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AMERICORDO

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Documenting the stories of Italian Jews in the Americas

In the annals of the Jewish and Italian communities in America there is little mention, if any, of Italian Jews. Indeed, with hardly any major figures in the 19th century and fewer than two thousand individuals forced to emigrate in 1938 by the Fascist racial laws, the arrival of Italian Jews in the New World is not a phenomenon that allows a general study. Since the 1990s, however, many memoirs have been published, and a story that does not quite fit any categorization has begun to emerge.

Through the collection and publishing of interviews and documents, Americordo will offer access to the stories of this diverse group of expatriates, who embraced all fields of knowledge and expressed in many ways their love of Italy and ties to their new homeland, yet always eluded ethnic identification.

Jews who were forced to this country by the Fascist persecutions continued their work in fields ranging from mathematics and biology, Tullia e Bruno Zevi, Giorgio Cavaglieri, Amalia Rosselli, Silvano Arieti, Emilio Segré, Franco Modigliani, Paolo Milano, and Giorgio Levi della Vida are only a few of this group whose impact on society and people goes well beyond the four Nobel prizes they collected in the years after World War II. Not always coalescing as a community, Italian Jews nevertheless continue to share the humanistic heritage of their country of origin, and to contribute to societal values and ideas that go beyond ethnic and religious particularism.

Images: Tullia Zevi, Bruno Zevi and Frank Lloyd Wright, Gisella Levi Cahnman, Peter Treves and Renata Colombo, Salvador Luria, The Fermi-Capon family, “Ragazzi di Via Panisperna”.