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Essays September 19, 2023

The Heretical Origins of the Sonnet

This essay was published in: Daily JStor, April 21, 2021 Of variable rhyme scheme and meter, sonnets are sometimes structured into stanzas of an octet and a sestet or of…

Books in Italian July 18, 2023

Thanks Goodness I Am Here

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Ringrazio il cielo di essere qui Lettere a Alberto Carocci da Larchmont e Beverly Hills 1939/41.  Alessandro Panajia, Ed. Le Sillabe, Florence, 2021  In July 1939, Mario and Clara…

Books, News April 18, 2023

Davide Rodogno’s Night on Earth

A complex and fascinating mosaic of the Western Humanitarian Organizations activities in the Near East After World War One One of the most impactful aspects of the International Museum of…

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Books November 29, 2008

Marriage Rituals Italian Style

Roni Weinstein, Marriage Rituals Italian Style, Brill Academic Publishers, 2003   Marriage Rituals Italian Style: A Historical Anthropological Perspective on Early Modern Italian Jews is the first comprehensive attempt to…

Books November 27, 2008

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Everyman’s Library, 2005   “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is first and foremost a love story and on quite a different level from anything…

Essays November 26, 2008

Giorgio Levi della Vida

Islam in the academia. The case of Giorgio Levi della Vida by Miriam Haier As an Italian Jewish professor in fascist Italy, Levi della Vida completed his groundbreaking work in…

Essays November 26, 2008

Growing up Jewish in Ferrara

  Courtesy of Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, June 2004 Giorgio Bassani’s Ferrara may be, as an American critic has called it, a “semiotic labyrinth,” but…

Essays November 19, 2008

Reflections

Reflections on an Italian Jewish life From: The Most Ancient of Minorities: The Jews of Italy, Stanislao G. Pugliese, editor, 2002 I am an Italian Jew. My forefathers settled in…

Essays November 19, 2008

Vito Volterra (1860–1940)

Vito Volterra (1860–1940): Scientist, Policymaker, and Bibliophile Vito Volterra is generally considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his time: “His most important contributions were in higher analysis, mathematical physics,…