been inappropriate even if they were marionettes. Although fine folk, the Finzi-Continis...
Formiggini’s Talking Cards
A brilliant publisher, Formiggini started running his business in the first decade of the twentieth century in his hometown of Modena. He then moved to Genoa and finally to Rome in 1916. The wit and refinement of his publications, as...
Piero Dello Strologo (1936-2022)
I met Piero Dello Strologo many years ago in Genova. He was younger than I am today and became the initial inspiration for what, years later, would be established as Centro Primo Levi in New York. I arrived at his office in...
Interview with Peter Cole
Going elsewhere might just show you who you are and what you might become. That physically, psychologically, imaginatively, you have to work your way into each of the “languages” involved in any broadly translational situation. And...
Under Gentile Eyes
As the reader will no doubt recognize, Under Gentile Eyes, the title chosen for this inquiry into some of the sundry ways in which Jews and Judaism have been represented in Christian Europe throughout the centuries, is quite blatantly...
Jewish Citizens
The National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah opened its third exhibition entitled Beyond the Ghetto. Inside Out curated by Andreina Contessa, Simonetta Della Seta, Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, and Sharon Reichel. Image:...
The Time of Love
Italian Jews Between Segregation and Emancipation (1849-1871). The Jewish Museum of Rome opens a magnificent exhibition dedicated to the period that goes from the second Roman Republic to the annexation of Rome to unified Italy:...
Research & Learning
Primo Levi
Primo Levi’s life and work through archives and research institutions, a short film and an anthology of essays....
The Shoah in Italy
A brief guide to the study of the persecution of the Jews in Italy based on material provided by the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan....
Americordo
Documenting the lives of Italian Jewish exiles in America, their struggles and achievements, through research, oral history and family albums....
Italian Jewish Press
Guided portal to the Italian Jewish press of 19th and 20th centuries. Created in collaboration with the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Coming Soon...
From & For the Press
Art After War: Paola and Lorenza Mazzetti
Magazzino.Art A program spotlighting the resilient legacy of the Mazzetti sisters, for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day....
La Voce Di New York: I film di Lorenza Mazzetti a Casa Italiana
By Maria Galeotti Sublimò il massacro della famiglia nel cinema e nella narrativa...
The New York Times: An Artist Shattering Boundaries in Pursuit of Freedom
By Jane L. Levere Corrado Cagli, an artist of the 1920s through the 1970s, is still defying categories like “Italian artist” or “gay artist,” as a show at the Center for Italian Modern Art reveals....
Actor Ronald Guttman Brings Hebrew Poet Immanuel of Rome to Life at Book Launch
By Gianna Pontecorboli “Mine Is the Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets of Immanuel of Rome” was presented by the Primo Levi Center of NY at NYPL...
Literary Works of Medieval Italian Jewish Poet Immanuel of Rome at the Dorot Jewish Division
By Lyudmila Sholokhova, Curator, Dorot Jewish Division...
USA: Amb. Zappia, a Stella Levi onoreficenze Cavaliere di Gran Croce
Giornale Diplomatico...
A New York Stella Levi diventa Cavaliere di Gran Croce della Repubblica Italiana
La Voce di New York A consegnarle l’onorificenza l’Ambasciatrice Italiana a Washington Mariangela Zappia...
Turning Lead To Air: Music for Cello From Primo Levi, The Brooklyn Rail
By Alessandro Cassin, our Director of Publishing at CPL Editions...
Interview with Valentina Pisanty in HISTORICAL EXPERTISE
Valentina Pisanty: “The more Memory Culture grew and the more institutionalized it became, the more the deniers gained visibility”...
Editors’ picks from our partners and elsewhere
The Primo Levi Archive in Turin
The International Primo Levi Studies Center offers scholars and students access to Primo Levi’s work and to research on different aspects of his writing. The archive collects the editions of his works, translations, critical...
CDEC Digital Library
CDEC Digital Library a web portal dedicated to the history, culture and traditions of the Jews in Italy from the emancipation era the present as well as to the largest collection, library and research body on the history of the...
Archivio Ebraico Terracini
The Archive of the Jewish traditions and customs Benvenuto and Alessandro Terracini collects and preserves objects, documents and books from the Jewish tradition of Piemonte. Established almost forty years ago in Turin by a bequest of...
Jewish Museum of Rome
Discover the Jewish Museum of Rome’s mappoth collection. Traditionally used to cover the sacred text between readings of different portions, these beautifully embroidered textiles are testimony to centuries of Jewish life in Rome. ...
Fondazione Fossoli
The Fossoli Foundation is dedicated to the preservation of the history of the concentration camp of Fossoli (Carpi, Modena) in its various phases (POW camp, national concentration/transit camp for Jews, DP camp and orphanage). The...
Franco Antonicelli Archive
Writer, public intellectual and publisher Franco Antonicelli was among the early opposers of Fascism, an activist of Giustizia e Libertà and later in the Comitato di Liberazione. He was responsible fo the first publication of Primo...
