The Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin presents the fifth Primo Levi Lecture. Primo Levi did not consider history the universal key to the past, but he offered historians groundbreaking analytical tools and concepts. It is mainly thanks to Levi that - next to the theme of political deportation, dominant in the 1940s and 1950s - the topic of the deportation of the Jews found its place in the Italian narrative. We owe to Levi the decisive distancing from heroic and consolatory interpretations of the past, the reflection on the limits and vagaries of memory and powerful arguments against Holocaust deniers. Levi articulated the key concept of the Gray Zone - the vast "middle ground" populated by small and large characters, from the internal hierarchy to the deportees.  Read 

This summer saw the beginning of a major project to digitize 1250 Hebrew manuscripts held in the  British Library.  Funded mainly by the Polonsky Foundation, the three-year project aims to make these invaluable manuscripts freely available to scholars and the public worldwide.  The manuscripts are being photographed in-house by the Library's Imaging Services team, and stored in preservation format.  Detailed catalogue records will be available for each manuscript, to enable users to search by various fields such as date, place of origin, author/scribe and keywords to find manuscripts of relevance to their work. All manuscripts will be displayed in their entirety on the Library's Digitized Manuscripts site free of charge.  We will also create a special 'tour' of the manuscripts on the website, highlighting aspects and themes of the collection in order to introduce it to wider audiences. Read 

A Civil War is a history of the wartime Italian Resistance, recounted by a historian who took part in the struggle against Mussolini's Fascist Republic. Since its publication in Italy, Claudio Pavone's masterwork has become indispensable to anyone seeking to understand this period and its continuing importance for the nation's identity. Read