EVENTS

Exploring Healthcare Inequalities
at the Economics Festival of Trento

By Daniel Reichel
 
The Economics Festival of Trento took place last week focusing on health inequalities. For the occasion, the Italian Jewish newspaper published a special issue on the topic this month.
Can a global network of kidney exchange be the answer to saving human lives and reducing inequalities in the healthcare system? Over the course of the Economics Festival of Trento, Alvin E. Roth, 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize recipient in Economics, gave an in-depth look into the logistics behind such a system as well as the ethical considerations and regulatory restrictions that surround this type of exchange that is widespread on the black market.

Read more

NEWS

"Judge Me Only Based on the Facts," Asks
the President of the Italian Football Federation

By Adam Smulevich
 
In an exclusive Interview with Pagine Ebraiche the President of the Italian Football Federation Carlo Tavecchio described as an "unhappy incident" the episode of 2015 that saw him using the Italian term 'ebreaccio', a pejorative for 'ebreo' (Jew), to call a Jewish-Italian businessman. Back then, his words had aroused disdain and distaste in all public opinion, not just in the Italian Jewish world.

Read more

CULTURe

He Tends Venice’s Jewish History.
She Filmed Him.

By Robin Pogrebin*

There are fewer than 500 Jews left in Venice, barely a handful compared with the 5,000 who filled the ghetto here at its height in the 17th century.
Drawn by this diminishing population, the Israeli artist Hadassa Goldvicht made repeated visits, along the way discovering Aldo Izzo, a former ship captain who for 35 years has been guardian and keeper of the two historical Jewish cemeteries on the Lido in Venice.
Mr. Izzo, 86, inspired Ms. Goldvicht, 35, to make her next project about him, recording hundreds of hours of footage with Mr. Izzo and Jewish residents around Venice, studying the meticulous illustrations and entries that fill Mr. Izzo’s daily journals. He keeps track of who has died and who remains.
“I kind of fell in love with him, and I was very occupied with death,” Ms. Goldvicht said in a recent interview. “He is not afraid.”

*The article was published in The New York Times on May 30, 2017.

Read more

bechol lashon - Español

Svevo, un escritor judío
de frontera 

En opinión del escritor y diplomático Maurizio Serra, autor de la biografía más completa de Italo Svevo, pseudónimo de Aron Hector Schmitz, que se acaba de publicar en España, “pocos autores son hoy tan contemporáneos” como este intelectual italiano por el uso que hace del alejamiento de la realidad y cómo lo refleja en su obra.
En una entrevista, Serra, uno de los principales estudiosos de la literatura europea de entreguerras, afirma que Svevo (Trieste, 1861 – Motta di Livenza, 1928), al vivir “a caballo entre un siglo XIX dominante y un XX neurasténico, puede ser una buena guía en un siglo XXI que parece avanzar retrocediendo”.“
Svevo tiene una parte de adhesión y otra de fuga de la realidad, inseparablemente unidas. La antivida, pues, como condición de su obra”, asegura Serra, cuyo interés por la figura de Svevo viene de tiempo atrás y se concretó después de escribir su anterior biografía sobre un escritor-personaje tan “extrovertido” como Curzio Malaparte (Tusquets), premio Goncourt de biografía.



Aurora 6.5.2017



Lee mas

pilpul

Talking to Stones
or Hitting Stones

By Yaakov Mascetti*

The wanderings of the people of Israel in the desert should not be considered as a mere stage in a long process that ends with the arrival in the Promised Land and the conquest thereof: the desert is, or should be considered as, the manifestation of an unattainable objective, and a critically important element in the process of redemption and cleansing of the people from the yoke of slavery and paganism. While the Promised Land is certainly the ultimate objective of the exodus, it appears to me that we may want to carve out of the biblical ethos (and maybe also out of the modern Zionist one too) a small, humble place for the desert as a process, as the expression of a yearning, of a desire for the ultimate and unreachable telos: we need to focus, in other words, on the sense of extraneity, an unending sense of foreignness which prevents the individual from ever touching the endpoint of the process.
The Divine commandment to love the stranger derives from the fact that, in God's own words, "you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Deut. 10:19), and is imparted on the people of Israel just before it crosses the Jordan into the Promised Land.

*Yaakov Mascetti holds a Ph.D. and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University.

Read more

IT HAPPENED TOMORROW

The Embassy Stays
in Tel Aviv

By Guido Vitale

"(…) "Mr. Trump isn't the first presidential candidate to promise an embassy move — former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush made similar comments as candidates that went unfulfilled. But some officials and diplomats took Mr. Trump's pledge more seriously, as he continued to keep the possibility open once he took office. He still could make the move eventually." (…) (The Wall Street Journal, June 2017)











Read more

italics

Syrian Jewish Cuisine:
A Food in Exile

By Rachel Ament*

We often draw empathy, not from our imagination, but from seeing our past staring back at us. As the global Jewish community grapples with how best to respond to the Syrian refugee crisis, we remember our own doomed history in the area. Jewish life in 20th and 21st-century Syria was marked by persecution, totalitarianism and abuse, the Jewish people banned from their jobs, their schools and eventually, their own properties. Later, Syrian Jews were able to flee the region, escaping to neighboring Israel, the United States, and Central and South America. Like so many Jewish communities in exile, Syrian Jews are a dispersed people, scattered, but connected by their traditions, but perhaps most, unmistakably, by their food.

*This article was published in Paste Magazine on May 31, 2017.

Read more