Surviving the Ghetto
Serena di Nepi, Sopravvivere al ghetto. Per una storia sociale della comunità ebraica nella Roma del Cinquecento, Viella, Roma, 2013 Serena di Nepi’s new book presents a vast, all…
Books
Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire
Natalie B. Dohrmann and Annette Yoshiko Reed (eds.), Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 Rethinking Romanness Annette Yoshiko…
The Golden Haggadah and its Two Collectors: Joav Gallico and Giuseppe Almanzi
The Golden Haggadah is one of the finest of the surviving Haggadah manuscripts from medieval Spain. The Haggadah, which literally means ‘narration’, is the Hebrew service-book used in Jewish households…
Yesterday and Today
The way our societies confront the plight of the millions of refugees from various areas of the world escaping famine, ethnic, religious and political persecution, hopelessness and war, will be…
A Chronicle of Jewish Life Under Fascism
A compelling new approach to the chronicle of Jewish life in Italy under Fascism From the very first pages of John Tedeschi’s Italian Jews Under Fascism 1938-1945, A Personal and…
History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity
Book Review: Aline Sierp, History, Memory, and Trans- European Identity. Unifying Divisions. London: Routledge 2014 The current explosion in scholarship on the question of European memory is haunted by a…
Abramo Colorni and the Economy of Secrets
Until recently, Abramo Colorni (ca. 1544-99) has been flying largely under the radar of historians, even having eluded detection by the editors of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Building on the research of…
Ariosto and Tasso
Curiosities of Literature It surprises one to find among the literary Italians the merits of Ariosto most keenly disputed: slaves to classical authority, they bend down to the majestic regularity…
Anthology
A Primo Levi Anthology Collected from various sources on the occasion of the presentation of Primo Levi’s Complete Works at the National Book Festival in Washington D.C. Quaestio…
Primo Levi, Mountain Rebel
Levi’s experience as a partisan—and the execution of two teenage boys—showed him humans’ capacity for extreme violence. A review of Sergio Luzzatto’s Primo Levi’s Resistance and Collaborators in Occupied Italy….