Italian Jewish leader condemns pro-Palestinian protest flyers for use of Primo Levi quote

Noemi Di Segni, the President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, in 2018. Photo by Simona Granati – Corbis/Getty Images

By Louis Keene January 23, 2024

The use of a Primo Levi quote to advertise a pro-Palestinian protest planned in Milan on Saturday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, has drawn a rebuke from an Italian Jewish community leader who says the activists should leave Holocaust references out of their messaging.

Levi, an Italian Auschwitz survivor who wrote several books about his experience, famously wrote that “if understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.” Pro-Palestinian protesters slapped part of the quote on a flyer to promote a protest of Israel’s war with Hamas, which is estimated to have killed more than 25,000 Palestinians.

“Leave Primo Levi to our memory,’’ Noemi Di Segni, head of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, was quoted by the news agency ANSA as saying, according to the Associated Press. “Have the dignity to show your thoughts without offending the memory of a survivor, and find other citations.”

Di Segni’s reaction came amid a spike in antisemitic incidents in Italy since Oct. 7, and the rise of a wider cultural discourse over the use of references to genocide and the Holocaust in the context of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Levi, who died in 1987 in Turin, repeatedly condemned Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in his lifetime, occasionally in ways that invoked antisemitism as a reference point.

After the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, in which the Israel Defense Forces supported a Lebanese Christian militia in the killing of hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians, Levi called for the resignation of then-defense minister Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, telling an Italian newspaper, “Everybody is somebody’s Jew.”