Even If We Told the Story, No One Would Believe Us.

Conversation: Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (NYU) and Uri S. Cohen (TAU).

“No matter how this war ends, we have won the war against you. No one will be left to testify, but even if one of you does survive, the world will not believe you. And even if some evidence should remain and some of you do manage to survive, people will say the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed.”

—Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

Presented jointly with Après-Coup New York and with an introduction by Paola Mieli.

Perpetrators and victims were both acutely aware that the crime incorporated its own negation. Unlike other victorious crimes in history which were used as spectacle glorifying leaders and nations, this one was meant not go unsung and unmourned; removed from the public eye and from collective conscience, it was an open secret.

Historian Zvi Ben-Dor Benite and Primo Levi scholar Uri S. Cohen reflect with Primo Levi: how and when did the victims come to understand themselves as witnesses? If this crime is in fact unprecedented how does it condition the victim’s decision to bear witness? Who is or remains a perpetrator since the crime not only contained its own negation but also the power to implicate everyone to some degree, including the victims? In the so-called “era of the witness” is there a landscape of testimony and how did Primo Levi see himself within it? 

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is a professor of History at the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. He is the author of Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2005), The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford 2009). He is co-editor of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought Writings on Identity, Politics, and Culture (Brandeis, 2013), The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (Columbia 2018), Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History (Hawaii University press 2023). 

Uri S. Cohen is a professor of Hebrew and Italian literature at Tel Aviv University, where he moved from Columbia University on a reverse brain drain grant. He works on comparative literatures and civil wars. He is the author of: Survival: Senses of Death between the World Wars in Italy and Palestine and The Security Style in Hebrew Letters. In addition, he has written extensively on Primo Levi, including the recent Primo Levi between Literature and the World. He is a co-founder of the fintech startup FUGU and is currently working on a counter-biography: The Essential Primo Levi.

Image: Giorgio de Chirico, le Retour d’Ulysse, 1968