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IN THIS ISSUE
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Italian Studies Open at Hebrew University
Interdepartmental Center for Jewish Studies at University of Pisa Makes Strides
Federica Francesconi is Selected for the Viterbi Visiting Professorship at UCLA
Queens College Opens New Doors to Jewish Studie: Italian Style
From the South of Italy: A History of Exchanges with Israel
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| EVENTS |
March 7 and 9Roman Shabbat with Rav Umberto Piperno and Romaniote Purim at Kehila Kedosha Janina. Links:Sound Archive: Fate Onore al Bel PurimPurim in ItalyHag Purim Sameach! detailsMarch 10 at 2 pmStreet Naming to honor Lorenzo da Ponte, Church & Leonard Street. March 12 at 6 pmJews, Commerce, and Culture Adam Teller, University of Haifa details
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| ARTICLE |
From the Venice Ghetto to the New York Underwolrd: a Poet Builds a Library.
The first poetry library in New York was purchased by Columbia College from Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist for Le Nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Cos� Fan Tutte (1790). His eclectic collection of books in Classical and Romance languages became the nucleus of one of today most comprehensive literary library holdings in the country. Da Ponte arrived in New York in 1805 and was appointed Professor of Italian language and literature in 1830. In 1833 he helped establish the first Italian Opera House in New York City.
About his flamboyant life we know very little, mostly what he narrated in an often hilarious, highly fabricated memoir. He was born Emanuele Conegliano in the Jewish ghetto of Ceneda, near Venice in 1749. When he was fourteen, his widowed father remarried, this time to a Catholic, requiring the family to convert to Catholicism, whereupon Emanuele took the name of the officiating bishop. He entered a seminary, mastered Hebrew and the classical languages (in which he wrote poetry), and soon became a professor.
He was ordained at age 24 and assigned to a church in Venice. His lifestyle was excentric, his love for poetry as great as that for women. His friends were Casanova and Gozzi. The authorities decided to bring him to trial but he had already fled to Vienna. In Vienna his reputation as a poet and librettist soon took him to work for the Court Theater of the Hapsburg Emperor, where he became acquanited and then close collaborator of Wolfagang Amadeus Mozart. more
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About
Inspired by the humanistic legacy of writer and chemist Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz and defined the place of memory in modern societies, Centro Primo Levi is dedicated to studying the history and culture of Italian Jewry, sharing beyond linguistic borders its current ferments and future perspectives.
With twenty-two centuries of history and a unique tradition of communal diversity, tolerance and integration, the Italian Jewish community is today considered one of the most vital minorities in Europe.Through cooperative policies, programs, networking, grant-making, and publishing, CPL helps individuals and institutions coordinate goals, optimize resources, and ensure that the historical heritage and contemporary ideas of Italian Judaism are accessible in English language through a unified portal.
Operating under the auspices of the Consulate General of Italy and in close collaboration with the Italian Association for Jewish Studies and the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities, CPL partners with research institutions in Italy, Israel, and the US.
The Center for Jewish History is one of the great public Jewish historical and cultural institutions in the world, having achieved recognition as a venue of unrivaled historical documentation and scholarship, imaginative exhibitions of art and artifacts, and vital public dialogue.
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Italian Jewish Studies News
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Italian Studies Open at Hebrew University
The Department of Romance and Latin American Studies at Hebrew University has relaunched the Italian Studies section, whose creation in 1961 was inspired by the famous Hebrew poetess Leah Goldberg.
Under the directorship of Dr. Manuela Consonni, the newly open chapter is the only one of its kind in Israel to offer a complete interdisciplinary program in Italian language, literature, culture, history, and society. The chapter will be a uniquely situated center for the study of the millenarian history of encounters between Italian and Jewish cultures.
Besides a strong core curriculum of language and literature, the program offers a dynamic network of courses in Medieval, Modern, and Contemporary History; Italian Jewish History, Culture, and Philosophy; History of Linguistic Vulgarizations; and Judeo-Italian dialects. Film, Gender, and Social Studies will also be part of the curricula.
With the assistance of the Vigevani Foundation, the chapter also promotes student exchanges and cooperative projects with scholars and academic institutions in Italy.
A Scholion Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies, Manuela Consonni is an original scholar with a sophisticated, complex intellectual vision and a profound understanding of the cultural dynamics of her two countries. Dr. Consonni is a specialist in Jewish historical, literary, and cultural studies, and the author of the monograph Memory of the Deportation and Extermination in Italy between 1945-1985 (Magnes University Press). She is on the Editorial Board of the journal Italia - On the History and the Literature of Italian Jewry.
Read more
Interdepartmental Center for Jewish Studies at University of Pisa Makes Strides
The creation of the Interdepartmental Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Pisa in 2003 was a groundbreaking step in the advancement of the study of Italian Jewry as a broad field-one to be mined from different perspectives, rather than as an isolated chapter of history. The project in many ways reflects a traditional line of Jewish secularism in Italy. It is also one of the first examples of the emancipation of Jewish studies from religious oversight, on the one hand, and from the limited perspective of linguistics, on the other. Directed by the renowned scholar of medieval Europe Michele Luzzati, the center engages over fifteen departments in the humanities and sciences in research on Jewish history, culture, and ideas.
Through the support of the Rothschild Foundation of London, this initiative has grown well beyond its initial scope. It offers not only extraordinary on-site and online resources for students and scholars, but also a course in Contemporary Jewish History for graduate and post-graduate students, taught by Dr. Guri Schwarz; publications; research opportunities; and annual conferences. Michele Luzzati expects a course in Medieval and Modern Jewish History to be added by 2010, taught by the prominent scholar of Italian Jewry Alessandra Veronese.
Among this semester's many interesting offerings will be the presentation of Carla Forti and Vittorio Haiim Luzzatti's book Palestine in Tuscany. Jewish Pioneers in the Senese Region (1934-1938), Firenze, 2009.
Federica Francesconi Selected for the Viterbi Visiting Professorship at UCLA
The Viterbi Program in Italian Jewish Studies, which was offered for three years by the UCLA Center of Jewish Studies, has expanded to become a visiting professorship in Mediterranean Jewish Studies, endowed by the Viterbi Family Foundation. According to David Myers, professor of history and director of the Center, the new program will help raise awareness of the cultural and political history of the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean regions. It will also create a new generation of scholars, whose vision of Jewish history will include the complex and little-known tapestry of narratives that define the Mediterranean and Italian Jewish experiences. Thanks to its rotating structure, the program will also provide students and faculty with important opportunities for exchange and international exposure.
The professorship was awarded to Dr. Federica Francesconi (University of Haifa), an expert in modern Italian Jewish history. She was a Fellow of the Center of Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a Scholar in Residence at Brandeis University. At Centro Primo Levi she lectured on the Jews of Modena and moderated a panel with Prof. Susannah Heschel and the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni. Dr. Francesconi will teach two courses: From Rome to Safed: Jewish Women in the Pre-Modern World, and The Italian Jewish Experience: Acculturation, Exclusion, and Integration from the Middle Ages to the Present. Read more
Queens College at CUNY Opens New Doors to Jewish Studies: Italian Style
Starting in September 2009, Queens College, CUNY, will welcome two emerging Italian scholars of Jewish studies whose work has already attracted the attention of many academicians and institutions. Francesca Bregoli and Elissa Bemporad, who specialize respectively in Sephardic and Yiddish studies, have been appointed Assistant Professor of Jewish History (Jewish Studies Department) and Ungar Assistant Professor in Eastern European Jewish History and the Holocaust (History Department).
Dr. Bregoli, originally from Venice, is currently a Research Fellow at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Her specialty is the history of Greek Jewry and the Sephardic diaspora.
Dr. Bemporad, from Modena, received her Ph.D. from Stanford University with the dissertation Red Star on the Jewish Street: The Reshaping of Jewish Life in Soviet Minsk, 1917-1939. She is a Visiting Fellow in Jewish Studies and History at Eugene Lang College/The New School. Previously, she was an Urbach Postdoctoral Fellow at Hunter College, CUNY, and a Fellow at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
From the South of Italy: A History of Exchanges with Israel
Fabrizio Lelli is a prominent and polymathic figure in the Italian academia. A scholar of the Renaissance and a noted expert in the cultural history of the Jews of Italy, he moved from his native Florence to the southern tip of Italy, the Salento, to teach at the University of Lecce. His enthusiasm and prodigious knowledge have revealed disparate and fascinating milestones of the Mediterranean Jewish experience.
Lelli's interests center on both contemporary and medieval/early modern history. A few years ago, in cooperation with Prof. Mandy Feingers (Tel Aviv University) and a group of Israeli students, Lelli inspired the Semeraro Foundation and the regional government to fund the production of a film and web site documenting the history of Jewish refugees who arrived in Salento between 1940 and 1947, and from there managed to clandestinely reach Palestine. The project has become a work-in-progress, viewable at www.profughiebreinpuglia.it.
This first experience acquired a new dimension when Lelli and Feingers obtained from the regional government of Puglia funds to purchase film equipment for the Ofeq School in Jerusalem to produce a film on the Darfur refugees in Israel. The results of the project will be the object of a presentation in Lecce, from which the two scholars hope to see the work continue.
Spanning from present to past without ever losing the urgency of each project, this April the History Department of the University of Lecce will offer a course by Dr. Michael Ryzhik. He is a leading expert in Judeo-Italian languages and a researcher at the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem who has recently published The Traditions of Mishnaic Hebrew in Italy According to the Medieval Jewish Rituals. With Ryzhik, Prof. Lelli has established a research project on "Judeo-Salentino" and the Italian liturgical traditions in southern Italy. This and other research on the Judeo-Italian languages is available through the online Census of Italian Vulgarizations.
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