Essays

A Polishman among Ethiopians

  A century before global Jewry reached out to Ethiopia’s community, a researcher named Jacques Faitlovitch sowed the seeds for a future ingathering. An odd sculpture recently appeared on the…

Jewish Settlement in Ethiopia

Plans for Mass Jewish Settlement in Ethiopia (1936-1943) Source: Tetzeta Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in the autumn of 1935, and the development of anti-Semitism in both fascist Italy 1 and…

The Mysteries of Italian Jewry

  Many years ago, at a lunch in Princeton, a venerable professor asked me whether Jews still existed in Italy. Was it a justified question? In a sense, yes. Of…

Amelia Rosselli

Exile. from: La Famiglia Rosselli – Una Tragedia Italiana At first glance and especially from a certain distance, Amelia Rosselli, reclining in her rocker on the front porch of the…

On Sabato Morais

Tradition in the New World: Rethinking Sabato Morais This Review of Arthur Kiron‘s Golden Ages, Promised Lands: The Victorian Rabbinic Humanism of Sabato Morais (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1999) was…

Yohanan Alemanno

Cultural Relationships between Jews and Non-Jews in Fifteenth-Century Italy: The Case of Yohanan Alemanno This talk was presented at the symposium “Humanism and the Rabbinic Tradition in Italy and Beyond”…

Elijah Benamozegh

Kabbalah in the Age of Reason: Elijah Benamozegh This talk was presented at the symposium “Humanism and the Rabbinic Tradition in Italy and Beyond” organized by Centro Primo Levi and …

The Time Fate Gave Us: 1938-1947

Group photo: 1938 This is the story of a group of young, ordinary people who happened to live, as Silvio Ortona put it, at an extraordinary time and who had…

The Matteotti murder, 1924-2014

The Matteotti murder and the origins of Mussolini’s totalitarian Fascist regime in Italy This paper was delivered on June 2 at Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò NYU on the occasion of…