NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò

J-ITALY, conceived by Centro Primo Levi in collaboration with ENIT (The Italian National Tourism Board) and designed by Jonathan Wajskol, is a newly created portal that provides a dynamic guide to both historical and contemporary Jewish Italy, allowing viewers to explore, at their own pace, the cultural treasures of the most ancient Diaspora community in the West.

Among the most courageous figures of Italian antifascism, Carlo and Nello Rosselli co-founded Giustizia e Libertà. Carlo was among the first to grasp the importance of the Spanish Civil War as a means of organizing resistance to fascism across Europe. A fascist spy reported in Rome that ''the greatest danger comes from Rosselli, and, in my view, it is absolutely necessary that he be suppressed.'' In the spring of 1937, he and his brother were murdered by fascist gunmen. Directed by Stella Savino and narrated by Alberto Rosselli.

It is a first hand testimony, in all its unique flavor and idiosyncratic detail, tracing the ark of a life that started in war torn Italy, continuing with an American emigration story and ending with reminiscences of its very beginnings in wartime San Donato. On April 6, 1944, when the Nazis rounded up the internees in

San Donato, Maria Cardarelli Puzzanghero was a teen-ager. She saw, understood and remembers it all. While the Tenenbaums found refuge in the mountains, they left little Katja in care of the Cardarellis.

Each year, the Primo Levi Forum connects scholars and practitioners from the many fields of the humanities and sciences that defined Levi’s intellectual horizon. What continues to emerge is the extraordinary inspirational capacity of his work and the creative power of his journeys across disciplines.

Held on the 90th Anniversary of Primo Levi the 2009 symposium highlighted the critical work of Giorgio Agamben and the translations of If This is a Man in Arabic and Farsi. Among the many guests were Levi’s Italian editor, Ernesto Ferrero, anthropologist Talal Assad, German literary scholar Ernestine Bradley, Israeli historian Manuela Consonni, writer Boualem Sansal and comparativist Marianne Hirsh.

“Avni’s vivid settings recalled Mahler and Shostakovich, always responsive to the poem’s meditation on inhumanity, based on Levi’s Holocaust experiences. The five songs are structured as a set, the steady march like pulse of the first two intensifying to the almost brutal cataclysmic third song about destruction, giving way via a bleak fourth song to a more optimistic lyrical celebration of compassion.”

In this rare New York appearance, Ernesto Ferrero, longtime editor of Levi's work, offers new insight into Levi's intellectual and moral concerns. “Is this a man?

The German, the good family man who belongs to the most civilized country in Europe, the country which produced Bach and Goethe, yet plans the extermination with bureaucratic rigor? Is it the Jewish prisoner who becomes a kapo, collaborating to gain a few more days of life? Was Auschwitz an accident in history, and as such cannot be replicated?”

On the occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, Hebrew University’s Italian scholar Manuela Consonni talks about Enzo Sereni, Italian Zionist, co-founder of kibbutz Givat Brenner, scholar, advocate of Jewish-Arab co-existence and a fighter who was parachuted into Nazi-occupied Italy, captured by the Germans and executed in Dachau concentration camp.

On January 27 Centro Primo Levi, the Consulate General of Italy and the Italian Institutions in New York commemorate the victims of the Shoah by reading the names of the Jews deported from Italy and the Italian-controlled territories.

On January 27 Centro Primo Levi, the Consulate General of Italy and the Italian Institutions in New York commemorate the victims of the Shoah by reading the names of the Jews deported from Italy and the Italian-controlled territories.

Carlo Spartaco Capogreco (The Duce’s Camps), Doris Schechter, hidden as a child in Italy, Alessandro Cassin. This panel will examine the unique situations of Jews in Italy during the Holocaust. From 1938 to 1943, civilian internment camps were established to segregate Italian Jews and foreign Jews living in Italy. While there were many cases in which local populations showed great empathy, others did not hesitate to give up their Jewish neighbors to the Italian Fascists or Nazis.

Dr. Iael Nidam-Orvieto, the Editor-in-Chief of Yad Vashem Publications discusses the topic of: "Fascist Italy and the Jews: myth versus reality".

This is the first part of this talk, for the second part click here

The video is part of the series Insights and Perspectives from Holocaust Researchers and Historians" supported by the Claims Conference.

Primo Levi on Science Fiction

Reflecting upon the causes and the implications of this “ immense biological and social experience,” as he defines it, Levi, the story teller, ponders on the issue of segregation in our own times, on the heritage the camps have bequeathed on the present, establishing a disquieting continuity between past aberrations and present normality, showing beyond any doubt how the present is subtly interwoven by the logic of the past.

In his hallucinated fiction, and, specifically, in his play La bella addormentata nel frigo (Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge), Levi shows with great acumen and perspicacity the strict relationship between science, new technologies, and subjective alienation, as well as the ways in which normality, the tranquility of a prosperous life, are in fact the product of a bio-political normativity, universally accepted with careless complicity.  As a reminder of our own situation, Levi writes:  “Monsters do exist but are too few to be really dangerous; by far more dangerous are common men, executives always ready to believe and obey without ever questioning what they are told.” 

RABBI DARIO DISEGNI

"Rabbi Dario Disegni, a 20th-Century Story", produced by  the Archivio Terracini of Turin. Rabbi Disegni was the spiritual guide of the Jewish Community of Turin from 1935 to 1959. Set against the larger historical context that goes from the Unification of Italy to the end of World War II, the video analyzes five different moments of Rabbi Disegni's life: his education in the early XX century; his spiritual upbringing within the Jewish community of Turin; the two World Wars and the tragic loss of his family; his teaching and the translation of the Bible, to which he dedicated the last period of his life.

At the end of WWII, Jewish refugees were temporarily hosted in transit camps in Puglia, which had been established under the aegis of the United Nations and the Allied Forces. Many of them were Holocaust survivors who were directed from various European places to DP (Displaced Persons) camps. Refugees remained in Puglia for shorter or longer periods strating in 1944.  From there many left for Palestine or the US. These interviews were conducted by Enzo Selleri.

“Children imprisoned behind barbed wire! Here is one of the typical symptoms of this heroic age of ours. [...]  Some of these kids were born in detention, spent their entire childhood in the primitive huts of internment camps, living on convict rations, laughing and playing in the shadow of fascist militia. They grew up in deprived and unhealthy conditions, anxiously looked after by older internees - their companions in misfortune - and kept under continued surveillance, with a kind of resentment, by an authority who received their orders from a government far away beyond the barbed wire that deemed such measures necessary for “national security”. Jan Hermann, Israel Kalk Archive, CDEC, Milan.