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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…

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….

Italy and the Voice of America

The Italian Section of the Voice of America during WWII On the evening of January 20, 1944, in Lima, Peru, my father Antonello sat down to write a long letter…