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Books, Essays October 16, 2025

La Storia

Elsa Morante. Excerpts from La Storia, remembering October 16, 1943 Not even from her mother had she ever heard this denomination “Aryans”; in fact, the de-nomination of Jews itself, for…

Essays, Interviews June 9, 2025

Thruth and the Holocaust

“If you no longer want to believe the truth, nobody will want to believe you.” Zelman Lewental, prisoner of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, quoted in Franco Fortini, “I cani del Sinai”. …

Essays September 2, 2024

Hatching the Cobra

Let no one praise Perillus, who was cruder than the tyrant Phalaris, for whom he constructed a brazen bull, promising that when a man was enclosed therein and a fire…

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Essays July 22, 2016

Rhodes: Our Piece of the Earth

Seventy years ago, on July 23, 1944, Jewish life on this Island of roses came to an end. Today we convene here in Kahal Shalom to mourn the interrupted and…

Essays July 18, 2016

Women and the Torah

In Italy, a Unique Connection Between Women and the Torah. Creating special Torah coverings—often from discarded scraps of fabric—has a long history for Italian women A Torah scroll takes years to…

Books July 18, 2016

A Primo Levi Atlas

A Primo Levi Atlas: Primo Levi di fronte e di profilo, by Marco Belpoliti Marco Belpoliti has crowned his decades long critical engagement with Levi with an ambitious new book, Primo…

Academia, Essays July 17, 2016

On the Dark Side of History

The historian Carlo Ginzburg talks about his publications and his historical method of microhistory, which he pioneered. Ginzburg dismisses the prevailing relativism of historical truth as intellectually, politically, and morally lazy,…

Academia July 13, 2016

EHRI Fellowship 2016-2018 offer a stage at CDEC

EHRI invites applications for its fellowship programme (2016-2018) The EHRI fellowships are intended to support and stimulate Holocaust research by facilitating international access to key archives and collections related to…

Essays July 10, 2016

The Enigma

The Enigma of a Rare Jewish Sixteenth Century Portrait from Cremona Recently, while visiting an art fair in New York, I was surprised and intrigued by a painting by Antonio…