Held on the 90th Anniversary of Primo Levi the 2009 symposium highlighted the critical work of Giorgio Agamben and the translations of If This is a Man in Arabic and Farsi. Among the many guests were Levi’s Italian editor, Ernesto Ferrero, anthropologist Talal Assad, German literary scholar Ernestine Bradley, Israeli historian Manuela Consonni, writer Boualem Sansal and comparativist Marianne Hirsh.