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Center for Jewish History

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Center for Jewish History

Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16 Street, New York, NY 10011

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The Fortunate Foàs of Sabbioneta
USA: Amb. Zappia, a Stella Levi onoreficenze Cavaliere di Gran Croce
A New York Stella Levi diventa Cavaliere di Gran Croce della Repubblica Italiana

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WE WERE OUTSIDERS IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY In this c

WE WERE OUTSIDERS IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY

In this conversation Judge Guido Calabresi, a long time friend of Centro Primo Levi, shares stories of his family’s flight from Fascist Italy —from Milan to Yale— and the ways his childhood experiences have shaped his personal and professional life in the USA.

This spring, Calabresi has appeared as a panelist in our presentation of Giana Pontecorboli’s Americordo.The Italian Jewish Exiles in America, and of Patrizia Guarnieri’s Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism.

Guido Calabresi is a legal scholar and senior Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A former Dean of Yale Laws School where he has been teaching since 1959, he is now Sterling Professor Emeritus and Professorial Lecturer in Law. He has been awarded some fifty honorary degrees from universities in the United States and abroad, and has published widely on the Law and related subjects.

AC Unlike most Italian Jews who came to the US, fleeing the Italian racial laws, your father was an anti-Fascist and realized long before the discriminatory measures where Italy was going. You family’s decision was not so much a consequence of the laws but rather a political decision.

Read the full article on our site...

“Our Life Was Divided in Many Facets”: Anna Fo

“Our Life Was Divided in Many Facets”: Anna Foa Yona, an Anti-Fascist Jewish Refugee in Wartime United States⁠
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Migration studies have dismissed the somewhat uncritical and romantic celebration of the heroic saga of the political expatriates as professional revolutionaries who traveled the world to spread the “Idea” and allegedly lived adventurously on the run. This vision used to draw in part upon the theoretical distinction between political exile and economic migration. Yet scholarship now emphasizes how thin the line between these two categories is (Témine, 1991, 57-72).2 Not only do lack of freedom and police repression, on one side, and shrinking means of subsistence, on the other, quite often intertwine in causing people to depart from their motherlands. Refugees for political reasons also have to make a living abroad. For example, in the recollections of his own son, after seeking sanctuary in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Michele Salerno – a Communist Jew from Calabria (Paparazzo, 2004, 38-40) – “sweated for more than eight hours per day, toiling at a burning machinery of the Cleaning and Dyeing Company” (Salerno, 2001, 26).⁠
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Read the full article in our link in bio.

Join us for MINE IS THE GOLDEN TONGUE, THE HEBREW

Join us for MINE IS THE GOLDEN TONGUE, THE HEBREW SONNETS OF IMMANUEL OF ROME... a book launch! October 30th at 6.30pm.⁠
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Please join us for a staged reading of Immanuel of Rome’s Sonnets by actor Ronald Guttman, followed by discussion with literary scholar Fabrizio Lelli. The reading includes Hebrew, Italian and English translations by Yehudah Cohn. The program is free and open to the public. No reservation is necessary.⁠
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On the occasion of the publication of the volume Mine is the Golden Tongue. The Hebrew Sonnets of Immanuel of Rome. Translated by Yehudah Cohn, CPL Editions, 2023. Presented in partnership with Centro Primo Levi New York, the Jewish Museum of Rome and Casa Italiano Zerilli-Marimo NYU.⁠
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A satirist, poet, and biblical commentator, Immanuel ben Shelomò or Manoello Giudeo, was a contemporary of Dante, who, recounting his ultramundane flight through Hell and Paradise in Hebrew, tied his name forever to that of the Florentine poet. He moved swiftly between vernacular and Hebrew, modeled his verses on the Arabic maqāma, and wrote the first known sonnets in Hebrew. He lived in Rome during the turbulent period following the communal experience, during which the popes were mostly absent. His mark on the Roman siddur suggests he was an active member of the local Jewish community, one that left no other trace but an extraordinary abundance of Hebrew manuscripts, translations, commentaries, philosophical and literary works.⁠
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Immanuel’s writings and life have fascinated scholars for over six centuries, making him one of the most studied Hebrew writers in history; yet, in the world of mass culture, he has remained practically unknown. His most published and studied book, the Mahbarot, a collection of satirical tales written in Hebrew foreshadowing Boccaccio’s Decameron, has never been translated as a whole. Scholars’ widely diverging readings of his work have cast mystery on his persona and the world surrounding him. Centro Primo Levi’s publication makes all of Immanuel’s Hebrew sonnets available in English for the first time.⁠
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MORE INFO AT THE LINK IN BIO

Join us October 18th for "THE JEWISH TENNIS PHILOS

Join us October 18th for "THE JEWISH TENNIS PHILOSOPHER"⁠
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As early as the twelfth century, the Jewish European bookshelf suggested a decent amount of parodic literary pieces. The world of medieval and Jewish parody suggested parodies of almost all the prominent genres in pre-modern Jewish literature. There were parodies of the Hebrew Bible, the Mishna and the Talmud, the liturgical literature, halakhic, and mystic literature. However, Jewish philosophical literature did not become the target of many parodic pieces. The lack of parodies of philosophical treatises is extremely interesting when taking into account the fact that some of the earliest medieval Jewish parodic pieces were written by Jewish scholars who were familiar with philosophy and even wrote and translated philosophical treatises themselves, such as Kalonymos ben Kalonymos and Gersonides. ⁠
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Maḥol mesaḥakim (“Dance of the Players”) is the only known Jewish medieval parody of a philosophical treatise. The text, which was written anonymously in Italy in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, suggests an eleven-chapter-long discussion about the philosophical importance of the game of tennis. In the introduction to the text, the anonymous author explains that the piece is dedicated to the author’s colleagues who are “sick of studying philosophy” and prefer to play ball in the streets. ⁠
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This talk will reveal for the first time this previously unknown literary piece. It will present the text’s place in the long history of Jewish parodic literature. It will also discuss Maḥol mesaḥakim‘s historical and cultural context and the text’s part in understanding early modern Jewish youth culture as well as the early stages of philosophical learning.⁠
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Refreshments will be served.⁠
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MORE INFO AT THE LINK IN BIO or visit our website...⁠

Join us, October 17th for "CORRADO CAGLI: TRANSATL

Join us, October 17th for "CORRADO CAGLI: TRANSATLANTIC BRIDGES: 1938-1947" at Center for Italian Modern Art, at 6.00pm.⁠
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Please join the Center for Modern Italian art and Centro Primo Levi for the inauguration of the exhibition of Corrado Cagli curated by Raffaele Bedarida and the presentation of CPL Editions’ new volume Corrado Cagli: Transatlantic Bridges: 1938-1947.⁠
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In the 1930s, the young Italian artist Corrado Cagli was a rising star of the Scuola Romana, supported by the Fascist regime despite being Jewish and openly gay. Following the Racial Laws, he fled to the USA, where he remained until 1947. In this book, Raffaele Bedarida focuses on Cagli’s American exile.⁠
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While examining Cagli in the context of the artistic and intellectual migration from Europe to the US, Bedarida provides new insight into the specific plight of this Italian Jewish artist and the challenges of doing art across national boundaries: between cultural diplomacy and negotiation of identity.⁠
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The author combines biography, cultural history, and critical analysis in exploring a decisive period in the life and work of a painter whose complex personality and multifaceted work defy classifications. The book also provides thought-provoking, nuanced arguments on the ideologically based ostracism Cagli encountered upon returning to Italy. Because of his past as a regime-endorsed artist, his recent American success, and his participation in the liberation of Europe from Fascism with the U.S. army, Cagli did not fit into any of the factions of Italy’s post-war heated cultural disputes. Based on extensive original research and written with brio, Bedarida’s book is an essential contribution to the growing field of transnational modernism studies.⁠
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MORE INFO AND BOOKING AT LINK IN BIO.

Join us September 20th for "OUTSIDE IN: THE ORAL H

Join us September 20th for "OUTSIDE IN: THE ORAL HISTORY OF GUIDO CALABRESI" at Casa Italiana at 6.30pm⁠
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There is no more interesting figure in the history of the American legal academy than Guido Calabresi, known throughout the legal world simply as “Guido”. After a flight from fascism, he arrived in the United States from Italy in September, 1939. His family was penniless but with deep awareness that there had been, spread throughout its past and on both sides, for many generations, not just wealth but social standing, a proud Italian-Jewish heritage, creativity, and intellectual accomplishment. Guido excelled in his schooling and joined the faculty at Yale Law School, where he became a great teacher and mentor; the preeminent scholar of his generation; and perhaps the best law school dean Yale or any law school ever had. Appointed by President Bill Clinton, Guido since 1994 has been an outstanding judge on the United States Court of Appeals. He is one of America’s great legal minds and one of its most interesting human beings.⁠
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MORE INFO IN BIO, link to sign up!

Seventy years ago, on July 23, 1944, Jewish life o

Seventy years ago, on July 23, 1944, Jewish life on this Island of roses came to an end. Today we convene here in Kahal Shalom to mourn the interrupted and lost lives of so many and to remember with love and pride the Jewish community that inhabited the homes and streets of the Juderia of Rhodes.⁠
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Not long after the war, survivors of the Shoah and Rodeslis who had emigrated before to the Americas, to the Congo, to Rodesia, had grasped the enormity of their loss and came to terms with the notion that it was impossible to resurrect or reconstruct Jewish life here in Rhodes.⁠
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Of the almost 4500 Jews who lived on the island before 1938 and the Racial Laws decreed by Fascist Italy, only about 1900 were left in 1944, and one year later, after deportation, only a handful. There were the Soriano family with Mr. Maurice Soriano as president, then the Sullam Modiano family, with Lucia taking care of the synagogue which she opened for the occasional visitors, and few other families which had recently come from mainland Greece.⁠
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Eventually, the expatriates began to come to Rhodes in a kind of pilgrimage, compelled by the force of memory and love: to remember -“Zakhor” in Hebrew -is a commandment in the Jewish tradition.⁠
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Read this full article by Stella Levi at our link in bio.⁠
Stella Levi is a board member of Centro Primo Levi. She delivered this speech in Rhodes on the 70th Anniversary of the deportation of the Jewish Community of Rhodes, July 23, 2014.⁠

My father, an Italian Jew, used to say that “family is everything,” yet I knew very little about the history of the Foà family. That changed when, in his retirement, my father wrote a forty-page family memoir and began to fill in some of the missing pieces. He devoted only one line to our most famous ancestors, I Fratelli Foà, printers of Bibles and Hebrew prayer books in sixteenth century northern Italy. They flourished between 1551 and 1590 in the tiny, walled city of Sabbioneta. I’d become aware of them when, a decade earlier, an Israeli cousin had sent me copies of their handsome printer’s mark, or colophon. Their books are still considered exceptionally beautiful....⁠
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Read the rest of Eleanor Foa's article at our link in bio. ⁠
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Pictured, the I Fratelli Foa colophon (or printer’s mark) in a book.

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