CULTURE

"The Merchant of Venice Still Speaks to Us"

The first performance of the Merchant of Venice in the Jewish Ghetto of Venice is a reckoning with an imaginary figure that has been haunting the place for centuries, overshadowing its real inhabitants while gaining enormous fame worldwide and becoming a proverbial name. To commemorate two historic anniversaries, the 500th anniversary of the formation of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice and the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, Compagnia de’ Colombari and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice have joined forces to offer the world an imaginative, ambitious production. A performance directed by Karin Coonrod, with an international cast, that brings the Merchant to life in a way almost impossible anywhere else, investigating its poignant and painful exploration of love and hate, justice, and, above all, what it means to be human. The event, part of the official program of the Ghetto Quincentennial, will take place on 26 July – 1 August 2016, and is here introduced by Shaul Bassi, Project Director.

By Shaul Bassi*

Great Renaissance intellectuals such as Leon Modena, Sara Copio Sullam, Simone Luzzatto; influential political and economic figures such as Gracia Nasi and Daniel Rodriga; ordinary people with picturesque nicknames such as Achille Silva ‘Gambeta’ or Sarina Parombolo; and the youngest deportees from Venice. No list would ever do justice to the multiplicity of Jewish lives of the Ghetto, and it is a irony of history that the genius of Shakespeare has made Shylock the most famous Venetian Jew of all times.

*Shaul Bassi is a professor at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. This text was published in the booklet "The Merchant in Venice", by Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Compagnia de' Colombari and with the support of the Venice Ghetto 500 Committee. The picture portrays the musician and composer Frank London in the Ghetto.

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media

On Pagine Ebraiche, 500 Years
of Venetian History

By Ada Treves

A remarkable year, an extraordinary coincidence: the 500th anniversary of the formation of the Jewish Ghetto in Venice - still a symbol of all exclusions - and the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, the playwright who created the most famous Venetian Jew.
A great opportunity, enriched by a cultural program in which a seminar follows a symposium, an exhibition adds to a show, all year long. In March, Pagine Ebraiche - on the occasion of the concert at the "Fenice" that marked the official opening of the program - was telling the story of the Ghetto taking its cue from those who are there every day, living there, working in the small shops, or playing in the "Campo" as the child portrayed on the cover was doing. Some institutional opinions were followed by a comparison between different ideas on what the Quincentennial should be like, along with the thoughts of many scholars from different fields, to close the pages with the beauty of music.
On the August issue of Pagine Ebraiche, we now go back to Venice with sixteen special pages: there is space to narrate the return of Shylock that, as Shaul Bassi has explained, is a re-appropriation without fear.

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NEWS

UCEI President Di Segni: "Bergoglio’s Visit
to Auschwitz Defends European Values"

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bechol lashon - deutsch

Erzähl mir eine Geschichte

von Peter Bollag*

Mehr als ein Jahr ist es her, da feierte die Bibliothek der Israelitischen Cultusgemeinde Zürich (ICZ) ihren 75. Geburtstag. Damals wurde in der größten jüdischen Gemeinde der Schweiz auch über die Rolle und vor allem über die Zukunft der Bibliothek diskutiert. Die ist nun geregelt: Ein Verein, hinter dem der Schriftsteller und Autor Charles Lewinsky steht, konnte genügend Geld auftreiben, um die Übergabe an eine große städtische Bibliothek zu verhindern.
Umso überzeugender kommt nun dieser große Sonderband mit dem Titel Quelle lebender Bücher quasi als aktuelles Lebenszeichen der Bibliothek daher. Die Bücher leben und mit ihnen auch die Bibliothek, in der die Bücher stehen. Das dokumentiert das Buch auf eindrückliche Art und Weise.

*Judische Allgemeine, 21.07.16.



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pilpul - double life

Summer in Tel Aviv

By Daniela Fubini*

The trick coming with living in Tel Aviv is that people think it's a place to go on vacation to, while we, the locals, actually work our nine, ten or eleven hour job like any Israeli and just don't get the chutzpah of the surfers coming back from the sea when we are still in our office clothes. True, the definition of office attire in Israel is closer to that of beach clothes anywhere else in the world, but still, wearing any type of shoe more structured then flip-flops makes us feel like total losers from late May well into October. On the other hand, we get to roll down to the sea anytime we want, evenings and weekends, and for that we are forever grateful.




*Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Tel Aviv, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York.

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eventS

Leading Experts Discuss New Season of Italian Jewish Culture at Pagine Ebraiche Seminar

By Rossella Tercatin

Historian Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, the new director of the Center of Jewish Contemporary Documentation (CDEC) in Milan, and Simonetta Della Seta, who has been heading the Museo dell’Ebraismo Italiano e della Shoah (MEIS – Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah) in Ferrara sat in the debate that inaugurated the annual Pagine Ebraiche seminar Redazione Aperta (Open Newsroom) last week.
Redazione Aperta has been taken place in Trieste for the past seven years. For every edition, the staff working in the newsroom of paper published by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI) are joined by Jewish leaders, scholars and experts in different fields, fellow journalists, to discuss and reflect on the state of the art of Italian Jewish life. In 2016, for the first time, the second week of the seminar is taking place in Venice, allowing the participants to attend some core initiatives of the 500th anniversary of the establishment of the Ghetto in the city.

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IT HAPPENED TOMORROW

Shylock Is My Name

By Guido Vitale

‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’ (Howard Jacobson - Shylock is my Name)


















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altrove/elsewhere

Cuneo

By Daniel Leisawitz*

Having just returned from Italy, I find myself reflecting over the various places and people we encountered on our trip.  Some of the most meaningful experiences took place in the small city of Cuneo, tucked away in the Northwest corner of Italy, in the mountain-ringed region of Piedmont.  By no means a major tourist destination, this picturesque provincial city at the foot of the Alps contains a surprising Jewish history.  Although it has always lived in the shadow of its larger Piedmontese neighbor, Turin, Cuneo was home to a small but significant Jewish community until the beginning of the 20th century.

*Daniel Leisawitz, professor at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA). The artwork is by Abraham Cresques a 14th-century Jewish Spanish cartographer.

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