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Books February 10, 2026

The Talking Dead

On ‘Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean’ by Karla Malette (The University of Chicago Press, 2021) Lives of the Great Languages is – and…

Academia, Books 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”. …

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Books January 15, 2024

The Eternal Tendency Toward Fascism

Edited for Printed Matter. Original version with notes published in Allegoria.    Every age has its fascism. Primo Levi   When Fear of Freedom was first published in Italy in…

Books, Essays September 28, 2023

Truth or Dare?

Reinterpreting Al-Harīrī’s Arab Rogue. The Markaz Review, 2021 A new English translation of Impostures from Basra-born Al-Harīrī (aka the Arab poet known as Abū Muhammad al-Qāsim ibn Alī ibn Muhammad…

Academia, Essays September 28, 2023

Immanuel’s Riddle

“But when I raise my voice at Kedushah or Yozer, the fountains of song open wide. And on Kippur, or Purim, or any of the holidays, whether I chant a…

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 in Italian July 18, 2023

Italy and the Jews Beyond the Borders

Michele Sarfatti I confini di una persecuzione-Il fascismo e gli ebrei fuori d’Italia (1939-1943), Viella, Rome, 2023 Adding to his decades-long seminal research on Italian Fascism, Michel Sarfatti’s new book…