Having trouble viewing this email? Click here March 15, 2021 – 2 Nissan 5781
ANTISEMITISM - REPORT

"In the wake of the pandemic, beware of hatred"

Against hatred and antisemitism, a strategy needs to be adopted - sporadic interventions are not enough.  Just like in chess, you need to have a clear goal, said the long-time president of the Jewish Agency for Israel Natan Sharansky. “It is necessary to work on multiple levels of society and to have a clear outline of antisemitism”. If you do not know who is in front of you, you don't know how to fight them. For this reason, it is important to keep in mind the IHRA - International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition for antisemitism” - Sharansky explains to Pagine Ebraiche. Thus, starting from that definition, we should deconstruct the many forms of antisemitic hatred.
Sharansky’s fear - shared by many – concerns the risk of a reappearing hatred in this social and health crisis, which would be characterised by an alarming intensity thanks to the various social platforms. This is underlined in the latest annual report on antisemitism in Italy by the Antisemitism Observatory of the CDEC – Contemporary Jewish Documentation Foundation.
“Looking above all at social networks, the theme of conspiracy has significantly re-emerged, in particular of the economic power of Jews - explains sociologist and head of the CDEC Observatory Betti Guetta - and has been connected to the theme of Covid. In the emergency, ancient stereotypes reappeared: as happened during the plague of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, returns the lie of Jews spreading the virus to make money”. Lies that find fertile ground, continues the sociologist, in today’s Italy where there has been growing deterioration, the economic crisis had already left tangible marks and the social ladder is blocked, if not worse.

(Above, the distribution of hate speech on social media platforms)
 
Translated by Antonella Losavio and revised by Silvia Bozzo, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.

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NEWS

Jewish cultural heritage, when unity is strength

For the safeguarding and promotion of the Italian Jewish cultural heritage, the implementation of “an institutional synergy that places full understanding and value at the center, encouraging the training of a new generation of experts” is essential. This is the wish expressed by Dario Disegni, president of the Jewish Cultural Heritage Foundation in Italy, during the online presentation of the book “Sub anulo piscatoris. A register and a Jewish community in the Rome of the popes (XVI-XVIII centuries)”, the work of the young scholar Lucrezia Signorello and the result of a synergy between the same Foundation, of which Signorello had won a research grant in 2017, the Jewish Community of Rome and its historical archive. A theme, that of the ghettos, which is “of great interest” in Rome and in the rest of the country. It will also be the focus of the next exhibition of the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara, with the inauguration scheduled in October, Disegni recalled.
Ruth Dureghello, president of the Community of Rome, also focused on the importance of collaboration between different entities, underlining how the volume presented yesterday, published by the Florentine publisher Angelo Pontecorboli, is “a concrete example of this type of approach”.

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

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CULTURE

On display in Brera, the Fantasies by Mario Mafai
are a scream against the horrors of Nazi-Fascism 

From mid-February the paintings “Le Fantasie” by Mario Mafai, twenty-two paintings donated to the museum in 2018 by engineer Aldo Bassetti, president of the Amici di Brera from 2007 to 2020, are on display in Brera. The Fantasies - tablets painted with hallucinated colors and a strong expressionist matrix - are a denunciation on canvas of the violence of war and in particular of Nazi-fascism. They are a harsh representation of massacres and horrors, of shouts and guilty silences.
The history of these works is an integral part of Bassetti's existence and starts from afar, when he was just 14 years old and a tragic episode profoundly marked his life: the massacre at the Hotel Meina on Lake Maggiore in 1943. Victims of a German raid, carried out on the entire Novara coast of Lake Maggiore, sixteen Jewish guests of the hotel in Meina were first identified and held for a few days in a room and then, in two subsequent nights (on 22 and 23 September 1943), killed and thrown with ballast in the lake. Among the victims was Lotte Froehlich Mazzucchelli, 38, aunt of Aldo Bassetti. It was he who was called to recognize the body.

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PILPUL

Equality as optional

By David Bidussa*

To relaunch tourism, Dubai offers three items package: travel, accommodation, and vaccine. Equality is optional.


*Historian of social ideas

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ITALICS

Backyard Exiles

By Fredric Brandfon*

“I should be grateful to Mussolini. He made me realize that I myself was a Jew.” In one acerbic sentence, Elsa Morante, the author of History: A Novel, epitomized her wartime experience, surviving both Fascist Italy (1922-1943) and the Nazi occupation of Rome (1943-1944). Natalia Ginzburg said the same. “My Jewish identity became extremely important to me from the moment the Jews began to be persecuted. At that point I became aware of myself as a Jew.” Of course, if you have to thank Mussolini for discovering your Judaism, there is already a problem. During the generation preceding Mussolini, Italian Jews had traded some or all of their Jewish identity for what seemed like a secure place in a modern, liberal democratic state. That turned out to be a very bad bargain.
After World War II a cadre of writers—Silvano Arieti, Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, and Elsa Morante—wrote about the tribulations of being Jewish during the years between 1922, when Mussolini grabbed power, and 1945 when both Fascism and the Nazis had been defeated. These writers, and the characters they created, had Jewish identities ranging from nonexistent to all-consuming. Yet being Jewish was a condition that none could escape.

*This article was originally published on Tablet on March 4, 2021.

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Special thanks to: Francesco Moises Bassano, Susanna Barki, Amanda Benjamin, Monica Bizzio, Angelica Edna Calò Livne, Eliezer Di Martino, Alain Elkann, Dori Fleekop, Daniela Fubini, Benedetta Guetta, Sarah Kaminski, Daniel Leisawitz, Annette Leckart, Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Yaakov Mascetti, Francesca Matalon, Jonathan Misrachi, Anna Momigliano, Giovanni Montenero, Elèna Mortara, Sabina Muccigrosso, Lisa Palmieri Billig, Jazmine Pignatello, Shirley Piperno, Giandomenico Pozzi, Daniel Reichel, Colby Robbins,  Danielle Rockman, Lindsay Shedlin, Michael Sierra, Rachel Silvera, Adam Smulevich, Simone Somekh, Rossella Tercatin, Ada Treves, Lauren Waldman, Sahar Zivan.
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Realizzato con il contributo di: Francesco Moises Bassano, Susanna Barki, Amanda Benjamin, Monica Bizzio, Angelica Edna Calò Livne, Alain Elkann, Dori Fleekop, Daniela Fubini, Benedetta Guetta, Sarah Kaminski, Daniel Leisawitz, Annette Leckart, Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Yaakov Mascetti, Jonathan Misrachi, Anna Momigliano, Giovanni Montenero, Elèna Mortara, Sabina Muccigrosso, Lisa Palmieri Billig, Jazmine Pignatello, Shirley Piperno, Giandomenico Pozzi, Daniel Reichel, Colby Robbins,  Danielle Rockman, Lindsay Shedlin, Michael Sierra, Adam Smulevich, Simone Somekh, Rossella Tercatin, Ada Treves, Lauren Waldman, Sahar Zivan.
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