The Making of Hebrew Books in Italy

Amidst growing instability and divide in American society, cultural uncertainty, and perhaps a surplus of time, revisionist histories of Jewish learning are sprouting everywhere. The lives of women and men who pursued professions and Jewish learning, who wrote, edited, translated, bought, sold, donated, and collected books in America seem to have been forgotten. Antisemitism, on whose definition nobody can agree, occupies the present, the past and the future. Columbia and Harvard are equated to universities in Nazi Germany, the impressive history of public education in America has no place in the new society of the elites, proportions are lost, reality has become an unnecessary burden, methods, and archives relics of the past, and forgotten is the love for books that led to the creation of marvelous libraries including of Judaica and Hebraica.