A painter, a writer, a doctor. Jewish, antifascist, journalist. Carlo Levi is one of the most complex and interesting figures in 19th-century Italian culture: a man of a multifaceted talent, driven by a profound humanity and an unquenchable thirst for …
The fascinating figure of Queen Esther, the savior of her people, is one of the key elements of the exhibition Beyond the Ghetto. Inside & Out on display at MEIS – National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah of …
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, a ceremony to commemorate the Jews of Libya persecuted by Nazi-Fascism took place in Rome at the Verano Cemetery on the initiative of Associazione Salvaguardia Trasmissione Retaggio Ebrei di Libia (ASTREL), aimed at protecting the transmission …
By Michaela Hoenig*
As Jews around the world were preparing to celebrate the High Holidays, I scoured the internet to discover some Italian traditions for Rosh Hashana, and consider how they compare to the American Ashkenazi traditions that I …
A large head with no eyes, ears, mouth. Seen from a distance, it looks like a stone. Like that the Israeli Ofer Lellouche really threw into the lake the first time he arrived in Meina, near Lake Maggiore. He was …
By Rheanna Bello*
As we grow, we tend to have questions about our family and heritage. In my case, I learned from my father, a first-generation Italian-American, to put the pieces together. We always knew that our family most …
By Serena Di Nepi*
The following is an excerpt from the introduction to the new international project “Jews in Politics in Long Renaissance Italy”. Starting from a magnificent painting representing Queen Esther and King Ahasuerus by Sebastiano Ricci (1659–1733), …
The relation between Jews and politics is generally addressed from the era of Emancipation onwards. Everything that precedes this historical phase, decisive in its importance, is generally neglected and very little explored in its many and complex folds. A major …
Over the last seventy years, Primo Levi (1919–87) has been recognized as the foremost literary witness of the extermination of the European Jews. In the book Primo Levi: An Identikit, a product of twenty years of research, Marco Belpoliti explores …
Concentration music is such a vast and partly unexplored heritage, that the eight thousand scores that have emerged so far could one day represent “only a fragment of what was created” in the more than twenty years spanning from the …