May 18, 2012

On Friday, May 18, 2012 at 1:15 pm in the South Court Auditorium of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street), the Wertheim Study New York Public Library

Paul Arpaia, a writer in residence in the NY Public Library’s Wertheim Study, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Fellow at the American Academy of Rome examines reactions among members of the Italian Royal Academy to private and state-sponsored anti-Semitism through the fall of Mussolini. The promulgation of the Racial Laws in 1938 marked a first attempt at state-sponsored anti-Semitism in unified Italy. Studies on Fascism have emphasized fundamental differences between Italian and German forms of state-sponsored anti-Semitism and between German and Italian reactions to Jewish persecution. This talk will focus, instead, squarely on Italy, and will analyze how anti-Semitism intersected the lives of Italians engaged in high culture through the prism of the Royal Italian Academy, Fascism’s preeminent institution of high culture. By drawing on letters and diaries in private hands, published sources from NYPL and the extensive archive of the Italian Royal Academy, now a part of the public record at the Accademia dei Lincei, it considers what they reveal about anti-Semitism among Italian elites and what lessons can be drawn today from them for cultural life in Italy and the United States. This research is part of a book project entitled “Luigi Federzoni, Standard-Bearer of Italianità from Liberal Italy to Post-Fascism.”