Features

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 March 27, 2009

The Familiarity of Strangers

Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period, Yale University Press, 2009 Taking a new approach to the study of…

Books March 27, 2009

Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy

Roberto Bonfil,  Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, University of California Press, 1994 With this heady exploration of time and space, rumors and silence, colors, tastes, and ideas, Robert Bonfil recreates the…

Books March 26, 2009

Outside the Party Lines

An intellectual biography of the antifascist Carlo Rosselli by Alexander Stille (The New York Times) Carlo Rosselli — one of the most courageous and interesting figures of Italian antifascism —…

Essays March 26, 2009

Acquiescence and Dissent

Acquiescence and Dissent: The Response of Intellectuals to the Fascist Racial Laws in Italy and Abroad When, in 1938, the Fascist government passed the anti-Semitic Racial Laws and the Jews…

Books March 23, 2009

History as Memory

History as Memory: Conversation with Sergio Parussa by Alessandro Cassin Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony, Syracuse University Press, 2008, by Sergio Parussa is a highly personal study of four…

Books March 19, 2009

Boualem Sansal Pays Tribute to Primo Levi

In a Complex New Book, Algerian Novelist Boualem Sansal Pays Tribute to Primo Levi.   Alessandro Cassin The German Mujahid, Europa Editions, 2009, by the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal is…