October 27
| FILMS

1:30 pm - 4:00 pm - FREE
CUNY Graduate Center

In collaboration with RAI Teche and RAI Corporation CPL presents a session of film from the archives of the Italian television. The session, featuring interviews with Primo Levi, opens with Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge, one of three television plays based on Levi's science fiction short stories. A breathtaking reflection on time, memory, history, and power the piece sheds new light on Levi as writer and socio-political commentator.
Italian w/English Subtitles.
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Follow our Fall 2009 program through I-Italy.org
The outreach for the program is made possible through the generous support of Regione Piemonte

October 25 | On Primo Levi's 90th Anniversary the International Symposium opens with Music and Personal Memories
Admission: www.smarttix.com | All programs are in English

A special performance of Tzvi Avni's song cycle for piano and soprano based on five poems by Primo Levi, inaugurates our third International Symposium on Sunday, October 25th at 6 pm, at the Center for Jewish History.

The evening will open with a personal reflection by scientist, educator, and philanthropist Andrew Viterbi who will remember Primo Levi as family and friend. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, Prof. Viterbi arrived in the US as a child as his family was fleeing Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws. He has spent equal portions of his career in industry and academia and is a major supporter of higher education both in the sciences and the humanities.

The concert features the acclaimed Israeli soprano Sharon Rorstorf-Zamir accompanied by Berlin pianist Rainer Armbrust. Initially composed for orchestra and voice, the piece premiered in New York in 1999 as part of the Interfaith Concert of Remembrance and has been recorded by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Post-concert talk with Tzvi Avni and composer, orchestrator, and educator Samuel Adler (Eastman Conservatory, Juilliard School).

Longstanding partners including Casa Italiana Zerilli Marim� at NYU, the Italian Cultural Institute, and the Cahnman Foundation are joined this year by the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, the NYU Center for Dialogues - Islamic World-US-The West, and the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin. 

The concert is made possible in part with the support of the Cahman Foundation, the Consulate General of Israel and the Consulate General of Germany.  read more
OCT 26 | Primo Levi, Anthropologist of Normality

NYU | Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marim� | 24 West 12th Street | FREE

5:00 pm | Primo Levi: Anthropologist of Normality

Opening remarks: Dario Disegni (Compagnia di San Paolo and Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi, Turin).
Ernesto Ferrero (author and director of the Turin Book Fair))

In this rare New York appearance, Ernesto Ferrero, longtime editor of Levi's work at Einaudi, offers new insight into Levi's intellectual and moral concerns and visions:

"The reception of Primo Levi's work has been characterized, in Italy and abroad, by serious misunderstandings. In the United States, If This Is a Man  was published in 1961 by Collier Books with a different, and misleading title: Survival in Auschwitz.
A title that makes it sound like a war report, which emphasizes  the protagonist's trials and tribulations and concludes with a happy ending. Apart from the fact that the book ends with a scene of death and desolation, the new title avoids the question implied by the whole book: Is this a man? The German, the good family man who belongs to the most civilized country in Europe, the country which produced Bach and Goethe, yet plans the extermination with bureaucratic rigor? Is it the Jewish prisoner who becomes a kapo, collaborating to gain a few more days of life? Was Auschwitz an accident in history, and as such cannot be replicated? Or is Auschwitz the rule rather than the exception?" more
OCT 26 | Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben

NYU | Casa Italiana Zerilli Marim� | 24 West 12 Street | FREE

7:00 pm | Levi, Agamben, and the Era of Witness


Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University), Chair and moderator, Debarati Sanyal (University of California, Berkeley), Thomas Trezise (Princeton University), Manuela Consonni (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

One of the central elements in Agamben's readings of Levi's work is the reflection on the "Musulmann" and the paradoxes of bearing witness. "This word," Levi explains, "I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection." The figure and meaning of the Musulmann has evoked a multifaceted debate ranging from ethics, to biopolitics and orientalism. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) drew extensively on Levi's writings in his work on biopolitics and the relation between human life and sovereignty. A diverse panel of scholars will discuss various aspects of Agamben's reading of Levi on the Musulmann; the term's currency; the notion of "true witness"; and whether Levi's text sustains Agamben's interpretation.   more
OCT 27 | Primo Levi in Translation:
                 German, Arabic, and Farsi


CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue | FREE
All programs are in English

5:00 pm | Quest and Judgment: Reading Primo Levi

Franco Baldasso (New York University), Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Brown University), Ernestine Bradley (The New School), Ernesto Ferrero

In a letter to his German translator, Primo Levi claimed that he wrote If This Is a Man with the Germans in mind as his audience. His first testimonial book is only the initial step in Levi's relationship vis-�-vis the Germans and their culture-a relationship strongly linked to his personal experiences at and beyond Auschwitz. Understanding them, both bystanders and Nazi perpetrators, is one of Levi's main themes. This roundtable will explore that relationship as seen in his works, from If This Is a Man to the final chapter of The Drowned and the Saved, which not by chance he titled "Letters from Germans." It will address such issues as the problem of judgment in Levi's works; his personal connections with German intellectuals and survivors,  from Jean Am�ry to Hety Schmitt-Maas, and their contributions to the development of his thought; and his books' reception in the context of the country's efforts to confront their past.

8:00 pm | In Arabic and Farsi: The Universality of Suffering

Boualem Sansal (author, The German Mujahid, Algeria); Abraham Radkin (Aladdin Project, France); Clifford Chanin (The Legacy Project, co-editor of Blooming through the Ashes); Moderator: Talal Asad (CUNY Graduate Center); Respondent: Ammiel Alcalay (CUNY Graduate Center)

The recently published Arabic and Farsi translations of If This Is a Man open a new world of references and possible readings of Primo Levi's books and pose a new challenge to the appreciation of  Levi's humanism. In which ways is his voice relevant to an Arabic- and Farsi- speaking readership  And does this new world of readers  test the universality of Levi's understanding of suffering and of human nature? As translations of his other works are planned in the same languages, a panel of scholars,  editors, and writers will discuss the circumstances in which the book was published and the responses in the Arab and Persian worlds to Levi's writings as a testimony of history and a reflection on the possibility of evil. Inevitably destined to enter the broader discourse on the Middle East, this new life of a book whose publishing history has not been easy in any language,  has a strong potential to shed new light on its author and open untapped perspectives of dialogue and exchange.  more
Links of Interest

The newly published translations of If This Is a Man into Arabic and Farsi raises a complex spectrum of issues and debates.
Here are some related items of interest.

Books:
Meir Litvak, Esther Webman. From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009 | H-Net Review

Boualem Sansal, The German Mujahid. Europa Editions, 2009 Book | Review | Join Boualem Sansal at the French Institute in New York on October 28th

Talks and conferences:
Confronting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. An exploration of their socio-historic and theological roots and similarities | November 10th - University of London | Info

Thinking of Religion, Secularism, and Politics. Berkeley's Conversations with History, Talal Asad | Video

The Jew, the Arab: An Interview with Gil Anidjar