By Benjamin Ravid*
The word “ghetto” initially referred to the copper foundry of the Venetian government, il ghetto (sometimes spelled gheto, getto, or geto) where cannon balls were cast, from the root gettare, to cast or to throw, encountered in …
By Henry Abramson*
Azariah de’ Rossi was an entirely unremarkable Italian Jew in his late 50s when the earth shook beneath his feet in the great Ferrara earthquake of November 1570.
Narrowly escaping the collapse of his home that Shabbat …
By Cnaan Liphshiz*
In a major policy reversal by Western members of the United Nations Human Rights Council, all its European Union member states voted against a permanent item singling out Israel.
The vote Friday was the first time that …
By Yvette Alt Miller*
On March 29, 1516, the Government of the city-state of Venice issued a new decree: henceforth all Jews must be confined to a small, polluted island within the city. The foul-smelling island was the former site …
By Katherine Keener*
Coinciding with the beginning of the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale happening this year, an installation by author and ceramicist Edmund de Waal will highlight the floating city’s 500-year-old Jewish Ghetto. psalm, which will run from …
By Elisa Scarton*
Pitigliano’s last Jewish nonna is a survivor, an advocate, a local celebrity and pretty much exactly what you’d imagine an Italian grandmother to be like.
It’s wet and windy Thursday morning when I finally manage to get …
By Diego Courchay*
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is not a real place. We should say that first. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it is, and you wouldn’t be alone. It was invented in Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 historical novel …
By Gabrielle Apuzzo*
The Charles and Joan Alberto Italian Studies Institute is co-sponsoring a two-day symposium: “New Italy and the Jews: From Massimo D’Azeglio to Primo Levi”, from February 28th to March 1st in partnership with the Italian Academy for …
By Joel S. Davidi Weisberger*
Poland, the place where the majority of the world’s Jewish population could be found by the eve of the First World War, was, of course, a land once dotted with thousands of Jewish houses of …
By Debby Segura*
I read “The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews” by Edda Servi Machlin cover to cover, something I’ve done perhaps twice in my entire life. I just couldn’t put it down. Machlin tells the story of her …