The 2026 Balagan Café, a cultural festival curated by Enrico Fink and Laura Forti, opened in the garden of Florence’s synagogue on June 18. The 14th edition, titled “Strong as Death Is Love,” is an ideal bridge to the European Day of Jewish Culture, which is dedicated to love this year. After a scaled-down edition in 2025, Balagan Café returns to its usual format. From now until August 27, a series of events will explore the theme of love from non-sentimental cultural and civil perspectives. These include love as responsibility and knowledge, a refusal of superficiality, and a will to navigate historical and human contradictions without renouncing dialogue. The curators emphasized on the opening evening that it is “an investment in the culture of meeting each other.” The Chief Rabbi of Florence, Gadi Piperno, participated in the event with the mayor, Sara Funaro.
The event featured a conversation with historians Marcello Flores and Giovanni Gozzini, who recently edited the Italian edition of Mein Kampf for publisher Garzanti. Gozzini explained that a critical reading of the text helps to understand why Jews are considered “the perfect rhetorical instruments” and “scapegoaters used to solve complexity.” This function, he added, can be applied to many different contexts.
Flores analyzed the secret behind the success of Hitler’s book. He said it is “the repetitiveness of simple and banal sentences, along with a suggestive ability to prompt propaganda with a strength that becomes truth. It is the same mechanism that we can see today on social media, albeit in different forms.” A concert with Stefano Saletti, Gabriele Coen, and the Banda Ikona concluded the evening.