GENOA – Jonathan Safran Foer awarded the Primo Levi International Prize 2025

The 2025 Primo Levi International Prize was awarded to the American writer and essayist Jonathan Safran Foer. Established in 1992 by the Cultural Center Primo Levi in Genoa, the prize recognizes personalities considered to be ideal heirs of Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. The condition is that the winner receives the prize in Genoa and gives a public speech. Ariel Dello Strologo, son of the Center’s founder Piero, recalled, “In the first year, in 1992, Elie Wiesel showed us that we could aim high. When he heard about the award, he came without hesitation. Since then, we have had many remarkable people. Among them are former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, Israeli President Shimon Peres, French philosopher Simone Veil, film director Andrzej Wajda, Israeli writers Amos Oz and David Grossmann, and Holocaust survivorand senator for lifeLiliana Segre.

The motivation of the prize for Safran Foer recalls the meaning of his work. “Where Primo Levi gave us a universal ethical testimony, an appeal to collective responsibility and memory as the foundation of civic life, Jonathan Safran Foer, born decades after the Holocaust, confronts the legacy of memory and the transmission of trauma between generations. Through his essays, he emerges as an intellectual committed to stirring consciences and awakening a sense of responsibility based on empathy and the urgency of change, capable of inspiring daily choices and evaluating their impact on the environment, animals, food, and future generations.”

“With Primo Levi, Jonathan Safran Foer shares the idea that literature is not only an aesthetic act, but also a political and ethical gesture with transformative power. In a world marked by new forms of violence, discrimination, and environmental crises, Primo Levi and Jonathan Safran Foer remind us that humanity is also preserved through the stories we choose to hear and pass on.”

The Primo Levi Cultural Center in Genoa was founded in 1990 as a cultural space to deepen Jewish themes in a broader sense. “The Jewish community in Genoa is becoming smaller and smaller, but at that time there was a strong interest in Jewish culture,” Dello Strologo also explains. Since then, many initiatives have been organized for the city and a spin-off was born: the International Primo Levi Center in New York”.