Charleston, SC; 3-5 May, 2012 - website

THURSDAY, MAY 3, 2012

I SESSION -- Italian Jews in the Mediterranean World (Chair: Marco Di Giulio, Franklin & Marshall College)

1. •(a) Igor H. de Souza (University of Chicago): "Jewish Philosophy in 13th-Century Italy: Between Isolation and Collaboration"
   

2. •(b) Vadim Putzu (Hebrew Union College, Franklin & Marshall College): "The Leviathan… may be digested through wine: Menachem Azariah of Fano’s Symbolism of Wine between Safed and Italy"
   

3. •(c) Pamela J. Dorn Sezgin (Gainesville State College): "Los Frangos: Italian Jews as Agents of Modernity in the Late Ottoman Diaspora"
   

II SESSION -- Jews in Italy between Pride and Prejudice (Chair:Jonathan Druker, Illinois State University)

1. •(a) Marco Di Giulio (Franklin & Marshall College): "Reclaiming Hebrew Studies: Language and National Pride in Nineteenth-Century Italian Scholarship"
   

2. •(b) Risa Sodi (Yale University): "Fascism and the Italian Roots of Racialism"
   

3. •(c) L. Scott Lerner (Franklin & Marshall College): "The Narrating Architecture of the Catholic-Jewish Relation"
   

PUBLIC CONCERT: “Voices of the Italian Holocaust”

1. •Caroline Helton (University of Michigan), soprano
   

2. •Kathryn Goodson (University of Michigan), pianist
   

3. •Aloma Bardi (International Center for American Music), introduction
   

Songs by Italian-Jewish composers Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Vittorio Rieti, Guido Alberto Fano, and Leone Sinigaglia. This concert, produced by the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies with the research collaboration of Aloma Bardi (ICAMus and the University of Florence), premiered in 2011 at the University of Michigan School of Music.

FRIDAY, MAY 4, 2012

III SESSION -- Musical Portraits of Jews in Fascist Italy (Chair: Gabriele Boccaccini, University of Michigan)

1. •(a) Jesse Rosenberg (Northwestern University): "L'ebraismo sulla scena operistica in Italia nel ventennio fascista"
   

2. •(b) Aloma Bardi (University of Florence, Italy; International Center for American Music): "Musical Exoticism of Jewish Folklore in Il dibuk by Renato Simoni and Lodovico Rocca (1934)"
   

3. •(c) The two papers will be followed by a panel discussion with the performers of the concerts.
   

IV SESSION -- Zionism, Judaism, and the Holocaust Survivors (Chair: Risa Sodi, Yale University)

1. •(a) Giuseppe Prigiotti (Duke University): "Zionism in La Civiltà Cattolica during Fascist Ventennio (1922-43)"
   

2. •(b) Wiley Feinstein (Loyola University Chicago): “Alaska Rather Than Palestine: The Problem of Italian Jewish Aversion to-Zionism in Major Narratives of the Shoah”
   

3. •(c) Jonathan Druker (Illinois State University): "On Levi’s Alterations to the Second Edition of Se questo è un uomo: Integrating Testimony and Commemoration"
   

4. •
   

SATURDAY, MAY 5, 2012

V SESSION -- Memory and Contemporaneity of Judaism (Chair: Wiley Feinstein, Loyola University Chicago)

1. •(a) Mattia Beghelli (University of Michigan): “La tragicità della sopravvivenza: Se questo e' un uomo, Shoah e Il portiere di notte”.
   

2. •(b) Luca Peretti (Yale University): "Filling the void after the October 16, 1943: Cinema, memory and the space of the Jewish Ghetto of Rome"
   

3. •(c) Melissa Coburn (Virginia Tech): "Metaphors of Identification and of Otherness: Antisemitism and the Double in Umberto Eco's Il cimitero di Praga"
   

LECTURE-RECITAL (VI SESSION) - "Leaves of Grass: The Whitman Songs by Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco" (Chair: Aloma Bardi, International Center for American Music)

1. •John Champagne (Bard College), lecturer
   

2. •Salvatore Champagne (Oberlin College), tenor
   

3. •Howard Lubin (Oberlin College), pianist
   

World Premiere of Walt Whitman’s songs, set to music by Italian-Jewish composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco in 1936 (from unpublished manuscript at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC). The lecture-recital will be followed by a panel discussion.