Having trouble viewing this email? Click here March 8, 2021 - 24 Adar 5781

By Adam Smulevich

To know how to seize opportunities during a crisis is a very Jewish challenge. We have tried to raise to it with various voices’ contribution in the dossier “A year with Covid”, on Pagine Ebraiche’s March issue. From education to the publishing industry, from theater to the restaurant business: no field has remained unaffected – and in some instances, devastated, with recovery perspectives still far away – from the crisis. Yet everywhere, with courage and dedication, people made an effort to find alternative roads and models. Even with the aid of technological instruments – some already existing, some new – which have soon become familiar to millions of Italians. A road taken by Italian Jewish institutions as well, to accommodate their members’ needs, to give strength to the challenge of being united and a full-fledged community even at a distance.
 
During the year of the pandemic, miscellaneous publishing has increased of 2,4%, reaching 1,54 billion euro for cover price. It is one of the best European performances, as the Italian Publisher Association – AIE pointed in a recent report. “Italy is often looked down, at least in this sector. For once, we have been the example, even to countries traditionally up ahead, thanks to the effective convergence and the successful cooperation among publishing houses, book shops, government, Parliament. Decisive was the choice by the institutions to deem books as essential goods, so to allow even during the lockdown the purchase in book stores. Instrumental was publishing houses’ and book shops’ bravery in keeping on investing and producing new titles, the precariousness of the period notwithstanding.
The increase in the 2020 balance – points out to Pagine Ebraiche AIE President Riccardo Franco Levi – gathers all these elements up”. E-books in particular registered great success (+36,6%), while print books showed a slight decline (-0,8%). Overall, sold copies are 2,9% more than in 2019, with a total of 104,5 million books purchased. “Encouraging and important data”, Levi says. But that must not make us forget the many unresolved issues in Italy’s relationship with books, the president of Italian publishers and vice-president of European publishers adds. Italy is still one of the countries in Europe which reads less, a true national emergency.

Translated by Silvia Bozzo and revised by Antonella Losavio, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators at Trieste University, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

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Five new exemplary figures were honored last week on the European Day of the Righteous in a ceremony in Monte Stella – Milan. They are Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary General of the United Nations Nobel Peace Prize winner who lost his life during a mission to solve the Congolese crisis; Carlo Urbani, the Italian doctor who first identified and classified SARS; Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia, the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize Winner and his partner who have spent their life in establishing an authentic democracy in China; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the judge of the United States Supreme Court, the second woman in American history to hold that office and the first female member of the Jewish community to serve on the Court, who has given a great contribution to the affirmation of women's rights in the US.
During the event, held online, the president of Gariwo - Garden of the Righteous Worldwide Gabriel Nissim, addressed the Italian government with the formal request "to appoint an advisor on the genocides in progress around the world and to always hold a session of the Foreign Commission to inform the public opinion on human rights violations and the international mechanisms that can prevent genocides”.

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The first Conversations/Conversazioni of the calendar year of the American Academy in Rome was focused on ghettoes and on their historical and metaphorical meaning. The recent lecture features David Nirenberg, professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago and the recently appointed American Academy in Rome director Avinoam Shalem, who speaks from the beautiful setting of the ancient ghetto in Venice.
The conversation, available online, confronts the idea of ghetto. “Ghetto” emerged as a word to describe a specific late-medieval phenomenon: the creation in Christian cities of segregated and walled neighborhoods in which Jews were required to live. Today its meanings are vaster, and it serves as a metaphor for many different types of containment and segregation. How did these urban spaces emerge? Why did they prove so useful as marginal spaces and a metaphor? And what work do the phenomenon and the metaphor do today?
 

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By Anna Foa*

On March 6, Europe celebrates the Day of the Righteous of Humanity. The establishment of this day was the result of a long battle waged by the Gariwo association and its president Gabriele Nissim. In many places, the very idea of ​​the Righteous of Humanity has been contrasted with that advocated by Yad Vashem of the Righteous among the Nations, that is, those Righteous who saved at least one Jew during the Shoah.
On the occasion of the Day of the Righteous of Humanity Mordecai Paldiel, who from 1984 to 2007 was director of the Department of the Righteous of Yad Vashem, wanted to express his opinion on this point. Arguing that the time has come to extend the concept of righteous to every crime against humanity, he thanked the European Union for having approved the law establishing the day of March.
“Yad Vashem – he said - was the first institution that created a Garden for the Righteous. We used these thousands of people we honored as an educational tool. But now the time has come when we have to expand this message and honor people who have saved other people, who have helped them in different ways not necessarily during the Holocaust but in many other cases of tyrannical regimes. People that are persecuted for no guilt be it in Bosnia, Burma, Cambodia, Africa, Paraguay, anywhere. This in order to spread the message that people can make a difference and act in the best tradition of humanitarian behavior”.

*Historian

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By Michael Sheils McNamee*

On 7 April 1926 an Irish woman stepped out from a crowd in Rome and fired a shot at one of the 20th century's most infamous dictators. One bullet grazed the nose of Benito Mussolini, but the Italian leader survived the assassination attempt. Among the many acts of individual bravery against fascism in Europe in the 20th century, Violet Gibson's has been largely lost to history. Of the four people who attempted to assassinate Il Duce, she came closest.
Now, nearly a century later, moves to put up a plaque in Dublin are gathering pace. Her attempt on Mussolini's life came three years into his rule, as he was making a speech. She fired one shot before the gun jammed and was then attacked by Mussolini's supporters, and only saved by the police intervening and arresting her. After some time in an Italian prison, she was deported to England, something it is suspected might have happened to spare the embarrassment of a public trial in Italy. She was subsequently kept in St Andrew's Hospital, a mental asylum in Northampton, until her death in 1956.

*This article was originally published on BBC News on 21 February 2021..

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