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…
Essays
Paper Lives
“My humble request to Your Excellency”. Brief accounts of life and death in Italy. Based on archival documentation on “foreign Jews” interned by the Fascist Regime. In 1938 the Racial…
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…
Arnaldo Momigliano
On July 22, 1955, the Times Literary Supplement welcomed the appearance of a new scholarly book with an enthusiasm rarely matched in its gray, closely printed pages. Pride of place,…
A Piedmontese View of History
I was born in Caraglio, Cuneo, in September 1908. There I lived with my family and received private education, studying in part with professors from Cuneo during the time of…
Arnaldo Dante Momigliano
Arnaldo Dante Momigliano 1908-1987 Arnaldo Dante Momigliano arrived at Oxford in 1939. In the previous fall he had been dispossessed of his professorship in Roman history at the University of…
Primo Levi, A family Memory
Opening remarks at Third Annual Symposium on Primo Levi I feel both honored and inadequate for the role of opening this symposium since I am neither a literary critic nor…
Statelessness
The Tragic, Enduring Relevance of Arendt’s Work on Statelness While Hannah Arendt is most known for her reflections on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, eighteen years of statelessness (1933-1951) brought her philosophical questions…
Venice: A Symbol of Jewish History
Should we assume, as we usually assume in ordinary parlance, that the word “symbol” signifies something beyond what appears at first glance, we should, I will argue, agree that Venice…
Primo Levi’s Love
In the chapter Phosphorus in the Periodic Table Levi tells us of a love story that took place in 1942, when he was employed in futile research after an oral…