Our Program Calendar
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
The Year of History, A Novel
When Elsa Morante published La Storia. Romanzo in 1974 it was a watershed event that invested Italian society both in terms of the unprecedented success among readers and the ideologically fueled controversy among critics. Echoes of ...
The resurgence of the Italian silk tallit.
Many of us remember well the years Rav Umberto Piperno spent in New York: his enthusiasm, wisdom and tireless efforts to present the specific traditions of Italian Jews from liturgy to food and beyond. In July he is back in...
Corrado Cagli: The American Years
In the 1930’s the young Italian artist, Corrado Cagli was a rising star of the Scuola Romana, supported by the Fascist regime despite being both Jewish and a homosexual. Following the Racial Laws, he moved first to Paris, and then...
Nuto Revelli: the History of the Present
For the rest of his life, Revelli did not stop studying and conducting interviews about the war and its devastating impact. His métier became that of bearing testimony and continuously questioning the past, the facts and their memory. ...
A Thousand Years Deep
In and of itself, this beam that, from the prison of Via Piangipane illuminates the land beneath which —in Carlo Levi’s famous depiction— Christ did not venture, creates a short-circuit within the narrative of the exhibit and opens an ...
Silvio Zamorani: Through Books One Thinks the World
One of the most challenging projects was an Aramaic grammar book. To begin with, who is going to buy such a book? It was a hyper specialized volume, not an elementary grammar, so you can imagine my surprise when I...
The Aryanization of Italian Musical Life
Thus, by following denigration with reassurance, he began the slow process of building up racist philosophy, which had appeared to have become extraneous to Italian culture once the country’s unification was completed in 1870....
Ghetto and Not
Overcoming the paradigm of insularity and unscalable walls – which the ghetto symbolizes – allows us to identify systems of exchanges, interactions, and reciprocal influences on shared spaces, whether physical or cultural....
Roman Policies Towards the Jews
Scholars have often wondered whether the documents presented by Josephus are at all genuine. Josephus is the only ancient author to mention these decrees. We furthermore also know that Josephus’s text suffers from serious textual ...
He Was and Old Man in a Cold Season
But here he was, in this room, in this chair, trying once more to explain – to explain the war, to explain his past, to explain his people. Explain to whom? Who still listened? His enemies, perhaps. Or that glittering...
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
The Inspiring History of Europe’s Largest Jewish Publishing House
Simone Somekh for Tablet, May 2018 Whether you’re looking for the latest Israeli best-selling novel, the five books of the Torah, or even the translation of the Babylonian Talmud, in Italy, there is one man behind all of these books....
Italy’s Jews to Israel’s Rabbinate: Hands off Our Artichokes!
Simone Somekh for Tablet, April 2018 When Ba’ghetto, the oldest Jewish restaurant in Rome, announced the opening of its new location in Milan, someone must have made a quick phone call to inform the Chief Rabbinate of Israel that the...
Tablet Magazine: Did Gino Bartali Actually Save Jews? An Investigation.
As the Tour de France wraps up this week, a historical debate still rages over who deserves credit for the production of identity cards for Jews hidden in Florence Michele Sarfatti, Tablet Magazine An exhibition at the Italian American ...
Tablet Magazine: A Holocaust Story form the White Pages
An ‘archaeologist of bureaucracy’ traces the ghostly lives of foreign Jews in Italy during World War II. By Michael Frank In the fall of 2011 I received a letter from my friend Letizia Gualandi, a professor of archaeology at...
Boston Review of Books: Finding Ourselves in the Venetian Ghetto
Michael Frank. “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.” This is the Talmud quoting Shmuel ben Nachmani on dreams, but the observation speaks fittingly—and pointedly—to last summer’s commemoration of the establishment of the...
New York Transatlantic: In Old Synagogue, New York Discovers Italian Chazanut
NEW YORK—Besides Israel, Italy is perhaps the smallest region in the world to feature the greatest concentration of different Jewish traditions. In its 2,000 years of history, the Italian Jewish scene has drawn on a number of ...
Giorno della Memoria 2017
Holocaust Remembrance Day 2017 inspires reflections on the crisis of the European Union and the plight of refuges New York, NY, January 13, 2017 – The 2017 commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day, coordinated by Centro ...
New York Transatlantic: 500 Years of Jewish History from the Venice Ghetto
Donatella Calabi presented her new book Venice, the Jews and Europe 1516–2016 at the Rizzoli Bookstore. Read the original article On the March 29, 1516, the Senate of the Republic of Venice decided that the city’s Jews had to live in a ...
Washington Post: Celebrating Primo Levi
Noon-1 Primo Levi, the preeminent writer on the Holocaust who died in 1987, is celebrated in a panel discussion featuring Ann Goldstein, translator of Primo Levi’s work and editor of “The Complete Works of Primo Levi,” and her ...
The Times Literary Supplement. The ethics of Primo Levi
Ian Thomson In the mid-1950s, Primo Levi often travelled to Germany on business as an industrial chemist. It would have been bad for business if he could not, at some level, accommodate the country that had degraded him as a...
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...
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 ...
