|
|
PRINTED MATTER | ANNA FOA'S PORTICO D'OTTAVIA 13
Andrea Grover
Anna Foa's, Portico D'Ottavia 13: Una casa del ghetto nel lungo inverno del '43, is a work unique to her oeuvre. A prolific author, Foa teaches modern history at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and although her new book chronicles well-documented events and employs extensive research, it stands apart from her previous scholarship due to the very personal nature of the work, in which the protagonist is the building in the title. Foa's decision to write about the building, which she refers to as the "Casa", is traced in the introduction. She recalls when, as a young activist, she came to the ghetto for the first time. " ... in 1962....I was seventeen and a member of the Communist Youth. There were local elections taking place in Rome, and young neo-Fascists had been coming into the ghetto from the offices of the MSI newspaper, Il Secolo d'Italia, to throw rocks at Jews. Our leaders sent us one evening 'to defend the ghetto', which was, in fact, highly organized in the art of self defense. We were in the square (piazza Giudia), waiting for the attack, which never came, talking to the Jews who were in the streets guarding the neighborhood. I remember that I said, perhaps to get on their good side: "I'm Jewish, too.".
|
PROGRAM | PLACES AND LIFE OF THE JEWISH DIASPORA IN SOUTHERN ITALY
March 31 at 6:00 pm | Italian Cultural Institute, 686 Park Avenue
RSVP: www.iicnewyork.esteri.it
Program in memory of Cesare Colafemmina
Mauro Perani (University of Bologna, Italian Ass. for Jewish Studies)
Fabrizio Lelli (University of Salento, University of Pennsylvania)
Dedicated to Prof. Cesare Colafemmina's lifetime work, this program explores the richness of Apulian and Southern Italian Jewish history, current research and communal experience. Southern Italy was home to vibrant Jewish communities since ancient Roman times. Between the 8th and the 13th century became a preeminent center of Jewish learning attracting rabbinical scholars from Spain, Provence and other Mediterranean countries. Although formal Jewish life came to an end in the 16th century, Judaism has remained part of the cultural fabric of the region. Read
|
|
FROM THE PRESS | LIEL LEIBOVITZ ON SCHINDLER'S LIST
From Tablet Magazine, the online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture
[...] Schindler's Jews do not matter. They're abstractions, spiritual currency so that our "hero" can pay his way toward salvation. Like Goeth, Schindler, too, is busy scrubbing away everything that makes him human.
The film's blunt simplification enraged the Hungarian-Jewish Nobel laureate Imre Kert�sz, himself a survivor. Schindler's List, he argued, was kitsch. "I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of 'civilization' as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust," he wrote in his 2001 essay "Who Owns Auschwitz?" "Here I have in mind those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience." Read
|
|
PRINTED MATTER'S ARCHIVE | PAPER LIVES: SURVIVAL AND DEPORTATION IN SAN DONATO VAL COMINO. 1940-1943
Alessandro Cassin reviews Anna Pizzuti's Vite di cartaAnna Pizzuti's website and book dispel myths and reconstruct life stories of foreign Jews in Italy during World War II. In the landscape of contemporary literature on the Shoah in Italy, Anna Pizzuti's Vite di carta. Storie di ebrei stranieri internati dal fascismo, Donzelli 2009, Rome, is an apparently small book that packs a big punch. Sixty-five years since the end of the war we are still struggling to understand the conditions that allowed some foreign Jews residing in Italy to survive while others were deported and murdered. As well as to understand the complex circumstances by which the Italian people alternatively protected and persecuted the Jews. Read
|
|
THANKS
Centro Primo Levi thanks its readers, audience, contributors and main supporters: Cahnman Foundation, Viterbi Family Foundation, Peter S. Kalikow, Dr. Claude Ghez, David Berg Foundation, John Elkann, Exor, Fairholme Foundation, Charles Hallac & Sarah Keil Wolf, Jeffrey Keil & Danielle Pinet, Marian and Jacob K. Javits Foundation, Andrew Sabin, Lily Safra, Joseph S. & Diane H. Steinberg Charitable Trust, Ezra Zilka
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
