Italy’s Jewish community is taking legal action against a television talk show for running an interview this week with a right-wing extremist who extolled fascism. Renzo Gattegna, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, or UCEI, said in a statement that the union had lodged a formal legal complaint against both the talk show,…
● Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade By Rachel Cohen Yale University Press, 344 pages, $18.98 Born Bernhard Valvrojenski in 1865 to a tin-peddling father in the Pale of Settlement, Bernard Berenson transformed himself into one of the most influential connoisseurs of Italian Renaissance art. An aspiring scholar, Berenson wrote a series of…
The lights illuminating the Colosseum in Rome will be switched off as a show of support for persecuted Christians around the world and the kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria. The initiative on Thursday is being co-sponsored by the Rome Jewish community and the Community of Sant’ Egidio, a Roman Catholic association that fosters interfaith dialogue, with…
An Italian priest who was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp because of his efforts to save Jews during World War II was recently beatified by the Roman Catholic Church. Father Giuseppe Girotti, whom Yad Vashem declared a Righteous Among the Nations in 1995, was beatified April 26 at a ceremony in the town of…
An Italian priest who was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp because of his efforts to save Jews during World War II was recently beatified by the Roman Catholic Church. Father Giuseppe Girotti, whom Yad Vashem declared a Righteous Among the Nations in 1995, was beatified April 26 at a ceremony in the town of…
Beppe Grillo, an Italian comic turned politician, refused to apologize for his parody of a Primo Levi poem about the Holocaust to criticize Italy’s government and political system. Italian-Jewish leader Renzo Gattegna called the parody on Grillo’s blog an “obscenity.” Grillo, who heads the anti-establishment Five Stars movement, paraphrased “If this Is a Man,” which…
I’m not usually the type of person who goes in for reality TV shows. Especially not when they revolve around singing competitions, and especially not when one of their singers’ performances becomes an overnight Internet sensation, to be endlessly posted and reposted on social media. So why did I feel compelled to watch a Sicilian…
Anti-Semitism in Europe is, once again, making headlines. In Paris, crowds sang, “Jews, France is not yours” at an anti-government protest last month. In Rome, a right-wing extremist mailed three pig heads to major Jewish sites, and Italy had its own anti-government protest — complete with anti-Semitic slogans — a couple of months ago. Plus,…
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