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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 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,…