A chamber opera -- with libretto and music by Ari Frankel -- inspired by the life, writings, and death of Primo Levi [1919-1987]. Frankel does not use any of Levi's writings; he channels impressions while exploring implications, through tonal and modal orchestral poetry. The opera's timeline and music morph techniques in search of truth, passion, and knowledge. “to scratch an angel” looks at life, and at living without being alive. It explores emotions, actions, and consequences. "I write becau...

A theatrical reading of correspodence between Amedeo Modigliani, his mother and his brother Mené.

The Italian Ghenizah, Mauro Perani, University of Bologna  For the past 20 years, under the guidance of late Prof. Joseph Sermoneta, Hebrew University, and then of Prof, Mauro Perani, thousands of Hebrew manuscripts recycled as binding of notary books were discovered in Italian archives and libraries. The magnitude of the finding paralleled that of the Cairo Genizah and provided an unprecedented resource for the study of inquisitorial confiscations of Hebrew books carried out in the Cou...

Nedo Fiano speaks about his memoir “The courage to live” with his son Andrea Fiano, NY correspondent of Milano Finanza. See Review by Marsha Leon, The Forward «My deportation to the Nazi extermination camps marked my entire life. My all family ended up there with me and they all died. At age 18 I was an orphan and this devastating experience made me a different kind of man: I have been a witness all my life». Nedo Fiano lived in Florence when the racial laws were promulgated. He was ar...

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Memoria: A Documentary Memoria was first screened at Centro Primo Levi in 1998 at the Tishman Auditorium at the New School. A documentary film directed by Ruggero Gabbai and written by historians Marcello Pezzetti and Liana Picciotto Fargion. Presented by the Centro Primo Levi, Consulate General of Italy and New York University Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò. Memoria is the first film to document recollections by survivors of the Italian ...

KABBALAH IN THE AGE OF REASON: ELIJAH BENAMOZEGH Alessandro Guetta, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris THE SEPHARDIC JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY OF SABATO MORAIS Arthur Kiron, University of Pennsylvania YOCHANAN ALEMANNO AND JEWISH SCHOLARSHIP AT THE MEDICI COURT Fabrizio Lelli, University of Lecce SHABBATAI DONNOLO BETWEEN MYSTICISM AND SCIENCE Vadim Putzu, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati WOMEN AND BOOKS IN RENAISSANCE ITALY Evelyn Cohen, Jewish Theolog...

THE VALMADONNA TRUST LIBRARY Jack Lunzer, custodian. Opening remarks by Arthur Kiron, University of Pennsylvania. The Valmadonna Trust Library in London is generally recognized to comprise the most important private collection of early and rare books in the world. Originating in Italy, the Valmadonna collection was at first composed of Hebrew books printed in Italy in the 16th century. The scope of the Valmadonna Library has since been extended to the entire field of Hebrew printin...

Walter Veltroni was born in Rome and began his political career as member of the Italian Young Communist Federation. From 1976 to 1981 he held the post of city counselor of Rome. In 1987, Mr. Veltroni became a member of the Parliament. Appointed as a member of the Italian Communist Party's national secretariat in 1988, he played a lead role in the transformation of the party into a social-democratic force. A professional journalist, Mr. Veltroni was the editor in chief of L'Unità from 1992 to 1...

Organized by Centro Primo Levi in cooperation with the Consulate General of Italy, Wagner College, the Center for Jewish History and the Italian Cultural Institute. With the participation of the International Raul Wallenberg Foundation and the Order of Sons of Italy. Hosted by Senator Seymour Lachman, Distinguished Professor, Wagner College. Opening remarks by the Consul General of Italy, Honorable Antonio Bandini. Panelists: Simon Levis Sullam, Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, ...

Centro Primo Levi jointly with the Consulate General of Italy, the Italian Cultural Institute, Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo, and the Italian Academy at Columbia University sponsors a series of programs and city events to commemorate the victims of the Nazi extermination camps. Between 1938 and 1945 European Nazi and Fascist regimes, and the people who supported them, annihilated millions of Jews and thousands of homosexuals, handicapped, mentally ill, and gypsies, they had labeled as “stranger,”...

Delving into a vast and entertaining musical and poetic repertoire and highlighting the exuberant crossovers originating in the multi-ethnic cradle of the Mediterranean, Lucidarium brings to the audiences of today the magical atmosphere of Medieval and Renaissance Jewish festivities, the sophisticated beauty of the language at the time of Dante, and the tentative and colorful shades of regional dialects, tinged all over by the patina of Hebrew. With a step into a contemporary cutting ed...

Centro Primo Levi and the Herbert Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at University of Pensylvania invite you to an evening dedicated to the cultures of the Mediterranean lands featuring Charles Manekin (Bar Ilan University), Miriam Goldstein (Hebrew University), Jessica Goldberg (University of Pennsylvania), moderator: Ross Brann (Cornell University), and performer Miriam Meghnagi. [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20...

Philip Roth received the first Grinzane Literary Masters Award in recognition of his merit as a writer and for introducing the work of Primo Levi to a wider American audience. The prize, which brings an honorarium of $25,000, is awarded this year in memory of Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish writer, chemist, and Auschwitz survivor, on the twentieth anniversary of his death in April 1987. [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] T...

An evening of talks, performance, film, and radio nostalgia on the beloved Mayor of New York and his sister Gemma. On the occasion of the publication of Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck's Story, the memoir by Gemma La Guardia Gluck, edited by Rochelle G. Saidel (Syracuse University Press). Opening remarks by the Consul General of Italy Hon. Antonio Bandini and Marjorie B. Tiven, Commissioner, City of New York. Speakers: Matilda Raffa Cuomo, Katherine LaGuardia, Rochelle G. Saidel. A...

What’s He Doing Here? Jesus in Jewish Culture. Centro Primo Levi hosts the Nextbook Festival of Ideas. Jesus was a Jew, but Jews do not accept his divinity. In What's He Doing Here? Jesus in Jewish Culture, an all-star lineup of writers, critics, filmmakers, and scholars explores the legacy of this paradox from the Gospels to medieval martyr stories to the paintings of Chagall to Woody Allen and Sarah Silverman. Notable the appearance of Rav Riccardo Di Segni,  Chief Rabbi of Rome in conversa...

Visiting lecturer: Sandra Debenedetti Stow Hebraic and Islamic Sources of Dante Alighieri. Professor Sandra Debenedetti Stow, Bar Ilan University, will discuss the relation between idea and representation central to Dante’s notion of heresy in The Divine Comedy. Illustrating its Jewish, Sufi and Neo-platonic roots, Professor Stow sheds new light on the intricate multicultural landscape that preceded the consolidation of Modern Europe and its religious and philosophical foundations. Centro Primo...

Leopold Bloom is more a Triestine figure than a Dublin one and Ulysses may be about Ireland, but only turbulent and cosmopolitan Trieste could have given Joyce the impetus to start setting it down.  Anthony Burgess, The New York Times This program stems from a collaboration between Centro Primo Levi, the Italian Cultural Institute, the Joyce Museum and the Svevo Museum in Trieste, engaged in exploring the Jewish heritage of Trieste and Joyce’s fascination with Jewish cultural and traditional tr...

  Sunday, January 27, 2008 Italian Academy at Columbia University Italian Fascist Race Laws and the Manifesto dellaRazza: How Law and Science Can be Racist David Freedberg (Italian Academy), Ruth Ben-Ghiat (NYU), Lidia Santarelli (NYU) and Alexander Stille (Columbia University). Symposium: Anti-Semitism At Home and Abroad Ira Katznelson (Columbia University) “The Liberal Alternative: Jews in the United States during the Decades of Italian Fascism” Claudio Lomnitz (Columbia University) “D...

Sephardic Film Festival Exodus.  A RAI production dedicated to the life of Ada Sereni. Based on the true story of Ada Sereni, who became a leader of the Aliyah Bet, helping the underground Jewish Brigade bring survivors to Palestine in 1945.  She and her husband, Enzo, had moved to Palestine and founded a kibbutz where their three children were born. Enzo was parachuted into Germany to help save Jews, and was captured and sent to Mathausen. Ada, in her search for him, was asked by the Aliyah ...

A collaborative series of Centro Primo Levi with the Herbert Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Each year CAJS invites some twenty scholars from around the world to study in depth a central theme of Jewish history and culture. This year the center highlights the period of Late Antiquity, focusing on the interactions between Jews, Christians, and pagans and the rise and development of Judaism and Christianity. The lectures at Centro Primo Levi in New York ...

Centro Primo Levi with the Consulate General of Italy and the Consulate General of Israel present a program dedicated to the history of Italians in Israel. May 13 at 5:00 pm Film screening: Chalutzim: Pionieri in Israele A film by Marco Cavallarin and Marco Mensa. Italian w/English subtitles. 2006, US premiere. Guest speaker: Manuela Consonni (Hebrew University) Enzo Sereni: a Jewish hero between two worlds Enzo Sereni was an Italian Zionist, co-founder of kibbutz Givat Brenner, sc...

Centro Primo Levi with the Italian Cultural Institute and Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimó inaugurate the first annual symposium dedicated to the Italian writer and scientist Primo Levi. Sessions continue on September 9 at 7:00 pm at the Italian Cultural Institute and on September 15 at 7:00 pm at the Center for Jewish History. Participants: Moni Ovadia (actor and playwright), Franco Baldasso (New York University), Uri Cohen (Columbia University), Luigi Dei (University of Florence), Andrea ...

David Ruderman (University of Pennsylvania). Visiting lecturer. Beyond the dialectic of ghetto vs. integration: towards a new vision of Jewish cultural history in Italy.  Over a decade ago two prominent scholars of Italian Jewry, David Ruderman and Robert Bonfil, entered a debate that resulted in many studies and exchanges of ideas within and without their academic circles. Bonfil, an Italian historian who settled in Israel and teaches at Hebrew University, challenged  the conventional vi...

December 16 at 6:00 pm Visiting lecturer: Gadi Luzzatto Voghera (University of Venice and Boston University, Padua). From “Jews” to “Israelites”.  Jewish emancipation and Italian secularism: models for a modern nation.   Were pre-20th century Italian Jews completely separated from the Italian society? What changes prompted the beginning of emancipation and how were Jews able to fully integrate over the span of a few decades? Was the Italian society ready to accept their emancipation? How ...

Outside the Ashkenazi/Sephardic Divide: Italian Jewish Studies in Italy and Beyond This Round Table focuses on the issues of Jewish identity raised by the Italian Jewish experience, as seen through the academic network of Italian Jewish Studies. Academic interest in Italian Jewry began in the mid-19th century in Italy and Germany, and has since developed into a wide-ranging field of research that involves scholars in Europe, Israel and the United States. Interest and awareness for Italian Jewis...

Congregation Ramath Orah and Centro Primo Levi are pleased to invite you to Kabbalat Shabbat on January 16, 2009 at 4:45 pm. Our special guest will be Rav David Gianfranco Di Segni, from the Italian Rabbinical College of Rome. Rav Di Segni will lead the Ma'ariv service in the Italian nussach and will deliver a D'var Torah inspired by the Italian rabbinical tradition.   Rav David Gian Franco Di Segni studied at the Yeshiva of Strasbourg. He obtained smicha from the Italian Rabbinical College of...

The Ensemble for the Romantic Century Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957), the most celebrated conductor in history, was admired also for his opposition to Fascism and Nazism.  His clashes with Mussolini and Hitler and his trips to Palestine to conduct an orchestra made up of Jewish refugees from Europe showed the world that artists can raise their voices against totalitarianism. During World War II he lived in exile in the United States, gave benefit concerts to further the war effort, and assisted...

The Art and Life of István Farkas (1887-1944)  Lecture by Éva Forgács, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena A modernist of the École de Paris, whose elusive landscapes fascinated writers and painters alike, in 1932 Farkas returned to his native Hungary where his mysterious works ultimately presaged his own death at Auschwitz. The art and personality of István Farkas have captured the imagination of critics such as André Salmon, who wrote the first monographic book on his work, and Nob...

January 26, 6 pm. Italian Cultural Institute, 686 Park Avenue, NYC Traces of Memory. Film screening and literary reading The Historic Ghetto of Venice by Regina Resnik. Maria Tucci reads from Primo Levi’s The Truce “Children of the Shoah (Hurbinek)” Wednesday, January 28, 6 pm. New York University Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo, 24 West 12 St., NYC Memory and Justice. Film screening and discussion Lo Stato di Eccezione by Germano Maccioni. Post Screening discussion with the author...

1:30 pm | Film screening.The Jews from Fossoli Directed by RuggeroGabbai (Italy, 2006, DVD, 50 minutes, Italian with English subtitles) This illuminating documentary exposes the Italian Social Republic’s 1943 deportation of the Jews residing in Italy to the concentration camp of Fossoli, which became the country’s main point of transit to Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps. 3:00 pm | PanelDiscussion With author Carlo SpartacoCapogreco (The Duce’s Camps) and Doris Schechter, hidde...

Reading of the names on January 27 On January 27 from 9 am to 4 pm we will be reading the names of the Jews deported from Italy and the Italian territories on Park Avenue at 68th Street in front of the Consulate General of Italy. We invite all New Yorkers to participate in the reading. Let us know at what time you would like to join by writing to: memoria@primolevicenter.org. Thank you! [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] ...

Conceived as a multi-projector installation, De/Portees retraces the geography of the Italian internment camps that were used for the detention, imprisonment, and transfer of prisoners to the Nazi concentration camps. In addition to the best-known establishments of Fossoli-Carpi (Emilia Romagna) and San Sabba (Trieste), the Fascist regime had created many other camps to imprison and often deport persecuted categories of Italian citizens and foreign refugees. While popular myth depicts Italy as...

ITALIAN JEWS, FOREIGN JEWS: COMMON DESTINY AND PLURALITY OF EXPERIENCES IN FASCIST ITALY 1:30 pm | Screening of The Jews from Fossoli, by Ruggero Gabbai (Italy, 2006, DVD, 50 minutes, Italian with English subtitles). This illuminating documentary exposes the Italian Social Republic’s 1943 deportation of the Jews residing in Italy to the concentration camp of Fossoli, which became the country’s main point of transit to Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps. 3:00 pm | Panel Discuss...

Monday, February 9, 2009 at 6 pm The Economics of Jewish Life in Modern Europe, Derek Penslar, University of Toronto Professor Penslar discusses modern economic Jewish history and contextualizes its cultural, ideological, and material aspects. Tracing the shaping of the notion of a distinct "Jewish economic man," an image that grew ever more complex and nuanced between the eighteenth and twen- tieth centuries, Penslar also provides sources and methodological per- spectives to reconsi...

February 9 at 6:00 pm Dante and Primo Levi Join an unexpected literary salon in town where scholar and writer Uri Cohen will take you on a fascinating and unexpected journey. Uri Cohen is an assistant professor at Columbia University specializing in Modern Hebrew Literature and Israeli culture . He is the author of Survival: Senses of Death between the world wars in Italy and Palestine as well as a novel and a documentary film on Polish Israeli author Ida Fink". He has published an variety...

OCTOBER 16th, 1943 “From the window we see… small children; pregnant women, shivering and scared; wives with shawls on their heads, the children were crying. When we went home we saw them (the Germans) taking everybody away at gun-point and kicking those who fell… children cried. It was devastating to see two trucks filled with Jewish families, near the synagogue by the Teatro Marcello. We did not understand what was going on because it’s not like there was another time like that for us Jews… p...

The writings of Giorgio Bassani are recognized internationally for their memorably elusive characters, the many ways in which they defy stereotypes, and their uncanny portrayal of the Italian society between the end of Fascism and the post war period. Lesser known to the public at large are Bassani’s contributions as editor and literary critic. Through the journal Botteghe Oscure, which he edited from 1948 to 1960, Bassani brought to Italy for the first time such writers as T. S. Eliot, Dylan...

Traditional reading of the Megillat Esther in the style of the Romaniote Jews of Ioannina, Greece. Service begins at 6:00 pm. Kehila Kedosha Janina, 280 Broome Street (at Allen St.), NYC. More information at: www.kkjsm.org Also in New York:  Shabbat Zachor, Beth Aharon  The Sephardic Minyan at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, 3700, Henry Hudson Parkway - Saturday March 7, 8-11 A.M. Reading of parashat  tezavve' and Zachor, Pre-Purim Ose Shalom in with Roman-Catalan melody Musaf by Ra...

A Shabbat dinner and talk with Dr. Sharon Flatto, The Age of the Ghetto: A Period of Persecution and Prosperity-the Perplexing Paradox, Dr. Flatto is an Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College; she specializes in early modern Jewish history, early modern and modern Jewish thought, and Kabbalah.

Centuries of Jewish Crossover From Venice to Lecce The program is co-presented by the Consulate General of Italy, Italian Cultural Institute, and Centro Primo Levi. It is made possible through the generous support of the Regione Veneto and Regione Puglia. The public program of Centro Primo Levi is made possible in part through the generous support of the Cahnman Foundation. This year, Italian National Day is dedicated to the regions of Veneto and Apulia. In conjunction with the cel...

An International Symposium on the Occasion pf Primo Levi's 90th Anniversary Concert & Round Table Sunday, October 25, 2009. Center for Jewish History, CUNY Graduate Center, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò. Admission: Free   From Poetry to Music: Primo Levi and Tzvi Avni Greetings: Consul General of Italy Francesco Maria Talò, Consul General of Israel Asaf Shariv, Israel Ambassador at the UN Gabriela Shalev. Introduction: Aoibheann Sweeney (Center for the Humanities, CUNY...

Co-presented by the National Organization of Italian American Women, in collaboration with: La Scuola D’Italia, Italian Cultural Institute of New York, and the Westchester Italian Cultural Center. On the occasion of the publication of Lia Levi’s novel The Jewish Husband (Europa Editions, 2009). Reception at 6:30 pm, program begins at 7:00 pm. Read more: A Conversation with Lia Levi by Alessandro Cassin. Lia Levi was born in Pisa on November 9, 1931, to a Jewish family of Piedmontese origins....

When, 150 years ago, Italy became a unified country, the Region of Piemonte was its center and the catalyst of its early development. As the oldest minority in Europe, Italian Jews held a high stake in a process that sanctioned their emancipation, and they actively participated in shaping the new national life. This evening of film, family history, and books will introduce the public to a fascinating landscape of culture, intellectual vision, and social mobility. 5:30 | Opening remarks: Jacob W...

SALONIKA 1943 Script by FerdinandoCeriani, Gian Paolo Cavarai, Antonio Ferrari.Musical director EvelinaMeghnagi. Staging in the US directed by Alan Adelson. Starring: Robert Zukerman, Lily Balsen, and GaleetDardashti. The performance is in English. Presented by the Consulate General of Italy and the Italian Cultural Institute in collaboration with Centro Primo Levi. "Salonika 1943" recounts the last years of the culturally unique, centuries-old Jewish community of Salonika through the eye...

Secular and Sacred in the Modern Jewish World Presented by the University of Pennsylvania in cooperation with the Yeshiva University Museum, the Center for Jewish History, and Centro Primo Levi. Lecture Series This series addresses, probes, and challenges one of the basic assumptions of modern Jewish historians--that the modern era, beginning with the Haskalah [Jewish Enlightenment], brought about a radical transformation of Jewish culture, precipitating the decline of religious faith and auth...

SALONIKA '43 Script by Ferdinando Ceriani, Gian Paolo Cavarai, Antonio Ferrari. Musical director Evelina Meghnagi. Staging in the US directed by Alan Adelson. Starring: Robert Zukerman, Lily Balsen, and Galeet Dardashti. The performance is in English. Presented by the Consulate General of Italy and the Italian Cultural Institute in collaboration with Centro Primo Levi. Introduction
: Alessandro Cassin
, Journalist and research and publication consultant for Centro Primo Levi Opening Remark...

Evelina Meghnagi and Ashira Ensemble sings “Di Voce in Voce”  (From Voice to Voice)  A concert featuring a fascinating mix of languages and music, of melodies and rhythms, of the archaic and the contemporary. From songs in Judeo-Spanish to the melodies of North Africa and those of the Italian tradition, the warm and captivating voice of Evelina Meghnagi gives a fresh color to ancient melodies.

An interactive videoconference presented by Centro Primo Levi and the Center for Jewish History and Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Thirteenth Annual Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Lecture The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies is pleased to invite you to a panel discussion prompted by the publication of Moshe Idel’s new book, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought. The book, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press ...

Did James Joyce call Leopold Bloom the man who had called himself Italo Svevo? Screening: Le Parole di Mio Padre/My Father’s Words (2001), directed by Francesca Comencini and based on Zeno’s Conscience. Post-screening discussion: Andrea Malaguti, director of Undergraduate Studies and associate professor at Columbia, about Svevo and his relationship with Joyce. Join us in celebrating Bloomsday on an evening devoted to the work of Italian writer Italo Svevo (born Ettore Schmitz in 1861 i...

Centro Primo Levi 4th International Symposium  October 25 at 5 pm Primo Levi, The West and the Rest Marc Nichanian (Sabancı University), Mahmood Mamdani (Columbia University), Gil Anidjar (Columbia University), Uri Cohen (Columbia University), Gayatri Spivak (Columbia University), Manuela Consonni (Hebrew University). With the participation of Michael Moore (translator of The Drowned and the Saved) 8:00 pm  - The Transparency of the Word.  Multimedia performance (US Premiere). Music by ...

A Symposium presented by Centro Primo Levi with CDEC, Milan, NYU Skirball Department for Hebrew and Judaic Studies, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò English-language Holocaust literature has generally portrayed Italy as having saved a high percentage of its Jews from deportation and extermination. However, recent scholarship in Italy offers a more nuanced view of the facts. While Italian Jews were indeed saved in great numbers by Italians of all stripes, tens of thousands of Italians collaborat...

Roundtable: Culture, Conflict, and Persecution on the Northeastern Border of Italy. Joze Pirjevec (University of Primorska, Slovenia), Annie Cohen-Solal(New York University), Uri Cohen (Columbia University). Moderated by Michael Biggins (University of Washington Libraries). The aftermath of World War One brought about a new geopolitical configuration, perceived as detrimental by most of the ethnic  minorities that had made up the former Austro Hungarian Empire.  In the cosmopolitan port city o...

A century before the infamous “Mortara case,” a young Roman Jew, Anna del Monte, the daughter of a well to do family of the Ghetto, is kidnapped from her family home and imprisoned in the Casa dei Catecumeni. The aim of the action is to convert her to Catholicism. A well educated and articulate woman, Anna left a diary in which she recollects the days in which men and women of the Church tried all ways to "steal her soul". Her courage and ability to rebut the arguments of her kidnappers, won he...

Giorno della Memoria | Seminars Michele Sarfatti (CDEC, Milan), Annalisa Capristo (Center for American Studies, Rome), Guri Schwarz (University of Pisa) and Ilaria Pavan (University of Pisa). Moderated by Alessandro Cassin (Centro Primo Levi) Post-war Italian and international historiography had a tendency to downplay the racist components of Fascism. Starting in the 1980's some historians began to challenge this view. They undertook an examination of the intellectual and political landsca...

Film screening and talk John Davis, University of Connecticut Not many people know of the utterly extraordinary events that took place in a humble southern Italian town in the first half of the twentieth century—and those who do have struggled to explain them. In the late 1920s, a crippled shoemaker had a vision where God called upon him to bring the Jewish faith to this “dark corner” in the Catholic heartlands, despite his having had no prior contact with Judaism itself. By 1938, about a ...

Co-presented by the RAI Italian Broadcasting Corporation and the Italian Cultural Institute. A panel of prominent Italian intellectuals and witnesses will recount and discuss the little-known story of Jewish participation in Italian antifascism and the armed resistance. The panel will shed light on the early opposition to Mussolini's Regime, the murder of GiacomoMatteotti in 1924, and the exodus to France of many political dissenters. Central topic of the program will be the movement Gi...

  Columbia Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies will host a roundtable on current trends in the study of Italian Jewish cultural and social history, co-sponsored by the Primo Levi Center. Convened by Francesca Bregoli of Queens College/CUNY and Jeremy Dauber of Columbia, this event will bring together scholars whose work concentrate on Italian Jewish history: Andrew Berns of the University of Pennsylvania, Flora Cassen of the University of North Carolina, Bernard Cooperman of the University ...

Purim with Rav Umberto Piperno Ardith, Reading of the Megillah, Traditional Italian songs, Chiacchiere and frappe di Haman Find your Italian Purim gear at Torah.it: E-books, Meghillat Ester ready for smartphone, children’s games, traditional Italian songs, essays and much more! LEISURELY READINGS Purim and Kippur: So Close, So Far, by Rabbi David Gianfranco Di Segni, in Morasha.it The feast of Purim commemorates an event which took place 2500 years ago in Persia, during the reign of Assuero...

Conversion is an explosive topic in Jewish life. Historically, Jews have alternately welcomed and discouraged converts. Jewishness itself has been variously defined by religion, peoplehood, and ethnicity, with differing implications for converts in each case. In our own day the borderlines of Jewish identity appear less fixed than ever, and the question arises as to what significance conversion still holds in a Jewish world increasingly marked by assimilation, intermarriage and cultural hybridit...

On the 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy For the first time in the US, the Choir of the "Tempio Maggiore" conducted by the renowned tenor Claudio Disegni and featuring the hazan of Rome, Alberto Funaro, and organist Federico del Sordo, will expose the New York public to the unique flavors and variations of the liturgical tradition of the Jews of Rome. Welcome remarks by the Consul General of Italy Francesco M. Talò and Dr. Giacomo Moscati, Representative for International Relations...

The vicissitudes of Italian and foreign Jews under Fascist rule have been the object of in depth studies but are still often presented as contradictory aspects of the same history. Today, thanks to a broad range of interdisciplinary research we are able to present a more cohesive picture of those years. Davide Rodogno and Donato Grosser will map the movements and fate of Jews residing in Italy and in Italian occupied territories between 1933-1945,  examining the diverse levels of solidarity an...

Riccardo Strano, ENIT, Natalia Indrimi, Centro Primo Levi Presentation of the portal, Jonathan Wajskol (designwajskol) Film screening The Marranos of Ancona, by Daniel Toaff and Giuseppe Santini Sorgente di Vita, RAI (20’, Italian w/English subtitles). Music talk Francesco Spagnolo, University of California, Berkeley, Puglia’s Jewish Diaspora: The Musical Traditions of the Jews of Corfú Reception to follow - Kosher wine from Marche and Apulia by Sentieri Ebraici. Admission is free. ...

Sunday, October 16, 2011 The Manifesto « It is time that Italians proclaim themselves genuinely racist. The entire work carried out by the Regime up to this point, is nothing else but racism. (...) The question of racism in Italy must be treated primarily from a biological point of view without political or religious intentions. The understanding of racism in Italy must be essentially Italian and its orientation must be Northern-Arian.» (The Defense of Race, August 5, 1938). Chronology In 1935...

NOV 7 | THE MARK OF THE CHEMIST Museum of Jewish Heritage | 36 Battery Park Theatrical reading of Primo Levi's scientific text. Featuring John Turturro and Joan Acocella. Soundscape by composer and virtuoso Marco Cappelli. Text selection by Domenico Scarpa. Co-presented with Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi and Teatro Stabile, Turin. English premiere. NOV 8 | SCIENCE & DYSTOPIA NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimó. 24 West 12th Street Primo Levi’s science fiction. A Conversation. F...

Opening night Theatrical Reading of Primo Levi’s Writings on Science Monday, November 7, 2011 - 7 PM | Roundtable Museum of Jewish Heritage | 36 Battery Park Place, NYC Admission: $ 20, $15 MJH, CPL members Box office: 646.437.4202 Featuring John Turturro and Joan Acocella. Soundscape by composer/virtuoso Marco Cappelli.Text selection by Domenico Scarpa. Co-presented with Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi and Teatro Stabile, Turin. English premiere. This progr...

Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - 5 pm to 8 pm NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimó | 24 West 12th Street Seating is on a first come first served basis | Opening night Film Screening: Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge, 1979, a rare fiction short, is based on Levi’s story with the same title and produced by the Italian television in collaboration with the author. In Italian w/English subtitles (16’). Paola Mieli (psychoanalyst, New York, Paris) on Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge, Gérard Haddad (psychoanal...

On the occasion of the New York presentation of QUEST, Journal in Contemporary Jewish Issues published by the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan (CDEC), this special event will present Mario Tedeschini Lalli’s research on Saul Steinberg’s Italian years, featured in the journal’s current issue. Introduction: Sheila Schwartz (executive director, The Saul Steinberg Foundation) Speakers: Mario Tedeschini Lalli (journalist and author of the first research on Steinberg's Itali...

JANUARY 27  9:00 am to 3:00 pm Consulate General of Italy | Park Avenue at 69th Street REMEMBRANCE CEREMONY The Consul General of Italy, Hon. Natalia Quintavalle is renewing her predecessors’ commitment to preserve the memory of the victims of Nazi-Fascist persecution. The Consulate, in collaboration with Centro Primo Levi, is organizing the ceremony of the reading of the names of all Jews deported from Italy and Italian territories. This reading is the centerpiece in a series of events prese...

Join us at Kehila Kedosha Janina for to Qabbalat Shabbat to honor the memory and celebrate the life of the Jews who were killed during the Fascist and Nazi persecution. During Shabbat service prayers will be offered to the victims and candles will be lit in their memory. Visit www.kkjsm.org and www.primolevicenter.org for additional information on the Shoah in Greece and Italy. Giorno della Memoria is held under the auspices of the Consulate General of Italy in collaboration with the Italian ...

Sunday, January 29, 2012 On January 29, at 2:30 p.m., the Primo Levi Center, the Museum and the Italian Cultural Institute of New York will present Italian Eugenics: Forging the “New Man,” a provocative discussion at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Professor Francesco Cassata of the University of Genoa and Alessandro Di Rocco, Professor of Neurology at NYU-Langone Medical Center - New York University School of Medicine and president of the Primo Levi Center w...

On January 30th at 6 pm Centro Primo Levi and Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, 24 West 12th Street, will present the world premiere of the documentary film The DP Camp of Cinecittà by Marco Bertozzi, based on research by Noa Steimatsky (University of Chicago). Admission is free. The conversion of Cinecittà, one of Europe’s largest movie studios, into a refugee camp seems an odd footnote to the chronicles of Italian cinema. However, its magnitude, the duration of its existence, and the broader soci...

Interview with Rabbi Riccardo Shmuel Di Segni CPL: The Jewish Community of Rome endured, negotiated and overcame centuries of direct contact with the Catholic Church. How  has this experience affected their perspective on Jewish-Christian dialogue? RDS: Before the arrival of the first Christian missionaries - who, by the way, were also Jewish -  Jews had already lived in Rome for two centuries. They’ve remained in the city ever since. This is  a unique occurrence in the history of the Jewish D...

Book presentation Locomotrix: selected poetry and prose of Amelia Rosselli  (University Chicago Press). This event attests to the growing interest for Amelia Rosselli (Paris 1930- Rome 1996) in the United States.  Her life and work are intimately tied to the recent history of Italian Jewry and antifascism. Moving back and forth between Europe and the United States, as a young woman Amelia pursued a career in musical composition and ethnomusicology, studying with  Name Dallapiccola, luig...

Welcome: Stefano Albertini (Director of Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò) Natalia Indrimi (Centro Primo Levi) Opening Remarks: Consul General of Italy, Hon. Natalia Quintavalle Speakers: Marco Coslovich (Historian and author of "Giovanni Palatucci: A Righteous Memory") and Mordecai Paldiel (former Director of the Institute for the Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem and professor of History of the Shoah at Stern College) will present their findings and engage in a conversation moderated by Alessand...

Join the Hazan of Livorno Daniele Bedarida and his son, art historian Raffaele Bedarida, for an evening of music and art. Daniele Bedarida will perform traditional music from the synagogue of Livorno which he contributed to recuperate from oral and written sources. He will be joined in performance by Rabbi Ira Rhodes. Mr. Bedarida’s latest CD Shemà Qolì provides a fascinating journey in the history of Livornese Jewry and its culture. The introduction by Francesco Spagnolo is available in Eglis...

Robert Gordon has published widely on 20th-century Italian literature, cinema and cultural history. He is the author or editor of several books on the work of Primo Levi, including Primo Levi's Ordinary Virtues, Auschwitz Report and The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. He is co-editor of Culture, Censorship and the State in 20th-Century Italy. His work on cinema includes the books Pasolini. Forms of Subjectivity and Bicycle Thieves, DVD and blu-ray audio commentaries on Pasolini's Teorema and ...

Robert Gordon (University of Cambridge) in conversation with Stefania Lucamante(Catholic University of America). On the occasion of the publication of their new books. Moderator: David Forgacs (New York University). Italy's modern history is entangled with the Holocaust in complicated ways. Fascist Italy was the model and origin for Hitler’s totalitarian racial state and adopted many of the Nazi's racist laws from the late 1930s onwards, although debate still rages as to how far Fascist totalit...

Film Screening and Roundtable: Il Grido della Terra, directed by Duilio Colletti, 1949 Guri Schwarz, Stefano Albertini, Wendy Gittler The film is presented in collaboration with the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - Cineteca Nazionale A Neo-Realist tale on the founding of Israel and one of the first films to narrate the migration of European Jews to Palestine of British mandate. Written by Lewis Gittler, Carlo Levi and Alessandro Fersen, Il Grido della Terra offers unprecedente...

Il Grido Della Terra, 1949, script by Lewis F. Gittler, Giorgio Prosperi, Carlo Levi and Akessandro Fersen. Directed by Duilio Coletti, produced in Italy by Albert Salvatori for Lux Films. Andrea Checchi, Marina Berti, Vivi Gioi, Carlo Ninchi, Luigi Tosi, Filippo Scelzo, Peter Trent. The film was produced in 1948 and was mostly shot in the old section of the city of Bari (Puglia). LEARN MORE ABOUT JEWISH REFUGEES IN PUGLIA AFTER WWII At the end of WWII, Jewish refugees were temporaril...

After Mussolini: The Reintegration of the Jewish Communities in Post-War Italy Guri Schwarz(University of Pisa) Introduction: Ruth Ben Ghiat (New York University) Respondent: Paul Arpaia (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) Download the preface      This seminar is based on Guri Schwarz’ new book After Mussolini: Jewish Life and Jewish Memory in Post-War Italy, Valentine Mitchell, 2012 From the Preface: Once the Second World War was over, the surviving remnant of European Jewr...

Mauro Canali (University of Camerino, author of The Regime’s Spies), David Kertzer (Brown University, author of The Popes Against the Jews, The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism). David Kertzer will discuss Mauro Canali’s research on the files of the Fascist police and the censorship commission that oversaw the activities of US correspondents in Italy from the 1920s until the end of World War II. Professor Canali has focused on a lesser known aspect of Fascist propaganda: Muss...

A program presented by Salon Sanctuary in collaboration with the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue and Centro Primo Levi. Pre-concert lecture by scholar Francesco Spagnolo, PhD, Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art & Life at the University of California, Berkeley, and a host for RAI Radiotre in Rome. Concert by the The Western Wind ensemble. Salon/Sanctuary's program of works by the Jewish-Italian composer Salamone Rossi (c. 1570 – 1630) returns for a third season.  Featuring liturgical wor...

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Before that, the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God and, in the 1940s, mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the most enormous, yet undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history? From Enemy to Brother illuminates the baffling silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, showing how the ancient...

Presenters: Consulate General of Italy in New York, Italian Cultural Institute, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, Italian Academy at Columbia University, Calandra Italian American Institute at CUNY, Centro Primo Levi New York. All programs are free and open to the public. No reservation is required. Thank you for your participation. January 24 at 6:00 pm IL RAGAZZO DI VIA SACCHI (2011) a film by Francesco Momberti Italian Cultural Institute, 686 Park Avenue, NYC Post-screening discussion:...

January 24 at 6:00 pm Italian Cultural Institute, 868 Park Avenue Il ragazzo di Via Sacchi (2011) a documentary film by Francesco Momberti Post-screening discussion: Guri Schwarz (University of Pisa) and Tullio Levi (former president of the Jewish Community of Turin). This program will also be presented to the students of the Scuolad’ItaliaGuglielmo Marconi and invited guest from other high schools. EmanueleArtom was a young anti-Fascist raised in Turin who joined the Resistance...

January 31 at 6:30 pm Calandra Italian American Institute at CUNY, 24 West 43rd Street Lidia Santarelli (Brown University), Yemane Demissie (New York University). Moderator: Andrea Fiano (journalist and former Chairman of CPL). Respondent Girma Abebe, Former Counselor, (Ethiopian Delegation to the UN). A political clash is growing in Italy after the dedication of a memorial to Fascist commander Field Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, a convicted war criminal. Graziani was honored with a mausoleum a...

Enzo Traverso (Cornell University) and Susan Zuccotti (author of The Italians and the Holocaust). Respondent Franklin Hugh Adler (Macalester College) “Se comprendere è impossibile, conoscere è necessarioperchéciòche è accadutopuòritornare, le coscienzepossononuovamenteesseresedotteedoscurate: anche le nostre”. (Primo Levi) The new two volume box set The History of the Shoah in Italy completes and updates the History of the Shoah in 5 volumes published by UTET in 2005 and aims at shedding n...

Patricia Heberer (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum): Giving a Face to Faceless Victims: Profiles of Disabled Victims of the Nazi “Euthanasia” Program Susan Bachrach (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum): Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race David Forgacs (New York University): Photographing Places of Social Exclusion Forced sterilization in Germany was the forerunner of the systematic killing of the mentally ill and the handicapped. In October 1939, Hitler promulgated a decree, which empo...

The Museum of Jewish Heritage and Centro Primo Levi in collaboration with CDEC and the Shoah Museum of Rome present: THE LONGEST JOURNEY. THE LAST DAYS OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF RHODES (2013) a film by Ruggero Gabbai, historical research by Liliana Picciotto and Marcello Pezzetti. Centro Primo Levi thanks the Consulate General of the Republic of Germany and Lufthansa for their support. On July 23, 1944, the Nazis deported almost the entire Jewish population of the island of Rhodes, while the ...

CHARLETTE SHULAMIT OTTOLENGHI: A SONG FOR LIFE Presented in collaboration with the Consulate General of Israel, the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland and the Consulate General of Italy on the occasion on the 70th Anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ms. Ottolenghi will be accompanied by renowned pianist Shai Bachar In world of increasing upheaval, we do not want that the sacrifice of the insurgents of the Warsaw Ghetto be forgotten. They demonstrated that even when ever...

Marina Caffiero is Professor Early Modern History at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and directs the PhD section of the Department of History, Cultures and Religions. She is the author of Forced Baptisms - History of Jews, Christian and Converts in Papal Rome (University of California Press, 2011). Serena Di Nepi (PhD) is a researcher of Modern History at the University of Rome La Sapienza. Her upcoming book is The Birth of the ghetto - Jews and Christians in Counter-Reformation Rome, (...

“Children imprisoned behind barbed wire! Here is one of the typical symptoms of this heroic age of ours. It will be for future generations to assess guilt and punishment for this imprisoned youth. The biological, psychological and moral consequences of such ignominious deprivation are the bitter fruits of hatred and stupidity. Some of these kids were born in detention, spent their entire childhood in the primitive huts of internment camps, living on convict rations, laughing and playing in the s...

Elizabeth and Misha, Alexander Stille’s mother and father, met in May 1948 at a party for Truman Capote. She came to the party with her husband at the time, Bob, and left with Misha. Within a week, she’d moved out of the apartment she’d shared with Bob, and begun an intense romance with Misha. The pair would get married and stay married for more than four decades, but the marriage would be a fiercely tempestuous one, fueled by epic fights and threats of divorce — a marriage that their son descri...

Centro Primo Levi is is pleased to join Marie Piccone, Franklin Adler and Russel Berman for a presentation of the latest issue of Telos “Italian Jews and Fascism” with the editors, contributors and friends. After the panel, a cocktail reception with Marie Piccone’s glorious “amaretti”  will celebrate Telos’ 45th Anniversary. Telos has always treasured rejuvenation and renewal, and in recent years has embraced change in a variety of ways. Its entire forty-four year archive has been digitized an...

October 24 | 5:00 pm Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance 226 E 42nd St New York October 25 | 9:00 am - 4:30 pm NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò | 24 West 12th Street The program is free. Reservations are required at rsvp@primolevicenter.org Sessions on October 24 are open to the general public. Sessions on October 25 are primarily meant for faculty and students. If seats remain available they will be assigned to the general public on the day prior to the conference. Thank you...

Susan Zuccotti narrates the life and work of Père Marie-Benoît, a courageous French Capuchin priest who risked everything to hide Jews in France and Italy during the Holocaust. Who was this extraordinary priest and how did he become adept at hiding Jews, providing them with false papers, and helping them to elude their persecutors? From monasteries first in Marseille and later in Rome, Père Marie-Benoît worked with Jewish co-conspirators to build remarkably effective Jewish-Christian rescue ne...

Centro Primo Levi is proud to co-host with the Italian Cultural Institute an evening dedicated to the 30th Anniversary of L'Indice and the 50th Anniversary of the New York Review of Books with Gian Giacomo Migone, Robert Silvers, Victoria De Grazia, Mark Lilla and Eric Foner. Don’t miss it! L’INDICE One of the most respected book magazines in Italy, L'Indice features monthly books reviews and cultural essays on current national and international affairs. With its quarterly supplements, L'Ind...

A Sunday afternoon of music and film presented by Salon/Sanctuary Concerts in collaboration with the Museum of Jewish Heritage and Centro Primo Levi. Curated by Jessica Gould. Program:  Instrumental overture The trio sonatas of Salomone Rossi. Leah Nelson, Lisa Rautenberg (violins), Daniel Swenberg (theorbo) Talk | Francesco Spagnolo, UC Berkeley Rethinking Salomone Rossi’s Music’ Intermission and refreshments Film screening Joseph Rochlitz, Hebreo: In Search of Salomone Rossi Con...

Presented by the Consulate General of Italy, Centro Primo Levi, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, Italian Cultural Institute, Italian Academy at Columbia University, Calandra Institute of Italian American Studies at CUNY. January 29 at 6:00 pm CUNY John Calandra Institute, 25 West 43rd Street Research Notes on Italian Jewish Exiles in the United States, 1938-1945 Fraser Ottanelli (University of South Florida) January 30 at 6:00 pm NYU Casa ItalianaZerilliMarimò, 24 West 12th Street ...

Consulate General of Italy in Philadelphia presents Witnesses of Rebirth: Jewish Refugees in Apulia Introductory remarks by Andrea Canepari Consul General of Italy in Philadelphia and by Rabbi Albert Gabbai Congregation Mikveh Israel. Fabrizio Lelli  Associate Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature at the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy) A conversation with Al Finci Former DP Camp Refugee in Santa Maria al Bagno, Italy Film Screening: Salento, a Bridge to Israel  (directed by M...

Presented by the Consulate General of Italy, Centro Primo Levi, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, Italian Cultural Institute, Italian Academy at Columbia University, Calandra Institute of Italian American Studies at CUNY. January 27 | 9:00 am - 3:30 pm Consulate General of Italy, 690 Park Avenue Ceremony of the reading of the names of the Jews deported from Italy and the Italian territories January 29 | 6:00 pm CUNY John Calandra Institute, 25 West 43rd Street, 17th Floor, NY Researc...

A Tribute to Rita Levi Montalcini Exploring Nerve Growth Factor  Italian Cultural Institute, 686 Park Avenue, NY, (10 am to 1 pm) Opening remarks: Riccardo Viale (ICI) Introduction: Moses Chao (NYU) Speakers: Piergiorgio Strata (National Institute of Neuroscience-Italy),  Ralph Bradshaw (UC/Irvine), Ruth Angeletti (Albert Einstein), Lloyd Greene (Columbia University). Conclusions: Eric Kandel (Nobel Prize, Columbia University). A Young Jewish Scientist in Fascist Italy Center f...

Presentation of David Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (Random House 2014). Panelists: David Kertzer (Brown University), Ruth Ben-Ghiat (New York University), Robert Maryks (Journal of Jesuit Studies & Series of Jesuit Studies, Editor-in-Chief), Mark Weitzman (Simon Wiesenthal Center) From National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI’s secret relations with Italian dictator Benito Mussoli...

CESARE COLAFEMMINA’S PIONEERING RESEARCH Mauro Perani (University of Bologna, Italian Association for Jewish Studies) JEWS AS INTELLECTUAL MEDIATORS IN 15TH CENTURY SOUTHERN ITALY Fabrizio Lelli (University of Salento, University of Pennsylvania) Dedicated to Prof. Cesare Colafemmina’s lifetime work, this program explores the richness of Apulian and Southern Italian Jewish history, current research and communal experience. Home to vital Jewish communities since ancient Roman times, betwee...

Thursday, May 1 | 6 pm  The Attitudes of Italian Jews Towards Fascism in the 1920s Thursday, May 8 | 6 pm Not Facing the Past: Italian Post-Fascist Policies Towards the Jews, 1945-2001 Thursday, May 1 | 6:00 PM The Attitudes of Italian Jews Towards Fascism in the 1920s Not much light has been shed on the history of the relationship between the Italian Jewish community and the Fascist regime prior to Mussolini’s antisemitic attack in 1938. The racial campaign and its tragic consequences hav...

Third Regional New York Conference, Latin American Jewish Studies Association, Americas Society, CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Science. DOWNLOAD LAJSA CONFERENCE PROGRAM After the promulgation of the Fascist anti-Semitic legislation, in the Fall of 1938, Latin America became a destination for many Jews residing in Italy. Argentina and Brazil were the main countries to become home to this new diaspora with fewer exiles fleeing to Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, San...

Presented jointly with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and the Consulate General of Italy on the 90th Anniversary of Matteotti’s murder and Italian National Day. Held with the endorsement of the President of the Italian Republic. Round table Mauro Canali (Università di Camerino) Spencer Di Scala (University of Massachusetts Boston)   8:00 pm Film screening ll delitto Matteotti, by Florestano Vancini, 1973 (In Italian) The barbaric murder of Matteotti, committed on 1...

Jacues Faitlovich and the Lost Tribes A film by Maurice and Sarah Dorés - Presented by the American Sephardi Federation The "extraordinary odyssey" of Jacques Faïtlovitch, a Polish Jew who, in 1904, "discovered" Ethiopian Jewry and set about re-establishing a connection between their community and the rest of the Jewish world. Post-screening discussion with Emanuela Trevisan Semi (University in Venice, Ca' Foscari). Taamrat Emmanuel (1888-1963) was born at Azazo near...

The Man with the Nagra, 2013 Written and Directed by: Yaala Levi Zimmerman, Produced by: Yaala Levi Zimmerman and Johanna Levi, Language: Hebrew and Italian with English subtitles The Man with the Nagra, narrates the life and work of Leo Levi, a prominent Italian intellectual, educator and ethnomusicologist who settled in Israel in 1936. The film combines Levi’s life story with that of the small community of the “Italkim”, his political work as a religious Zionist with his activity as a writer...

Presented with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, Department of Italian Studies, Department of History. This year the Italian Jewish Studies Project is held in connection with the international symposium Legacies of the Italian Occupation in Ethiopia organized by Maaza Mengiste and Ruth Ben Ghiat. Emanuela Trevisan (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice) Taamrat Emmanuel Between Colonized and Colonizer Brook Abdu (Research Fellow at the Capucin Franciscan Research and Retreat Center, Addis Aba...

Wednesday, January 28, 2015 January 29, 2015 at 6 pm John Calandra Italian American Institute at CUNY | 25 W 43rd St 17th fl., NYC. Free admission. Marco Clementi (University of Calabria) will present the first results of the survey conducted on the records of the special bureau of the Italian Carabinieri in Rhodes (today Greece, between 1912 and 1946 Italy). The archive was unexpectedly discovered in 2011 and identified in 2013. It is now being catalogued through a joint project of th...

The Della Seta family films shot in 1923, featuring weddings, leisure time and other daily activities, are the only known video document of Italian Jewish life before the Holocaust. The Italian journalist Claudio Della Seta found the negatives of films in his family home and never imagined they could be screened again. Recently he discovered that the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and the National Restoration Institute had the capability to restore and digitize them. After 91 years ...

Giacomo Moscati, vice-president of the Jewish Community of Rome and Joyce Sarner, documentarian. Giacomo Moscati offers a visual tour of the museum and its magnificent silver and textile collections, introducing the public to the history of Roman Jews between the establishment of the ghetto and the emancipation of 1870. The program will delve into stories of the families that made up a small but highly multicultural Jewish society that was forced to reinvent itself in segregation. Momen...

Film Screening: Oro MachtFrei Directed by Jeffrey Bonna. Produced by Jeffrey Bonna and Catherine Campbell. Executive Producer Joel Markel. Original music composed and performed by Yotam Haber. Post screening discussion: Catherine Campbell, producer. Introduction by Alessandra Di Castro, Director of the Jewish Museum of Rome. After Italy's Armistice with the Allies (Sept 8, 1943), the country was divided: Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic and its German ally, soon to become the occupying...

Tuesday, January 27, 2015 January 27 at 6:00 pm Ambasciata d’Italia 3000 Whitehaven St, NW, Washington, DC 20008 Opening remarks: H.E. Ambassador Claudio Bisognero. Post screening discussion: Marco Clementi, University of Calabria. With an introduction of VadimAltskan, Holocaust Museum Archives Film screening The Island of Roses, A Tragedy in a Paradise.by Rebecca Samonà, 2008 (Italian with English subtitles) Through the memories of her mother ErminiaLicitri, and Stella Levi a famil...

January 27 at 6:00 pm Ambasciata d’Italia, 3000 Whitehaven St, NW, Washington, DC 20008 Opening remarks: H.E. Ambassador Claudio Bisognero. Post screening discussion: Marco Clementi, University of Calabria. With an introduction of Vadim Altskan, Holocaust Museum Archives Film screening The Island of Roses, A Tragedy in a Paradise. by Rebecca Samonà, 2008 (Italian with English subtitles) Through the memories of her mother Erminia Licitri, and Stella Levi a family ...

Marco Clementi (University of Calabria) will present the first results of the survey conducted on the records of the special bureau of the Italian Carabinieri in Rhodes (today Greece, between 1912 and 1946 Italy). The archive was unexpectedly discovered in 2011 and identified in 2013. It is now being catalogued through a joint project of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Greek State Archive. The special bureau was a political surveillance office that, between 1932 and 1945, col...

In collaboration with the Consulate General of Italy, Italian Cultural Institute and the Simon Wiesenthal Center Opening remarks, Giorgio Sacerdoti (President, CDEC) LilianaPicciotto (Director of Research, CDEC) Starting in the last months of World War II, surviving family members of Jews who had been deported to extermination camps prompted the first attempts to locate their loved ones and gather information about their journeys and fates. Soon after, in 1945, the Union of the Italian Jewish...

In collaboration with the Consulate General of Italy, Italian Cultural Institute and the Simon Wiesenthal Center Opening remarks, Giorgio Sacerdoti (President, CDEC) Liliana Picciotto (Director of Research, CDEC) Starting in the last months of World War II, surviving family members of Jews who had been deported to extermination camps prompted the first attempts to locate their loved ones and gather information about their journeys and fates. Soon after, in 1945,...

Centro Primo Levi with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in collaboration with the Jewish Museum of Rome and the Consulate General of Italy present “Unrecovered Memory: The Jewish Communal Library of Rome,” a panel discussion on the story of one of the oldest and most precious Jewish libraries in Europe, which was looted by the Nazis in 1943 and disappeared without leaving any trace. Speakers : Serena Di Nepi, University of Rome La Sapienza and Jewish Museum of ...

Launching of the first books published by CPL Editions (see www.primolevicenter.org) Visual history of S.F. Vanni through historical family photographs Visit the old space and the new one, linking the present to the last memories of publishers’ row in the West Village Refreshments S.F. VANNI, the first Italian bookstore in America, in business from 1884 to 2004, will reopen to launch CPL Editions, Centro Primo Levi's publishing endeavor. The space will remain open...

The idea for If Only I Were That Warrior,  took shape in February 2013 when director Valerio Ciriaci and producer Isaak Liptzin attended a panel discussion on the recently inaugurated monument to Rodolfo Graziani organized by the Calandra Italian American Institute at CUNY and Centro Primo Levi NY. An Italian army general responsible for war crimes and human rights violations in Africa, Graziani was first denounced by the League of Nations and, after the war, brought in front of the United Nati...

Merima Ključo, composer and accordionist, Bart Woodstrup, artist, Seth Knopp, pianist A multimedia work composed by Merima Ključo. Sarajevo Haggadah: Music of the Book traces the incredible journey of this most treasured 14th-century Hebrew illuminated manuscript. Inspired by the musical traditions of Spain, Italy, Austria, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ključo collaborates with artist Bart Woodstrup and pianist Seth Knopp to present a multimedia performance exploring the Sarajevo Haggadah as...

On March 30th from 1 pm to 5 pm Centro Primo Levi will screen films and documentaries from its collection. Special feature of the day will be Emanuele Luzzati’s and Giulio Gianini’s Oscar nominated animation La Gazza Ladra (1964) with music by Gioacchino Rossini. The film is part of a series of animations Luzzati and Giannini created after operas by Rossini and Mozart. Unlike their other films however, this one uses music as base for animation but departs completely from Rossini’s original libre...

David Meghnagi (University of Rome 3) Mordechai HaCohen: Rabbi and Ethnographer Mordekahi Cohen (1856 - 1929) was a prominent rabbi in the Libyan Jewish community. A talmudic scholar, he compiled a monumental work on the Jews of Libya and their relations with the Islamic and Arab world which was published for the first time only in 1978. Rabbi Cohen became interested in early Zionism. A selection of his writings was published in 1931 by Martino Moreno. More recently the Italian publis...

Organized by the United Nations Department of Public Information in cooperation with the Permanent Mission of Italy to the United Nations and B'nai B'rith International. The celebrated Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini is well known for his music and courageous stand against fascism during the Second World War. Cesare Civetta, author of The Real Toscanini: Musicians Reveal the Maestro will give a multimedia presentation to be followed by Q & A. Speakers: Ms. Cristina Gallach, United Nations ...

What the documents – Italian legal, administrative, and judicial sources – showcase emphatically is the central role of lawyers in the Race Laws implementation, laws that address who could own radios or homes, who could operate a business, who could marry whom, and of course, who is legally Jewish. The legal approach is novel to the historical discourse on this time period, which has previously focused on political and social perspectives. Livingston writes in the book: “As compared to Hitler...

SPAZI  METRICI - An encounter with the life and work of Amelia Rosselli (Paris, 1930- Rome, 1996). The daughter of the Italian anti-fascist leader Carlo Rosselli and the English Labour Party activist Marion Cave, Amelia spent her childhood in exile from Fascist Italy, in France, England and the United States. She returned to Italy in 1946. Following her studies in musical composition, she emerged as one of the most important poets of her generation, addressing with a bold new approach to verse,...

André Naffis-Sahely will discuss the work of Alessandro Spina (1927-2013), a Syrian Maronite born in Benghazi who wrote in Italian. Spina received the Bagutta Prize in 2007 for his 1280 page opus The Confines of the Shadow (I confini dell’ombra), a cycle of 11 novels and short story collections that chart the history of Libya from 1912, when Italy invaded the former Ottoman province, to the commercial exploitation of oil reserves in the 1960s. The first volume of Naffis-Sahely’s three-part trans...

Gemma Vitale Servadio, I am Counting on You, on Everyone… (CPL Editions, 2015) Introduction by Mirella Bedarida Shapiro. With an essay by historian Marco Coslovich. Translated by Alta Price. Speakers: Alessandro Cassin, Mirella Bedarida Shapiro and Marco Coslovich Film screening: The Jews of Fossoli, by Ruggero Gabbai and Liliana Picciotto (excerpts) Gemma Vitale Servadio was born in Turin in 1878 into a middle-class Jewish family. When the Racial Laws were enacted she ha...

With David Remnick, Bob Weil and Ann Goldstein. Special guest, the writer's son, Renzo Levi. After 12 years of work, W.W. Norton presents Primo Levi's Complete Works in English. Thus Levi becomes the first Italian writer whose oeuvre is available in English in its entirety. Primo Levi (1919-1987), a chemist and humanist who survived Auschwitz, is known worldwide for If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table. His work has been translated in 38 languages and has become a point of reference i...

Held in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and the Center for Fiction  NORMALITY October 21, 7:00 pm, Center for Fiction, | 17 E. 47th Street. A conversation based on A Silver Martian, Normality and Segregation in Primo Levi's Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge by Paola Mieli, (CPL Editions, 2015). With Paola Mieli (psychoanalyst) and Joan Acocella (writer and critic). Film screening: Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge, directed b...

Sunday, October 25, 2009 Opening remarks by Prof. Andrew Viterbi I feel both honored and inadequate for the role of opening this symposium since I am neither a literary critic nor a historian. Still I have read practically all of Primo Levi’s writings and have spent more time with my first cousin’s husband than probably anyone here. So I accepted the invitation to speak as one who had had the good fortune of enjoying his company at various times over a period of nearly four decades. ...

Reading and discussion from The Drowned and the Saved. Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] The Nazi genocide of European Jews has frequently been described as the paradigm of modern evil. More than any other event, it seems to oppose a group of guilty perpetrators to a mass of innocent victims. The Jews, after all, were not singled out for anything they might have...

Reading and conversation on “On Translating and Being Translated”, (Other People’s Trades) [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] Ann Goldstein (editor of Primo Levi’s Complete Works) and Esther Allen (Baruch College) “To Translate and Be Translated” from: Primo Levi, Other People’s Trades, and was translated by Anthony Shugaar According to Genesis, the first humans had only one language: this made them so ambitious a...

Reading and conversation on Primo Levi’s poems and writing on poetry. [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] André Naffis-Sahely (poet and translator) and Jonathan Galassi (translator of Primo Levi’s poems. Editor in chief, Farrar Straus Giroux). Jonathan Galassi, novelist, publisher and distinguished translator of Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale, will appear in conversation with André Naffis-Sahely to discuss his lifelon...

Book conversation: Primo Levi, The Friend by Bianca Guidetti Serra (CPL Editions, 2015) Opening remarks: Giorgio Van Straten (Italian Cultural Institute) Guri Schwarz (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa), Alessandro Cassin (Centro Primo Levi), Stella Levi (Centro Primo Levi) will read excerpts from the book. A presentation of Primo Levi, The Friend, by Bianca Guidetti Serrra (CPL Editions 2014) offers the opportunity to delve deeper into more personal and intimate sides of Levi’s biography: h...

Film Screening and discussion with the film makers: Oro Macht Frei (Ottimo Film) Directed by Jeffrey Bonna. Produced by Jeffrey Bonna and Catherine Campbell. Executive Producer Joel Markel. Original music composed and performed by Yotam Haber. Post screening discussion: Catherine Campbell, producer. Introduction by Alessandra Di Castro, Director of the Jewish Musuem of Rome After Italy's Armistice with the Allies (Sept 8, 1943), the country was divided: Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic an...

Giorno della Memoria in New York is a collaborative initiative of the Consulate General of Italy with Centro Primo Levi, the Italian Cultural Institute, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, the Italian Academy at Columbia University, CUNY’s John Calandra Italian American Institute. Educational events are also held at the Scuola d’Italia Guglielmo Marconi and the Bronx High School of Science. On January 27, 1945 the Soviet Army entered and liberated the extermination camp of Auschwitz. This date ...

The Simon Wiesenthal Center and Centro Primo Levi are pleased to welcome Prof. Manuela Consonni, newly appointed director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since its founding in 1982, the SICSA has provided one of the most comprehensive academic platforms for the study of the antisemitic prejudice. Under the directorship of Yehuda Bauer, Dalia Ofer and Robert Wistrich, the center has offered conferences, fellowships ...

De Felice’s The Jews in Fascist Italy: An Historical Appraisal On the occasion of the paperback reprint of Renzo De Felice’s The Jews in Fascist Italy, this panel will explore the genesis of the book and its place in contemporary historiography. Commissioned by the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities and published in 1961, it was the first study of the anti-Jewish persecution in Italy to reach a general audience. It was also a young historian's first book on the Fascist era. This glance i...

Opening remarks: Stefano Albertini (Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò) and Natalia Indrimi (Centro Primo Levi). Manuela Consonni (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Michael Livingston (Rutgers University) Manuela Consonni’s new book, "L’eclisse dell’Antifascismo. Resistenza, questione ebraica e cultura politica in Italia, 1943-1989, (Laterza 2015)” (Laterza, 2015), analyzes the history of the “Anti-Fascist paradigm” as the backbone of the Italian Republic, from its inception to its decline. In he...

Job, Primo Levi and the Search for Roots Manuela Consonni (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) In The Search for Roots (1981), Primo Levi discusses four books that shaped his intellectual and individual itinerary. Defining the horizon of his perspective are Job and the black holes. In his reflection on Job’s heavenly monsters Levi addresses the themes of deliverance through laughter, the unjust suffering of man, a man’s stature, and, most importantly, deliverance through knowledge. Why...

I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice Marking the 500th anniversary of the establishment of the Venetian Ghetto (1516 - 2016) In collaboration with the Embassy of Italy in Washington D.C. and the Italian Cultural Institute in NY Shylock's Venice was a crucible of cultures and a magnet for immigration, where – in spite of pervasive prejudic...

Giorno della Memoria in New York is a collaborative initiative of the Consulate General of Italy with Centro Primo Levi, the Italian Cultural Institute, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, the Italian Academy at Columbia University, CUNY’s John Calandra Italian American Institute. Educational events are also held at the Scuola d’Italia Guglielmo Marconi and the Bronx High School of Science. On January 27, 1945 the Soviet Army entered and liberated the extermination camp of Auschwitz. This date ...

Film screening: What the Allies Knew (2015) by Virginie Linhart, produced by Cinetevè, historical supervision by Henry Rousso Registration is required Speakers: Umberto Gentiloni (University of Rome and author of Bombardare Auschwitz?, 2015), Fabienne Servan-Schreiber (producer), Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University). Moderator: Yasmine Ergas (Columbia University) Co-sponsors:Italian Academy at Columbia University; Columbia's Alliance Program and Maison Française, and the Cultural Servic...

Book presentation:Americordo. The Italian Jewish Exiles in America by Gianna Pontecorboli Guest speaker: Judge Guido Calabresi “A fascinating and intriguing book that traces networks of kinship and relationships that reverberate into many developments of the late twentieth century” Susanna Pesenti L’eco di Bergamo. “The meaning and worth of this collection of voices remind us how many individuals and families were driven to flee– human beings deprived of everything, from their dignity to ...

  Centro Primo Levi recommends this program in the Washington area. FESTIVAL EBRAICO. MUSIC OF THE JEWS IN ITALY: A LECTURE WITH MUSICAL SELECTIONS Hazzan Dr. Ramón Tasat and The Kolot HaLev Ensemble, Mike Langlois, piano Presented by The Foundation for Jewish Studies Sunday, March 6 2016, 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm,  Temple Beth Ami, 14330 Travilah Road, Rockville, MD 20850 From the 16th century to the present day, the impact of Italian art and popular music on the musical field has be...

Theatrical reading and meeting with actors and director of the Compagnia de' Colombari Featuring: Reg. E. Cathey, Emmy Award Winning Actor and Members of Compagnia de’ Colombari, Karin Coonrod, Founder and Artistic Director, Compagnia de’ Colombari, Shaul Bassi, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice and Beit Venezia. Join us for an exceptional preview reading and discussion of “The Merchant of Venice” which will be performed outdoors in the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo on July 26, 27, 28, 29, and 31. ...

A reading from Primo Levi’s Complete Works by Francesco Cassata, University of Genoa. Cassata's presentation is part of the Seventh Primo Levi Lecture, funded in 2015 by the Turin Primo Levi International Center. The Lecture has been published by Einaudi in May 2016, with the title "Science fiction?" Storie naturali, the first collection of Primo Levi's science fiction stories, was published in September 1966, under the pen name Damiano Malabaila, wrapped in a paper band by the Einaudi pub...

After the Holocaust – Primo Levi and the Nexus of Science, Responsibility and Humanism The Holocaust and United Nations Outreach Programme in partnership with the Centro Primo Levi New York invite you to a roundtable discussion. Registration is required. Register now The Holocaust and United Nations Outreach Programme in partnership with the Centro Primo Levi New York will present a roundtable discussion titled "After the Holocaust - Primo Levi and the Nexus of Science, Responsibility and...

On the 100th Anniversary of Giorgio Bassani's birth and on the occasion of the publication of his American lectures by CPL Editions. Opening remarks by Giorgio Van Straten, director of the ICI, Dalia Sofer (writer), Andrea Malaguti (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), and the writer’s daughter, Paola Bassani. Admission is free. Program During the 1960s and 1970s Giorgio Bassani spent considerable time in the United States, as president of the ecological as...

The Law Library of Congress, in collaboration with the Embassy of Italy and the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, will host a program on Tuesday, May 24 to mark the 500th anniversary since the establishment of the Jewish Ghetto of Venice in 1516. The program, “La Città degli Ebrei/The City of the Jews: Segregated Space and the Admission of Strangers in the Jewish Ghetto of Venice,” will feature University of Maryland history professors Berna...

Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism, From Florence to Jerusalem and New York Introduction: Giorgio Van Straten (Italian Cultural Institute), Alessandro Cassin (Centro Primo Levi) Speakers:  Patrizia Guarneri (University of Florence), Judge Guido Calabresi (Yale University), Mary Gibson (John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center). Fascism and the racial laws of 1938 dramatically changed the scientific research and the academic community. Guarnieri focuses on psychology,...

Panel discussion with the director and producer (5:30 pm) and film screening (7:15 pm). Directed by Valerio Ciriaci, an Italian filmmaker based in Brooklyn, is a documentary focusing on the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in 1935. Following the construction in 2012 of a monument dedicated to Fascist general Rodolfo Graziani, the film addresses the unpunished war crimes he and others committed in the name of Mussolini’s imperial ambitions. The stories of three characters, filmed in present day Eth...

Join us Tisha B’Av day for a screening of Oro Macht Frei and a lecture by Rabbi Richard Hilary. All programs are free and open to the public. No reservation is required. Information After Italy’s Armistice with the Allies (Sept 8, 1943), the country was divided: Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic and its German ally, soon to become the occupying force, took over the peninsula the from the Alps to area south of Naples, while the Anglo-American troops occupied Sicily, Puglia, Calabria and p...

Seminar in Italian Jewish Studies Presented by Centro Primo Levi - NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and Department of History Introduction: Ruth Ben Ghiat (New York University) Fraser Ottanelli (University of South Florida) Matteo Pretelli (New York University and Middlebury College, Florence) Discussant: Marcella Bencivenni (Hostos Community College, CUNY) [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] Overview Literat...

Writer and cultural critic Alain Elkann in conversation with Donatella Calabi, curator of the 500th Anniversary exhibition on the Venice ghetto. Presented by Marsilio Editori and Rizzoli in collaboration with Centro Primo Levi. Cocktail reception to follow. Venice, the Jews and Europe 1516-2016 is a companion book to the exhibition by the same title mounted at Palazzo Ducale in Venice for the 500th Anniversary of the establishment of the ghetto. Through a rich array of beautifully repro...

Primo Levi's Complete Works at the 16th National Book Festival in Washington D.C. Download Primo Levi's chronology and historical timeline Visit the Book Festival Website   Panel An extraordinary roster of writers, poets and artists will participate in the 2016 Library of Congress National Book Festival, which will take place on Saturday, Sept. 24, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the U.S. capital. Many of America’s – and the world’s – most dist...

CPL Recommends: A dialogue between Ann Goldstein and Marco Belpoliti, editors of Levi's Complete Works respectively in English and Italian Marco Belpoliti, essayist and writer, teaches at the University of Bergamo, contributes to many newspapers and magazines, and co-edits the series “Riga” (Marcos y Marcos) and the online cultural magazine “Doppiozero." A leading scholar of Primo Levi's works, he curated the Italian edition of the complete works of Levi in 1997 for the publisher Einaud...

Historians Anthony Grafton and Carlo Ginzburg will discuss the work of Arnaldo Momigliano, one of the most distinguished 20th-century scholars of ancient and modern history. In 1939, following the passage of Italy’s racial laws, Momigliano was forced to leave his professorship in Turin. He continued his career at Oxford, London, and later in Chicago. His study of ancient and classic historiography and the emergence of national history are essential to the contemporary debate on religion, politic...

Andrew Viterbi in conversation with Maria Teresa Cometto Centro Primo Levi and The Italian Cultural Institute are pleased to present Andrew Viterbi’s memoir Reflections of an Educator, Researcher and Entrepreneur (CPL Editions, Memoirs & Biographies series, 2016). In the book the author examines his life in America as an immigrant child, his success as a scientist and businessman and the principles that inspired his most decisive choices. Dedicated to the memory of both his father ...

Museums and the Memory of Nazi-Fascism, the Holocaust and World War II: Toward a Shared European History? Morning session: 9:00 am to 12:00 noon (faculty and students only. rsvp to info@primolevicenter.org specifying affiliation). Columbia Faculty House, Ivy Lounge, 64 Morningside Drive (if closed use side entrance). Evening session: 5:00 pm. NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, 24 West 12th Street. New York, NY 10011.Free and open to the public.  For this session no reservation is required. ...

Paper Lives. The Little Known Story of Foreign Jews Interned in Italy Presentation: Anna Pizzuti, curator of the database and historical portal on foreign Jews in Italy during World War II, presents her work. Film screening: E42 by Cynthia Madansky, produced during her fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. The film is centered on the story of Katja Tenenbaum, who was born in a town South of Rome where her parents were interned as foreign Jews. Casting Tenenbaum's reflection against t...

Ceremony of the reading of the names of the Jews deported from Italy and Italian territories. Opening remarks by Consul General Francesco Genuardi. Rabbi Nissim Elnecavé will recite kaddish before the beginning of the reading. During the ceremony we will read brief accounts of the lives of men, women and children whom the Nazi and Fascist regimes had labeled as “foreign Jews” or “stateless Jews”. Some of them arrived in Italy in an attempt to leave Europe, remained trapped and were even...

In collaboration with the Center for Fiction   Uri S. Cohen (University of Tel Aviv) We will never know what exactly took place thirty years ago when Primo Levi fell to his death in the stairwell of his ancestral home. The moment is sealed, retaining its silent mystery, a deafening lacuna at the end of a life. Meaningless in terms of reality the nature of his death is of no real importance, while having enormous implications for interpretation. If this survivor willed his barely saved l...

This presentation by Centro Primo Levi of a selection of books from the Renato Maestro Library and Archive in Venice and the Library of Congress, is meant as an invitation to discover the dawn of Hebrew printing and its impact on the environments in which it flourished. Visit the collection! With the book at its center, this site is built like a mosaic of facets of a story that occurred in a distant time and place, where the modes of transmission of knowledge were limited to the reaches of in...

This program is at capacity. Limited standing room tickets may become available on a first-come, first-served basis. Centro Primo Levi, in partnership with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, the Library of Congress and The Jewish Museum, in collaboration with the Italian Embassy and the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, as part of the Carnegie Hall festival La Serenissima: Music and Arts from the Venetian Republic, presents a roundtable discussion on Venice’s 500-year- old Jewish...

  Centro Primo Levi, in partnership with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, the Library of Congress and The Jewish Museum, in collaboration with the Italian Embassy and the Italian Cultural Institute in Washington DC, as part of the Carnegie Hall festival La Serenissima present:   February 20, 5:00 pm. Italian Embassy, 3000 Whitehaven St NW, Washington DC While the program in New York focuses on the centuries of the Venetian Republic, the p...

The Italian Chazanut Roudtable is a project of Italian Jewish music and liturgy established in memory of Erna Finci Viterbi z'l, whose love for tradition and dedication to learning have profoundly contributed to shape the center’s principles. This year is held in collaboration with Kehilah Kedosha Janina. Ashkenazi Songs From the North of Italy Rav Elia Richetti and Dr. Francesco Spagnolo This program features one of Italy’s leading cantors, Rabbi Elia Richetti, performing a selection ...

On September 14th, 2017, Centro Primo Levi and the Jewish Museum of Rome will open a learning space, the Rome Lab, dedicated to the history of the Roman Jews and of the twenty-two centuries relations between Rome and Jerusalem. The Rome Lab, located in the Selz Gallery at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street will offer weekly presentations through January 14th 2018. The public, students and scholars are welcome to join and participate in the conversation. All programs are free. ...

The first session of the Rome Lab features Rav Alberto Funaro, teacher and cantor of the Spanish Temple in Rome. Join us to learn the most beautiful tunes of the Roman liturgy for the Selichot and the High Holidays. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] Traditional liturgical melodies of the Italian and Spanish rite in Rome have been handed down o...

Join Centro Primo Levi and Kehilah Kedosha Janina for Quabbalat Shabbat,  Shabbat service and Selichot with Rav Alberto Funaro and Rav Nissim Elnecavé. Service will be held according to the Roman and the Spanish traditions. Service is open to all. Seating is limited. Please let us know you will be attending: info@primolevicenter.org. There will be a kiddush on Friday night and refreshments will be served for kiddush on Saturday.   The Minhag Benè Roma Italian Jews are under many resp...

On October 16th at 6:00 pm, the Rome Lab will present a film screening dedicated to the memory of the over 2,000 Jewish men, women and children who were rounded up and deported Auschwitz on October 16th, 1943 and during the following 9 months. The film, "Una Giornata Particolare" by Claudio Della Seta. The film is a narrated journey among a series of home-film shot in the 1920s and 1930s by several members of the Della Seta-Di Segni families in Rome who had acquired one of the first 16 mm. am...

Join acclaimed historian Paula Fredriksen (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on a fascinating journey into the formative era of Western Judaism. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] Everyone knows that Rome destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE. But most people do not appreciate how much, in the period before the War, Rome also built up Jerusalem, serving a...

Minority, Religion and Roman Law, Alessandro Saggioro, University of Rome La Sapienza and Seth Schwarz, Columbia University. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] This event has been postponed. A film screening will take place this evening: Luigi Magni, In the Name of teh Pope King (english subtitles). On February 15th, 438 the Emperor Theodosi...

Frivolous, Ironic and Erotic Like the Bible: The Poetry of Immanuel da Roma. Ann Brener, Library of Congress, Isabelle Levy, Columbia University. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org [vcex_spacing size="30px"] Born around 1261 to a notable Jewish family in Rome, Immanu'el ben Šelomoh (Immanuel Romano) might have been a physician and is considered one of the most innovative (and perhaps controversial) Hebrew authors of all ages. H...

“Io so’ jodìo romano”: The Jewish-Roman Dialect Out of the Ghetto Daniel Leisawitz, Muhlenberg College Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org [vcex_spacing size="30px"] This presentation examines the life-long project of the Jewish-Roman poet and historian, Crescenzo Del Monte (1868-1935), and its changing socio-political implications as Italy transformed from a representational democracy to a Fascist dictatorship.  Del Monte dedicated much of his l...

The Jerusalem Temple in the Jewish Renaissance. Imagining Spaces Beyond Historical Boundaries. Giuseppe Veltri, University of Hamburg. The destruction of the Temple in the first century was not the end of the sacred meaning of a precious building. On the contrary, it was the beginning of a new imaginative space built in a time without limits but within the boundaries of the history. The Jewish Sage of the rabbinic period replaced the sacrifices with the Torah and the building with the presenc...

This session will explore the rabbinical elite’s views of the Romans and the foundational story of Yavneh. Amram Tropper, Ben Gurion University, Ron Naiweld, French, National Centre for Scientific Research -Moderator: Shai Secunda, Bard College. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org Another Tale of Two Cities: Jerusalem and Yavneh Amram Tropper, Ben Gurion University The rabbinic movement emerged in Yavneh following the destruction of Jerusalem.  S...

Rome and the Jews at the Times of the Ghetto, Serena Di Nepi, University of Rome La Sapienza. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org By establishing ghettos in the Papal States, in 1555 Pope Paul IV marked a milestone in the history of Italian Jews. In spite of the fact that the segregation in Rome came nearly 40 years after the Venetian decree on the settlement of Jews in the laguna (1516) and 9 years after a similar one that was issued in Ragusa  (today Du...

To be a scribe in Italy: A Century Old Legacy Rav Amedeo Spagnoletto, Collegio Rabbinico Italiano. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org According to scholars a great part of the most precious Jewish manuscripts produced up to the 15th century have a connection with the Italian peninsula. A unique calligraphic tradition developed in Italy as a synthesis of different traditions that at one point coalesced and formed a distinct style that has resisted the ...

Rav Amedeo Spagnoletto, Collegio Rabbinico Italiano. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org Traditions of Roman Jews: Life and Religion In the history of the Jewish people, the minhag (custom) has not been a factor of division and exclusivity but represented facets of a cohesive system which, over time, has helped Jews to adapt and survive. Roman Jews have always regarded their customs as a direct link to Eretz Israel. Over the centuries they developed ri...

Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org Alessandra Di Castro, Museo Ebraico di Roma, Serena Di Nepi, University of Rome La Sapienza, Rav Amedeo Spagnoletto, Collegio Rabbinico Italiano, Olga Melasecchi, Museo Ebraico di Roma. Every Saturday, in the Synagogue of Rome after the reading of the Torah, the community is blessed. According to the Italian rite a special blessing is added for “every daughter of Israel who makes a me‘il or a mitpachat in honour of the ...

Ra’anan Boustan, Princeton University. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org The Jewish inhabitants of medieval Rome, like their Christian neighbors, dwelt in a landscape crowded with monuments to and memorabilia from the city’s glorious history. Alongside its collections of imperial and ecclesiastical artifacts, Rome also housed—or was said to house—countless items from the ancient Jewish past, such as the ritual vessels from the Jerusalem Temple. Moreover...

Two 18th Century Roman Jews in Eretz Israel: Amadio Abbina and Sabato Isacco Ambron. Asher Salah, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org   July 9, 1746. In the middle of the night, two Jews of the Roman ghetto, Amadio Abbina and Sabato Isacco Ambron, leave the city on a gig, as if they were going for a short visit in the countryside. They will be reunited with their families only a year later. For four months they tra...

Gallery talk. Giuseppe Valadier’s Restoration of the Arch of Titus. Marina Caffiero, University of Rome La Sapienza. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org Very little of what we see today of the Arch of Titus belongs to the original structure, as Stendhal put it "only a copy remains". In medieval times, when the forum was already in complete decay, the monument was incorporated in the Frangipane Fortresse remaining barely visible to the public. It was not u...

Michela Andreatta, University of Rochester, Serena Di Nepi, University of Rome La Sapienza, Jane Tylus, New York University Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org In 2016 and 2017 Italy celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Orlando Furioso. This conversation offers a reading of Ariosto's 16th centuries literary masterpieces from a Jewish perspective. It appears that  Orlando received considerable attention in the Jewish world. Among its numerous transla...

Marina Caffiero, University of Rome La Sapienza. Free and open to the public. Reservations: romelab@primolevicenter.org Marina Caffiero will discuss the symbolism of the ceremony of the Papal adventus, its transformation over time and the role of the Jews. In the Middle Ages, Roman Jews used to exhibit for the new Pope and later present him with a  Torah scroll. Through this act they defined themselves as people of the book. Some sources report of a ritual in which upon receiving ...

The Garden State Philarmonic Orchestra and the Aldo Finzi Association present for the first time at Carnegie Hall Aldo Finzi's symphonic music. Program “Shylock” – Ouverture La serenata al Vento – Arie Liriche Sonata per violino e pianoforte "Cyrano di Bergerac" - Poema sinfonico   Interpreters Maestro Alessandro Calcagnile, conductor Raphael Negri – violin Simonetta Heger – piano Ágnes Molnár – soprano Elizabeth Herzberg – soprano Francesco Anile - tenore John...

Iom Romì, a short film born within the Rome Lab, will be screened at the New York Jewish Film Festival on January  21 together with the Della Seta home movies. Don't miss them! The Rome Lab, dedicated to the encounter between Rome and Judaism, will close on January 14th, 2018. Documentation of the virtual installation, research, publications, and lectures will be available through this website.   "Iom Romì" (A day in Rome) chronicles a day in the life of the contemporary Jewish communit...

Join us for the annual ceremony of the reading of the names. On January 29, 2018, the Consulate General of Italy, Centro Primo Levi, the Italian Cultural Institute and our academic partners, NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, the Calandra Institute for Italian American Studies and the Italian Academy at Columbia University, invite you to partecipate in the ceremony of Holcaust Remembrance and read the names of 9,700 Jews deported from Italy and the territories under Italian control. In ligh...

Luca Fenoglio (University of Leicester), is the author of Angelo Donati e la "questione ebraica" nella Francia occupata dall'esercito italiano (Silvio Zamorani, 2013). In this presentation he will analyze the rescue efforts orchestrated by Angelo Donati, a prominent Jewish lawyer from Modena who tried to find exit pathways for Jewish refugees caught in the Italian-occupied zone of France. His plans were ultimately hindered by conflicting agendas and lack of political interest in the fate of refu...

This program is organized through a partnership between Centro Primo Levi and the Columbia Seminar in Modern Italian Studies. It is held at the Italian Academy and is meant for students and faculty. Reservation os required. Visit the Seminar's webpage for details. Luca Fenoglio (Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Leicester). Respondent: Susan Zuccotti (author of Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue and Holocaust Odysseys: The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vésubie an...

Nation-Building through Antisemitism: Fascist Italy and the Jew as Internal Enemy Ernest Ialongo, Associate Professor of History at Hostos Community College of The City University of New York. In 1938, Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini institutionalized antisemitism in his country with the Racial Laws, and set in motion events that culminated in the Holocaust in Italy. Scholars have put forward a number of reasons for this new policy. However, all such reasons are specific to the l...

This series presented by the Italian Cultural Institute in collaboration with Centro Primo Levi highlights the stories of those Italian artists, scientists, and intellectuals who were forced to leave Fascist Italy for political reasons or racial persecution, and fled to the United States. Panels of scholars and writers will explore how their exile not only influenced their professional pathway and personal lives but also changed the intellectual scene in Italy and America. Free and open to th...

Groundbreaking research project opens new avenues to understand survival. Welcoming remarks: Consul General of Italy Francesco Genuardi Introduction: Andrew Viterbi. Liliana Picciotto (Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation), Susan Zuccotti (author of Père Marie-Benoît And Jewish Rescue How A French Priest Together With Jewish Friends Saved Thousands During The Holocaust), Mordechai Paldiel (Historian and former Director of the The Righteous Among the Nations - Yad Vashem) Admi...

Centro Primo Levi presents Alain Elkann's quasi-autobiographical novel Money Must Stay in the Family (CPL EDITIONS, 2018) together with recently restored family home movies shot in the 1930’s. Presented in collaboiration with the Consulate General of Italy and the American Sephardi Federation. Welcoming remarks: Consul General of Italy Francesco Genuardi. Alessandra Stanley, journalist, and former New York Times bureau chief in Rome and Moscow in conversation with Mario Calvo-Platero, writ...

The second session of the series Creativity and Exile features the legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini who left fascist Italy in protest of Mussolini's Racial Laws and settled in America where he left a profound mark on the way in which symphonic music is performed and understood. Music director of the Los Angeles Opera, James Conlon will discuss Toscanini's experience with his biographer, the renowned musicologist, Harvey Sachs. Free and open to the public. Make a reservation. [vcex_d...

The series aims at highlighting the stories of Italian artists, scientists, and intellectuals forced to leave Italy for political reasons and racial persecution, and come to the United States. Historians Renato Camurri and Federico Finchelstein discuss the American experience of two political intellectuals: Gaetano Salvemini and Max Ascoli. Salvemini and Ascoli who both fled to the US as political dissenters, represent two very different souls of antifascism. While Ascoli eventually emb...

Historians Davide Rodogno (The Graduate Institute) and Sergio Luzzatto (University of Turin) will present and discuss their current research on cases in which, during the century that was theater to two world conflicts, the notion of humanitarian intervention took shape and and shaped the societies that received it as well as those that practiced it. Admission: this program is primarily meant for an academic audience. A limited number of seats are available for the general public. Location: W...

Viterbi Symposium in Mediterranean Jewish Studies Series. Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies This half-day symposium brings together a group of distinguished, international scholars engaged with the life, writings, and impact of Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jew who survived Auschwitz and helped define what it means to bear witness to the Holocaust—and the modern condition. More than a survivor of the Holocaust, Levi was also a chemist, a humanist, and a storyteller, whose wr...

A conversation with Shulim Vogelman (La Giuntina, Florence) Born in Florence in 1978, Shulim Vogelmann received a degree in History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and went on to become director of the Giuntina Publishing house which his father founded. Vogelmann initiated a new series of Israeli literature called "Israeliana" for which he translated 15 novels.  For ten years he curated the International Festival of Jewish Literature in Rome.  In 2004 he published the novel Mentre la ...

The Divan of Moses-Ibn-Ezra op. 207 (1966), voice and guitar. Luigi Attademo, guitar Free and open to the public. Make a reservation. Musing his own life and exile in the last years of life, the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco decided to dedicate a cycle of song to the Spanish poet Moses Ibn Ezra whose exile from his native Granada disrupted his early life and became a source of inspiration. Castelnuovo Tedesco came himself from a family of Spanish origin that traced its arrival...

The Rome Lab, Centro Primo Levi's collaboration with the University of Rome La Sapienza, continues with Paula Fredriksen's inaugural lecture for La Sapienza's newly established Master Course in Jewish History. The project is held in cooperation with the Jewish Museum of Rome and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. The Master Course is the first of its kind in Italy, where, in spite of a flourishing scholarship in Jewish studies, no dedicated chair or department has ever been establish...

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and the infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return to barbarism. — Primo Levi [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14p...

Book talk with Simon Levis Sullam (University of Venice Ca' Foscari) "The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy" (Princeton University Press, 2018) In conversation with Alexander Stille (Columbia) and Federico Finchelstein (The New School for Social Research) Sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at The Graduate Center in collaboration with the History PhD Program and Centro Primo Levi NY. Free admission. Reserve your seat at this link. [vcex_divider style="sol...

The series continues with a panel discussion that explores the experience of two Italian artists: Corrado Cagli and Costantino Nivola, who fled Fascist Italy for America and whose experience of exile become a platform to reflect upon art, cross-fertilization, and creativity. Panelists: Giuliana Altea and Raffaele Bedarida. Costantino Nivola and Corrado Cagli came from very different backgrounds. Nivola, from rural Sardinia, was the son of a mason, Cagli from Ancona and Rome was born in...

Manuela Consonni (The Hebrew University and Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism). Introduced and moderated by Federico Finchelstein (The New School for Social Research). Copresented by the History Department at Eugene Lang College, the New School for Social Research and The Janey Program in Latin American Studies. Free admission [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] Through a re-reading of s...

Reading and panel discussion on Elsa Morante's La Storia (History, a Novel). In Italian with English translation. Organized by Centro Primo Levi and the Italian Cultural Institute on the 80th anniversary of the promulgation of the Racial Laws and the 75th anniversary of the deportation of the Jews of Rome. Free admission “An indictment against all the fascisms of the world. And an urgent, desperate plea addressed to everyone for a possible common awakening.” La Storia -a towering exampl...

Ruth Ben Ghiat and Alexander Stille in conversation with Mauro Canali on his new research and book La scoperta dell’Italia on American correspondents in Fascist Italy. Respondent to be announced. Co-presented by Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, NYU Department of History and Centro Primo Levi. Prof. Canali will present in Italian with English interpreter. Mauro Canali’s new research, published as La scoperta dell’Italia, examines the activity, impact, and perspectives of American correspondent...

This lecture by Michele Sarfatti Introduced by David Kertzer, is sponsored by the Centro Primo Levi, the Italian Academy at Columbia University, and the Columbia University Seminar in Modern Italian Studies, and presented on the occasion of the upcoming publication of a special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies focusing on the 80th anniversary of the implementation of the Racial Laws in Italy. The volume, edited and introduced by Annalisa Capristo and Ernest Ialongo, is in honor of ...

Seminar. An introduction to the study of Mussolini's Racial Laws presented by one of the leading scholars in the field. Organized by Centro Primo Levi with Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò. NYU Departments of Italian and History. Introduced by Ruth Ben Ghiat and David Forgacs. Sessions will be held on October 22, 24 and 26. Registration is required: Molly Engelmann (molly@primolevicenter.org). Attendance is free. Please specify date, name and affiliation. These sessions are not open to the gen...

FASCISM AND THE “DEFENCE OF RACE”  From 1938 Racial Laws to the Present  November 4-5, 2018, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rabin Building, Mount Scopus Campus. Visit: www.sicsa.huji.ac.il   Saturday, 3 November 2018 Hevrat Yehude Italia BeIsrael, 25 Hillel Street, Jerusalem   Sunday, 4 November 2018 Rabin Building, room 3001, Gatherings 16:00-16:15   Barak Medina Rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Fabio Ruggirello, Istituo Italiano di Cultura, Tel ...

You are cordially invited to join us for an evening dedicated to the Italian silk talit tradition. Presenters: Dora Piperno, Celeste Pavoncello Piperno, Rav Umberto Piperno Tasting of kosher Italian bottarga, wine and citron sweets from Calabria Organzied by the American Sephardi Federation, Centro Primo Levi, Talled Di Seta. Seating is limited and reservation is required: info@primolevicenter.org [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" mar...

A film by Tamar Tal Anati. Italy, November 1943. The Italian Social Republic orders the arrest of all Jews present on its territory.  A Florentine family, the Gnagnattis, composed of parents, four children and two grandmothers, flees the first round up in the city and seeks refuge on the mountains. The brothers spent months hiding in a cave in the Tuscan countryside. After World War II they moved to Israel and became Israelis. Shalom Italia tells the story of three of them reuniting in Italy nea...

An evening dedicated to Paolo Milano and Renato Poggioli, two Italian intellectuals instrumental in the development of a cultural dialogue between Italy and the United States, particularly in the fields of literature and comparative literature. Paolo Milano came to the United States in 1938 due to the racial laws and remained until 1957;  Renato Poggioli, a fervent antifascist, left Italy as well, in 1938, never to return, but maintaining strong bonds with his country of origins, so much so t...

Continuing the series "Exile and Creativity," this evening explores the lives and works of the writer and political activist Amelia Pincherle Rosselli (1870-1954) and her granddaughter, the avantgard poet, Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996). Marina Calloni (University of Milan) and Jennifer Scappettone (poet and translator) The two Amelia Rosselli whose lives and work will be discussed and celebrated, were respectively, the mother and the daughter of the anti-Fascist leader Carlo Rosselli, founde...

Film screening and panel discussion with the filmmaker and scholars Pentcho (2018) By Stefano Cattini Produced by  Sonne Film, Mosaic Film, RAI Cinema, Emilia Romagna Film Commission. Between the years 1934 and 1939, illegal immigration to Palestine grew in response of the increasingly oppressive measure against German and Eastern European Jewry, the restrictions imposed by the British Government through the Jewish Agency and eventually, the outbreak of the war.  One of the main g...

Scuola d’Italia Guglielmo Marconi, 12 E 96th Street 1938-1945 The Persecution of Jews in Italy A Documentary History A traveling Exhibition by the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan. January 25-February 6 The exhibition is designed for students and teachers and can be visited by appointment. For additional information contact the Scuola d'Italia at (212) 452-4813. [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="...

Join us for the ceremony of the reading of the names of the Jews deported from Italy and the Italian territories. Consulate General of Italy, January 28th, 2019 from 9 am to 3:30 pm. Information: info@primolevicenter.org   January 31, 1946  Report by Massimo Adolfo Vitale on the persecution of the Jews of Italy, Centro Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Digital Library, www.cdec.it The tragedy of Italian Jews and of the foreign Jews who lived in Italy and were deported to Germa...

Film screening and discussion with Giorgio Treves (filmmaker), Ernest Ialongo (Hostos Community College, CUNY) and Nina Valbousquet (Fordham University) 1938 - Diversi (2018), By Giorgio Treves Produced by Tangram Film/Roberto Levi and Carolina Levi, in collaboration with Sky Arte, Piemonte Film Fund, MiBACT, AB Groupe e AAMOD "Fascism can still return under the most innocent appearance. Our duty is to unmask it and to point to each of its new forms - every day, in every part of the world...

Eve Wolf, Executive Artistic Director of ERC, Donald T. Sanders, Director of Theatrical Production of ERC, Harvey Sachs (Author of Toscanini: Musician of Conscience). Moderated by Stefano Albertini (NYU) Further information Ensemble for the Romantic Century's theatrical concert Maestro, which runs at the Dukes Theater until February 9th starring John Noble, brings to life the story of legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini and his brave opposition to Fascism. His refusal to perform in Italy ...

Film screening and discussion with Peter Stastny and Paola Mieli (Après-coup Psychoanalytic Association) Redemption Blues (2017). By Peter Stastny. Produced by Peter Stastny, Lucia Schrenk, Roland Hablesreiter – Transmitter Film Redemption Blues, a film about the onerous legacy of the Holocaust, begins where conventional Shoah narratives leave off and traces a path forward, exploring redemption through the second generation’s point of view. At a time when the last members of the survivor g...

As part of the Exile and Creativity series  organized in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in New York,  Renato Camurri will discuss the work of the Nobel Laureate economist, Franco Modigliani. [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] "My mother and Fräulein Pabst had taught me a little German, and I was asked to translate some articles from German into Italian by the Traders’ Federation. In this way I made ac...

The series comes to an end with a conversation between two of the most renowned historians of our time: Carlo Ginzburg and Saul Friedländer. [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] From: Wooden Eyes. Nine Reflections on Distance. by Carlo Ginzburg, Columbia University Press, 2004 The reader will find here nine essays, three of them previ­ously unpublished, that I have written during the last decade. The "distance" referre...

As part of the Carnegie Hall Migrations Festival, Centro Primo Levi and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts present an evening with art historian Raffaele Bedarida dedicated to the experience of Italian artist and cultural organizer Corrado Cagli. The Cantori New York directed by Mark Shapiro will perform excerpts of Vittorio Rieti's music for the Magnifico. Free (registration required) at 212-642-0142. Additional information: www.primolevicenter.org and www.nypl.or...

Pankaj Mishra Reads The Drowned and the Saved This lecture inaugurates a series of programs to mark Primo Levi’s Hundredth Anniversary held at various venues in town, including the New York Public Library, the Italian Cultural Institute and Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò. Following the center’s tradition of providing a platform for readings of Levi’s work stemming from contexts and experiences others than those in which they originated. Novelist and essayst Pankaj Mishra will draw on two cha...

To celebrate the centennial of Primo Levi's birth, writers, performers, and scholars gather for a multilingual, full-length reading of his seminal memoir. Promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute in collaboration with the New York Public Library and Centro Primo Levi.  “ I've always thought that bridges are the most beautiful work there is..." —Primo Levi In 1947, just three years after he had been liberated from Auschwitz, Primo Levi published If This Is a Man, an unsparing account...

Michael Rothberg (UCLA) will discuss his new book in conversation with Gil Hochberg (Columbia University). Presented by the Rifkind Center for the Humanities and the Arts at the City College of New York in collaboration with Centro Primo Levi and the Columbia University Cultural Memory Seminar. When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit fr...

Presentation of a new anthology edited by poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, offering a uniquely varied look at a theme both ancient and urgently contemporary. Reception to follow. André Naffis-Sahely, Jenny Xie (NYU, Graywolf poet), Aaron Robertson (Lit Hub Editor and translator of Ethiopian memoirist Martha Nasibù) and Jonathan Galassi (poet and translator, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Sinan Antoon (poet, translator) and Jee Leong Koh (poet). The Heart of a Stranger charts the histo...

Centro Primo Levi and the Rhodes Jewish Historical Foundation in partnership with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, Kehila Kedosha Janina and the American Sephardi Federation present: Los Corassones Avlan. Conversations on Jewish Life on the Island of Rhodes. A multimedia pop-up installation in the West Village. Visiting hours: Monday through Thursday: 12 noon to 1:30 and 5 pm to 9 pm. Sunday: 1 pm to 5 pm. Saturday night open when events take place. Check our calendar! Los Corassones A...

Uri Cohen: Affection and Survival: Primo Levi and Friendship in the Camp Affection is a lesser known aspect of the human and Jewish experience in the camps. Mostly it is related to the fractured past of which the camp is the present. Having written some of the essential pages on the human experience in the Lager, Primo Levi continued contemplating and writing about it throughout his life. This talk will question affection in Levi’s writing and its place in the camp as a strategy of survival. ...

Please join us for an evening of poetry at 148 West 4th Street. Visit the pop-up installation Los Corassones Avlan. This imaginary monologue on memory and history revisits the encounters and clashes between the Ottoman and European worlds as seen through the eyes of young women from the tiny Jewish minority of Rhodes who, at the time, were in their teens and twenties. Taking inspiration from the women in Rhodes who, on Saturday night, gathered with neighbors to sing and tell stories after the...

Film screening and conversation: The Island of Roses, Tragedy in Paradise, by Rebecca Samonà.    

For over two hundred years, the island of Rhodes was ruled by the Knights of St. John who had taken it over from the Genoese after they lost Jerusalem to the Saladin in the First Crusade. The knights built a castle, palaces, imposing walls. Everything on the island became enveloped in the stark stone monuments they erected, next to which even the  largest tree appeared small. Because of the magnitude of their fortress and homes, even after the Ottomans forced them out and filled the city with mi...

An afternoon tea with Enrico Fink, musician, scholar, improviser, chazan and story-teller from Florence who will talk and sing about the many influences and exchanges that shaped the liturgy of Jews all over the Mediterranean. At Los Corassones Avlan, 146 West 4th Street, Friday, November 8th at 2 pm! Poetry of devotion, joy and sorrow – a glimpse into the fascinating world of Italian Sephardic piyutim, as can be found today in the traditional repertoires of Italian Jewish communities for Tis...

Daphna Mor (voice, winds, percussion) and Kane Mathis (oud) return to Los Corassones Avlan with an intimate acoustic musical performances inspired by the tradition of families, women and neighbors sitting together to make music, on Saturday night in Rhodes. The crossover of melodies includes Turkish, Greek, Judeo-español, Balkan and Mediterranean as well as liturgical hymns - Piyutim -from the Synagogue and liturgy. Don't miss it at Los Corassones Avlan, 148 West 4th Street on Saturday, Novem...

Berkley-based psychologist Elliot Touriel discussed with Stella Levi their shared memories of Rhodes, how they made use of them during their lives, and where they lead us today. At Los Corassones Avlan, 148 West 4th Street, on November 12 at 6 pm!  

Daphna Mor (voice, winds, percussion) and Adam Good (oud) return to Los Corassones Avlan with an intimate acoustic musical performances inspired by the tradition of families, women and neighbors sitting together to make music, on Saturday night in Rhodes. The crossover of melodies includes Turkish, Greek, Judeo-español, Balkan and Mediterranean as well as liturgical hymns - Piyutim -from the Synagogue and liturgy. Don't miss it at Los Corassones Avlan, 148 West 4th Street on Saturday, Novembe...

Film screening and conversation: The Island of Roses, Tragedy in Paradise, by Rebecca Samonà. 2008/Italy, 56 min., documentary, in Italian with English subtitles Written and directed by Rebecca Samonà. Produced by L’Altravista and Rebecca Samonà. Post-screening conversation with Erminia and Gloria Licitri. Pregnant with her second child, Rebecca Samonà goes to the island of Rhodes to research family stories, accompanied by her mother Erminia Licitri and Stella Levi, a family friend who survi...

Please join us for an evening of poetry at 148 West 4th Street. Visit the pop-up installation Los Corassones Avlan. This imaginary monologue on memory and history revisits the encounters and clashes between the Ottoman and European worlds as seen through the eyes of young women from the tiny Jewish minority of Rhodes who, at the time, were in their teens and twenties. Taking inspiration from the women in Rhodes who, on Saturday night after the Havdala, gathered with neighbors to sing and tell...

We continue the conversation on poetry from the perspective of Spanish Jewish practitioners. Isabelle Levy, Tamar Menashe, and Raymond P. Scheindlin will read poems in some of the languages of Sephardi Jews and discuss the interconnected histories of secular Hebrew poetry of al-Andalus, the Judeo-Spanish romansas which drew upon Castilian and Galician-Portuguese tropes, and the contiguous poetic practices in Arabic and romance-languages. At Los Corassones Avlan, 148 West 4th Street, on Novemb...

Ian Thomson presents the new edition of his classic biography of Primo Levi. Program presented in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute and NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò. From the Preface I did not choose to write Levi’s biography; Levi had no sooner died than a London publishing house approached me. At first I demurred. Intellectually there seemed to be little point in such a book. Levi was a writer of ethical meditation in the school of the Renaissance essayist Michel d...

Women of Rhodes Stella Levi in conversation with Michael Frank about the grandmothers, mothers, older sisters, and younger cousins of the Juderia and how their lives changed - or didn't - with the passage of time. [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] Michael Frank is the author of a memoir, The Mighty Franks, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection that was named one of the best books of 2017 by The Tel...

Los Corassones Alan at 148 West 4th Street will close on Sunday, November 24th and 5 pm. We wish to thank all of the visitors who came and participated in shaping this installation with their questions and thoughts. We are grateful to the work and creativity of those who contributed to create this installation and kept it moving for the time it remained open. And many thanks to the writers and newspapers as they helped bring it to a much larger public than our small center could reach. ...

European preview: Efratia Gitai’s Correspondence, CPL Editions New York 2019. Featuring: Makram J. Khoury, Yael Abecassi, Hanna Schygulla, Clara Khoury and special guest, Claire Bloom. [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] One woman’s intimate record of the tumultuous world in which Israel was born. Efratia Gitai was born in Haifa, 1909. Her parents had arrived only a few years before from Białystok. She was one o...

Eleanor Foa Dienstag in conversation with Meryl Gordon. In post-World War II America, who ever heard of an Italian Jew? No one. Journalist and author Eleanor Foa, born in Italy, raised in America, daughter of a brilliant father whose Italian-Jewish roots trace back to 16th-century printers, was proud of her exotic roots, yet knew little about her lineage. In 2006, accompanied by her American born sister, she retraces the footsteps of their ancestors through northern Italy (Soragna, Cortemaggi...

Join us for the ceremony of the reading of the names of the Jews deported from Italy and the Italian territories. Consulate General of Italy, January 27th, 2019 from 9 am to 3:30 pm. Click here to reserve a time to read. [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] Giorno della Memoria: Twenty Years of Remembrance in Italy Twenty-four years have passed since the establishment of January 27th in Germany as the day of commemo...

An exhibition of drawings from the internment camp, sketchbooks with notations on architecture, art history and decorative arts, sketches, paintings, family photographs and official papers. Curated by Cynthia Madansky In collaboration with Centro Primo Levi _____ Leo Yeni: An artist’s Paper Life Leo Yeni was 23 year old in 1943, when Italy surrendered to the Allies and precipitated into chaos and a civil war. The journey that would eventually take him to New York along with tho...

Dramatic reading of Maria Eisenstein's diary Internee n.6, (1944), one of the earliest testimonies of life in a fascist concentration camp. Details to be announced. Excerpts for the reading are translated from the Italian original: Maria Eisenstein, L'internata numero 6, edizione critica a cura e con un saggio introduttivo di Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2014 (prima edizione Roma 1944). Introduction by and Q&A with Carlo Spartaco Capogreco (Università della Calabria)....

"Children imprisoned behind barbed wire! Here is one of the typical symptoms of this heroic age of ours. […]  Some of these kids were born in detention, spent their entire childhood in the primitive huts of internment camps, living on convict rations, laughing and playing in the shadow of fascist militia. They grew up in deprived and unhealthy conditions, anxiously looked after by older internees – their companions in misfortune – and kept under continued surveillance, with a kind of resentment,...

Modernity, Fascism & Resistance: How Four Ethiopians Confronted, Maneuvered and Survived the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-1941 Filmmaker Yemane Demissie’s forthcoming social-history documentary series, The Quantum Leapers: Ethiopia 1916-1975, focuses on the buoyant and tumultuous experiences of Ethiopians during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Synthesizing imagery and narratives from more than 500 interviews and thousands of photographs unearthed from the interviewees’ collections and doz...

Join the Jewish Music Forum, Salon Sanctuary, American Society for Jewish Music, and NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò for an evening with ensemble members performing in Ester, Liberatrice del Popolo Ebreo ("Esther, Liberator of the Jewish People") by Alessandro Stradella (1639 -1682). Scholar of 17th-century oratorio, Eugenio Refini (New York University) and  members of the Salon/Sanctuary ensemble will perform excerpts and discuss the opera. Admission is free. Please reserve seats by emai...

Centro Primo Levi Editions is pleased to announce the English language publication of Efratia Gitai: Correspondence 1929–1994, with a stage reading of a selection of the letters featuring Barbara Sukowa, Ronald Guttman and pianist Yali Levi Schwartz. Admission:  General $12, Seniors $10, Students $8, free for MoMA members. Reserve your tickets. [vcex_divider style="solid" icon_color="#000000" icon_size="14px" margin_top="20px" margin_bottom="20px"] Born in 1909 in Haifa to Russian Zioni...

Simon Levis Sullam (University of Venice Ca' Foscari) and Marla Stone (Occidental College). Sponsored by the Alan Leve Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA in collaboration with Centro Primo Levi NY. Free admission. Reserve your seat at this link or contact: cjsrsvp@humnet.ucla.edu or call (310) 267-5327 to register. Viterbi Lecture in Mediterranean Jewish Studies. Sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies in collaboration with Centro Primo Levi NY Istituto Italiano di Cult...

This event has been cancelled. Giorgio Van Straten, Alessandro Cassin, Alexander Stille and Fraser Ottanelli. Exile and Creativity, published by CPL Editions, is a collection of essays  from a program series held in 2017-18 by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York jointly with Centro Primo Levi. The essays examine the lives of Italian man and women who were forced or chose exile during the Fascist era. These include Enrico Fermi, Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco, Arturo Toscanini, Nicola ...

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...

"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

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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: ...

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 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 ...

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...

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...

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...

NYU, Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, the Calandra Institute at CUNY, and Italian Academy at Columbia University present: A conversation: Stefano Albertini (Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, NYU), Anthony Tamburri (Calandra Institute, CUNY), Bianca Finzi Contini Calabresi ( Columbia University). Alessandro Cassin (Centro Primo Levi), Michael Korie (Librettist, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis opera). Seats are sold out. Please click here to make a reservation for online attendance “I am Mi...

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...

The Centro Leo Levi per lo studio del Patrimonio Liturgico Ebraico presents the Thesaurus of Italian Jewish Music, an online resource for cantors, scholars and the general public . This event is dedicated to the memory of three Italian chazanim: rav Elia Richetti z'l (1950-2021),  rav Vittorio Chaim Della Rocca z'l (1933-2021), and rav Fernando Belgrado z'l (1913-1998). The Online Thesaurus of Italian Jewish Music is live at www.jewishitalianmusic.org  in collaboration with: National Libra...

Brooke Gladstone (On the Media) in conversation with David Kertzer on his new book The Pope at War Registration Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer discusses his new book, The Pope at War, examining Pope Pius XII’s actions during World War II, including how he responded to the Holocaust. Kertzer is joined by Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC's On the Media. David I. Kertzer is the Paul Dupee, Jr., University Professor of Social Science and professor of a...

Presented by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and  Centro Primo Levi. On the occasion of the donation of the Alessandro Sabbadini Family Archive to the David M. Rubenstein National Institute for Holocaust Documentation. The archive contains hundreds of records documenting the experience of Alessandro Sabbadini, a young Jewish law graduate from Rome who fled to the United States in 1939 after racial laws were enacted. Mr. Sabbadini was enlisted in the American army and train...

BOOK LAUNCH Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and Centro Primo Levi present: One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World. By Michael Frank. Illustrated by Maira Kalman, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2022. Recipient of the Jewish Book Council’s Natan Notable Book Award. The remarkable story of Stella Levi whose conversations with the writer Michael Frank over the course of six years bring to life the vibrant world of Jewish Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz tha...

Presented by the  JDC Archives and the Centro Primo Levi.  Registration In a May 1947 memo, JDC worker Theodore Sanejberg described Italian children’s home, Selvino, as a “children’s paradise.” Less than a month later, however, he wrote that his original assessment had been “idealistic” and described the children’s behavior as “very unpleasant.” Located in the foothills of the Alps between Milan and Switzerland, Selvino became the rehabilitation center for hundreds of Jewish children, primar...

Historians’ Journeys: Tales of Search and Research in the Understanding of Fascism 4–6 December 2022 - Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Mt. Scopus Campus, Maiersdorf Faculty Club, Room 405 - With the Support of the Knapp Family Foundation. Schedule refers to Jerusalem time. Online Participation via Zoom: https://bit.ly/historiansj One Hundred Years after the March of Rome on October 28, 1922 the scope of this international symposium is twofold. On one side, it will focus on the analysis...

4–6 December 2022 - Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Mt. Scopus Campus, Maiersdorf Faculty Club, Room 405 - With the Support of the Knapp Family Foundation. Schedule refers to Jerusalem time. Online Participation via Zoom: https://bit.ly/historiansj 9:30 am - Session 2 Chair: Noah Benninga | SICSA, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Lorenzo Benadusi | Sapienza Università di Roma ‘In Italy All Are Males’. Fascism and Homosexuality: An Indecent Speech Discussant: Iris Rachamimov | Tel ...

4–6 December 2022 - Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Mt. Scopus Campus, Maiersdorf Faculty Club, Room 405 - With the Support of the Knapp Family Foundation. Schedule refers to Jerusalem time. Online Participation via Zoom: https://bit.ly/historiansj 9:30 am - Session 8 Chair: Matteo D’Avanzo | Scuola normale di Pisa; SICSA, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Yemane Demissie | New York University Modernity, War & Transformation in Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia Discussant: Leonardo C...

International symposium focusing on Giorgio Bassani's vast poetic production and his teaching periods in the United States (1976-80). On display, autograph letters written by the author in America along with original manuscripts of some poems defined by Bassani himself as "The American poems.” Organized by IIC New York and Fondazione Giorgio Bassani in collaboration with the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (MEIS) in Ferrara. Reservations: https://iicnewyork.esteri.it

Magazzino Italian Art, Cold Spring  - Transportation and reservations: www.magazzino.art This  two-part performace inspired by the work of Primo Levi features the world premiere of Piombo (The Periodic Table), a solo work by Luciano Chessa written for the legendary cellist Frances-Marie Uitti. The program also includes Quest[o], a work conceived by Chessa and Uitti for Cello, Dan Bau and Piano. QUEST[O] - Una meditazione. For cello, piano, dan bau and voices by Luciano Chessa and Frances-M...

This panel takes its title from the first volume in English of Eugenio Colorni's writings and correspondence. Born in 1909, Colorni was a political philosopher and a teacher who entered the ranks of the anti-fascist movement. His analysis of the convergence of capitalistic interests, nationalism, and state violence, and his federalist ideas led to his incarceration at Ventotene and, in 1944, to his murder by Pietro Koch’s Fascist militia. Besides the renowned Manifesto di Ventotene, his writings...

January 27 between 8:30 am and 2:00 pm Consulate General of Italy in New York 690 Park Avenue at 69th Street Each January 27, we read the names of 9,700 Jewish men, women and children deported from Italy and the Italian territories between 1943 and 1945. The ceremony is open to the public and held outdoors, in front of the Consulate General of Italy. Everyone can join and read. Today, the collective awareness of this past is becoming blurred or mythologized, ideologies of violence and ...

From the library and archive of Centro Primo Levi, we will read excerpts from the memoirs of Jewish women who grew up in Fiume and became victims of Fascist persecution. Each had a different story. Dominique Kirchner Reill (University of Miami), Andra and Tatiana Bucci, Nora Tausz Ronai, Marsha Fink. Moderated by Natalia Indrimi. Cathy Lager was taken by an aunt to the United States along with as many family youngsters as they could pay for. Cathy had trained since childhood to become a piani...

Ruth Ben Ghiat (New York University), Alexander Stille (Columbia University), Raffaele Bedarida (Cooper Union), and Natalia Indrimi (Centro Primo Levi NY) will present the film and propose some hypotheses on its history and production. A group of scholars will discuss a little-known 1948 short film, one of the earliest public recollections of the deportation of the Jews of Rome, the exile, and the birth of the State of Israel. A particular set of circumstances makes the film intriguingly enig...

A Conversation:  Zvi Ben-Dor Benite and Uri S. Cohen. A conversation among authors, scholars, and sages about history, power, and the Messiah. Starting with Walter Benjamin's distinction between "weak" and "strong" messianic forces and history, this program presents three Italy-related stories. We begin with Primo Levi, and his writing of the concentration camp presented in negative messianic terms: Auschwitz as an uncanny messianic state of power, a utopia/dystopia. Couched in his words i...

Western humanitarians pretended to act upon a kind of tabula rasa, when in fact there was no tabula rasa there, and there was a very long Ottoman humanitarian tradition. Davide Rodogno in conversation with Rajan Menon and Joshua Craze. Co-presented by The Ralph Bunche Institute and Centro Primo Levi. Reception to follow. Please RSVP to: eusc@gc.cuny.edu Constructed after Jim Jarmush’s film and driven by profound empathy, Davide Rodogno's Night on Earth is a broad-ranging account of intern...

Introduction: Laura Benedetti (Georgetown University) and Elettra La Duca (Italian Cultural Institute, Washington D.C.). "Where is Fiume?" Lucia Wolf (Library of Congress) will feature selected items from the Library of Congress’ collection, highlighting the relevance of Fiume in the American context. “Saving the Nation” Natalia Indrimi (Centro Primo Levi) will discuss some aspects of the Fiume research project and reflect on its public impact. Conversation with Aviel Roshwald (Georgetown Univer...

I can take liberties, I can invent scenarios. And why shouldn’t I—coming from Brazil, with Algerian roots—reimagine this history? It’s an incredible opportunity to see things differently. Karim Aïnouz Please join us for an evening with Monique Sochaczewski Goldfeld (IDP Brasil) and Louis Fishman (Brooklyn College) in conversation on the political and cultural relations between Brazil and the countries of the former Ottoman Empire. In 1858, the Empire of Brazil and the Ottoman Empire signed a...

A Sunday brunch conversation at Vol de Nuit with Serena Di Nepi (University of Rome La Sapienza), Lynn Westwater (George Washington University) and Ida Caiazza (Marie Curie Global Fellow, New York University) Co-presented by: Centro Primo Levi New York, Casa Italian Zerilli Marimò at NYU and the University of Rome La Sapienza. Reservation is required: info@primolevicenter.org Prompted by the Protestant Reformation and held between 1545 and 1563, the  Council of Trent was a cultural and ...

Study days held in collaboration with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and  the University of Rome La Sapienza. Fabrizio Lelli (University of Rome La Sapienza), Davide Liberatoscoli (University of Postdam), Dario Internullo (Università di Roma Tre), Serena Di Nepi (University of Rome La Sapienza), Roni Cohen (Tel Aviv University), Karla Mallette (University of Michigan), Mahnaz Yousefzadeh (New York University), Michela Andreatta (University of Rochester), Isabelle Levy (Columbia Un...

Isabelle Levy (Columbia University), Karla Mallette (University of Michigan), Fabrizio Lelli (University of Rome La Sapienza), Davide Liberatoscoli (University of Postdam), Dario Internullo (Università di Roma Tre). This program follows two study days  whose aim is to reconsider Immanuel of Rome and his work in relation to three areas of interest: recent historiography on fourteenth-century Roman culture from the communal experience to the end of Avignon; the role of language and the question...

Norman I. Silber, Hofstra University,  in conversation with Judge Guido Calabresi, former Dean of the Yale Law School Alessandro Cassin, Centro Primo Levi Stefano Albertini, NYU. RSVP at Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò "This book combines family memoirs, an account of Jewish integration in Italy and the United States, an account of successful immigration, of the formation of a famous intellectual, of a piece of history of a renowned American university, and an investigation into American legal c...