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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…

Fascist Antisemitism in the US

  Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish-Italian Relations in the United States Courtesy American Jewish Archives Journal, 56 NO. 1 & 2 (2004) Courtesy of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the…

Primo Levi Anthropologist of Normality

I first met Primo Levi in February 1963, a month before the release of his book The Truce. I had just walked into the press office at Giulio Einaudi publishing…