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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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Books March 29, 2009

Between Worlds

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Between Worlds: The Life and Thought of Rabbi David Ben Judah Messer Leon, State University of New York Press, 1991 Italian rabbi, physician and writer David ben Judah…

Books March 29, 2009

Resisting Alterities

Marco Fazzini, Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness, Rodopi, 2004 This volume – of essays, poetry, and prose fiction – records various attempts to read the fracture…

Books March 29, 2009

Jews in Italy, 1922-1945

Joshua Zimmerman, Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi rule, 1922-1945, Cambridge University Press, 2005 “Zimmerman’s edited collection offers a valuable overview of the new historical scholarship on the racial…

Books March 29, 2009

The Former Jews of This Kingdom

Nadia Zeldes, The Former Jews of This Kingdom: Sicilian Converts After the Expulsion, 1492-1516, Brill Academic,  2003 This book examines the presence of the converted Jews in Sicily following the…

Books March 29, 2009

A Fortunate Jew

Vittorio Dan Segre, Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story, University of Chicago Press, 2008 (1st ed. 1987) John Gross, The New York Times ‘I NEVER entered into the…