Alessandro Cassin (Centro Primo Levi) in conversation with Hans von Trotha (author)  and  David Kertzer (Pulitzer Prize winner for The Pope and Mussolini). REGISTER HERE A fascinating novel illuminates the chasm between civilization and barbarism by spotlighting a little-known figure devoted to knowledge and the power of artistic creation: Ludwig Pollak. Born in Prague in 1868, Pollak was an archeologist, collector, antiquarian who lived in Rome for almost 50 years. A profound connoisse...

NYU, Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò with the Calandra Institute at CUNY present: A conversation: Stefano Albertini (Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, NYU), Anthony Tamburri (Calandra Institute, CUNY), Alessandro Cassin (Centro Primo Levi), Michael Korie (Librettist, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis opera. To be confirmed). RESERVE HERE “I am Micol.”  Giorgio Bassani, The New York Times, 1972 Giorgio Bassani's novel The Garden of the Finzi-Contini was first published in English in 1965 enti...

On the occasion of  Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) presents: Robert S.C. Gordon (Cambridge University, UK) and Raffaele Bedarida (Cooper Union, New York), will discuss their recent research on the memorialization of the Holocaust in the context of Italian public monuments and memorials. Prof. Gordon will examine the tensions and creativity that underpinned the creation of the Museo Monumento del Deportato in Carpi and the Memoriale italiano di Auschwitz...

On January 27th, between 9:00 am and 2:00 pm, the Consulate General will host the ceremony of the reading of the names of the Jews deported from Italy and the Italian territories. The event is held in observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day or Giorno della Memoria. The public is invited to take part in the reading compatibly with the safety measures imposed by the Covid epidemic. The event will take place outdoor in front of the Italian Consulate (690 Park Avenue between 69th...

Aldo Braibanti and Sylvano Bussotti, a collaboration. An event of the Carnegie Hall Festival "Voices of Hope" -  www.carnegiehall.org/voicesofhope Premiere screening of "The Scandal of the Imagination," a film by Alessandro Cassin produced by Awen Films. Followed by Q&A with Alessandro Cassin. Featuring Luciano Chessa in Sylvano Bussotti’s Julio Organum Julii. One of Primo Levi’s concerns was the permanence of conditions that enable oppression in democratic societies. Such permanenc...

Presentation of Serena Di Nepi's new book: Surviving the Ghetto (Brill, 2021) Serena Di Nepi (University of Rome) in conversation with Emily Michelson (University of St. Andrews). Introduced and moderated by David Malkiel (Bar-Ilan University). With this English edition of Surviving the Ghetto, Serena Di Nepi traces the troubled and compelling history of the birth of the ghetto in sixteenth-century Rome. From the arrival of the Sephardim to the Italian wars, and the incredible story of an ...

Presentation of Clémence Boulouque's new book Another Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2021) Clémence Boulouque (Columbia University) inc conversation with Jessica M. Marglin (University of Southern California). Another Modernity is a rich study of the life and thought of Elia Benamozegh, a nineteenth-century rabbi and philosopher whose work profoundly influenced Christian-Jewish dialogue in twentieth-century Europe. Benamozegh, a Livornese rabbi of Moroccan descent, was a prolific wr...

Presentation of the book by Valentina Pisanty (University of Bergamo), The Guardians of Memory, published by CPL Editions 2021. Participants: Valentina Pisanty (University of Bergamo), Michael Rothberg (UCLA), Omer Bartov (Brown University), Manuela Consonni (The Hebrew University) In collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and The Vidal Sasson International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. From Michael Rothberg's preface to the book: ...

January 27, 2021 will mark twenty years since the first commemoration of Giorno della Memoria (Holocaust Remembrance Day) in Italy. In New York, each year, the Consulate General of Italy has held the ceremony of the reading of the names of the Jews deported from Italy and the Italian territories. This year, due to the pandemic, we will not be able to gather for this day of remembrance. We have thus decided to share with audiences, in and beyond New York, the past ceremonies and some of th...

Ian Thomson in conversation with Alison Cornish and Federica Anichini. Click here to register "It might seem strange that a poem most emblematic of medieval Christianity, The Divine Comedy, should contain so many Arabic loan-words as well as references to Islamic intellectual life. Eastern treatises on medicine, natural science and mathematics had entered the Italian peninsula by way of Muslim Spain and Sicily, and left their fingerprints on Dante Alighieri's great 14th century work. In th...

Sarah Stein in conversation with Aron Rodrigue  on her new book Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Click here to register The Levy family established itself in Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece) in the 18th century and for some two hundred years published books and newspapers for the region’s Sephardic Jews. With the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, the Levys scattered throughout the world, but kept in touch through letters. Drawing on ...

From a letter to my son. By Alessandro Cassin Dear  L. I know your job involves making predictions about the short, medium and long term. That is what those who trade stocks, bonds, currencies, and derivatives do. Yet in a time when the future is completely unpredictable, I believe it becomes necessary — individually and as a society— to admit that we have no idea what awaits us. Instead of relying only on “forecasting professionals” (scientists, virologists, economists or philosophe...

In the period between September 1917 and April 1918, while his world was in shambles (the Spanish Flu, the October Revolution, the Great War) Franz Kafka, after being diagnosed with tuberculosis, took up residence with his sister Ottla, in Zürau, a village in West Bohemia. Chaos, war, diseases and uncertainty were raging, yet Kafka finds the inner calm to abstract himself from all that suffering, looks inside himself and finds a bottomless well. In addition to compiling his "Blue Octavo Noteb...

To attain silence one must listen to others, and in order to listen to others one must listen to oneself, start from oneself.   Noisy breathing is not a physiological need, but a merely histrionic act which means: look and listen as I labor, I, full of energy, I, etc… In reality one burns one’s own energy more quickly in order to consume it in the shortest possible time. On the contrary, it is necessary to decrease the noise of breathing which disturbs our attention of all the other noise...

"Who could prohibit me from placing in the Mimete a gram or two of carbon atoms so that they would be honestly reconfigured in a tetrahedral arrangement, and then selling the result? No one: not the law, and not even the conscience. With such things, it is essential to be first, since there is no imagination more industrious than that of men eager to make a profit."  Primo Levi, Vice of Form

A boy hammers on a girl’s door. The girl doesn’t open it. The boy’s head is spinning. The girl’s head is spinning. Thousands of angels escort the sun on its way, [audio m4a="https://primolevicenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Natan-Zach.m4a"][/audio] LOVE A boy hammers on a girl’s door. The girl doesn’t open it. The boy’s head is spinning. The girl’s head is spinning. Thousands of angels escort the sun on its way, Flying in that unique formation peculiar to ange...