Simon Levis Sullam, who teaches modern history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, has written a well-researched book that shatters the widely-held belief that Italians were brava gente, “good people,” who protected their Jewish fellow citizens from the horrors of the Holocaust.

The postwar government in Rome nurtured the false belief that the inherent “tolerance” of Italians rendered them incapable of collaborating in “the genocide” of the nation’s Jews. Not surprisingly, this characterization struck a responsive public chord among Italians. Western societies, too, were receptive to the benign, almost comedic image of Italians. The fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, was often portrayed as a strutting buffoon, a farcical refugee of the operatic stage. 
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In fact, on November 17, 1938, (a week after Kristallnacht took place in Germany and Austria), the Mussolini regime adopted a series of harsh laws that denied Italian Jews their civil rights and removed them from public office and institutions of higher education. Other Fascist laws deprived Jews of their assets, limited their travel, and forbade sexual relations and marriages between Jews and “racially pure” Italians. 
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Manoel Dias Soeiro was born in Lisbon in 1604 into an outwardly Roman Catholic family that had been forced by the Inquisition to abandon its Jewish faith and practices.

A half century later at the time of his death in Holland, Soeiro was the world’s most famous Jewish personality of his time, widely known to Jews and Christians as Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel.

In his excellent new book, Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam(Yale University Press), Professor Steven Nadler of the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes this remarkable transition. 
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Desperate to escape Portugal (the Inquisition authorities physically tortured Manoel’s father), the family escaped to Amsterdam in 1610, where refugees could reclaim their Jewish names and identities.

(RNS) — America’s greatest musician of the 20th century was born on Aug. 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Mass. When he died 72 years later, The New York Times called him a “Musical Monarch.” And indeed, Leonard Bernstein, a man of extraordinary emotion and energy, was all that and more.

To honor Bernstein during his centennial year, there have been 3,000 musical and cultural events in more than 30 countries, including performances in Iran, Kuwait and Malaysia.
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The world will forever remember his classic Broadway musicals, “West Side Story,” “On The Town,” “Wonderful Town” and “Candide.” Bernstein also composed music for the ballets “Fancy Free” and “ Dybbuk,” the Yiddish term for a tormented spirit that enters a person, and he wrote the music for the film “On The Waterfront.” Of course, Bernstein was a gifted pianist, a creator of classical music, an acclaimed educator, a political activist and a world-class symphony orchestra conductor.

The centennial of the renowned maestro Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) is currently being celebrated around the world with more than 3,000 musical performances and museum exhibits. More than 30 countries are hosting concerts featuring Bernstein’s music, including the U.S., Canada, France, Britain, Israel, China, Russia, Iran, Malaysia, and Kuwait.

Most widely known for the Broadway hit musical West Side Story, Bernstein was a gifted pianist, composer, and conductor.
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He was born in Lawrence, MA, on August 25, 1918, to parents who immigrated to the United States to escape the anti-Semitism of their native Ukraine. They were active members of Boston’s Mishkan Tefilacongregation.

In Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), literary critic and poet Adam Kirsch presents us with a collection of 270 letters spanning the period from 1924 to 1975, the year of literary critic Lionel Trilling’s death at the age of 70. The letters are organized in chronological order rather than thematically, juxtaposing love letters to his wife Diana (an important literary critic in her own right) to discourses on his favorite British authors, to dealings with his psychoanalysts. 


Trilling’s father was a tailor from Bialystok, Poland, and although Lionel’s mother was born in England and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, her family’s Jewish roots were also in Poland.   
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Lionel was born in Queens, N.Y., in 1905 and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He entered Columbia University at age 16 when, as Trilling wrote 50 years later, the university was “pretty far along toward its Jewish coloration.” He earned both his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia and made history when he overcame embedded academic anti-Semitism to become the first Jew to gain professorial tenure in Columbia’s prestigious English department.

Nearly 40 years have passed since Dan White, a disgruntled political rival, shot and killed San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, and Mayor George Moscone in their City Hall offices.

At his trial, White ’s lawyers claimed his mental capacity was diminished as a result of severe depression, and he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. Two years after his release from prison, White committed suicide in 1985.
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Since those murders, the mists of legend have enveloped Milk, who had served as supervisor for only 11 months before his murder at age 48. A 2008 film bears his name as does a New York City high school. Time magazine included Milk on its list of the hundred most influential individuals of the 20th century, Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2009, and the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor in 2014.

​Professor Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) of the Hebrew University – arguably the greatest Jewish scholar of the 20th century – considered himself an archeologist. No, not the kind of person who digs into the history-laden soil of Israel, but rather one who delves into the Jewish religious tradition that Scholem described as “a field strewn with ruins.”

Scholem described his life’s work as “…the modest but necessary task of clearing the ground of much scattered debris and laying bare the outlines of a great and significant chapter in the history of the Jewish religion.”

​(RNS) — Philip Roth’s death at age 85 marks the end of an extraordinary writing career. In my mind, Roth was the greatest American author of the past 60 years.

I’m a fast reader and usually get through most novels quickly. Not so with Roth’s many remarkable writings. His carefully crafted books demand slow reading because of his rich, tightly composed prose. Indeed, I often reread his words again and again simply to admire his magnificent command of the English language.

​(RNS) — For most people April 19 is just another springtime day on the calendar: the baseball season is well underway, it’s often the date for the Boston Marathon, and the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., are usually just past their peak.

But April 19 is deeply embedded within my personal memory bank.

On that date 75 years ago, in 1943, I was a youngster traveling with my family from Alexandria, Va., to Pittsburgh to participate in a Passover seder at my grandparents’ home located in what was then rightly called “The Steel City.”

It was the midst of World War II, and my father, a U.S. Army major, was stationed at Fort Belvoir. He had carefully accumulated enough rationing coupons to provide sufficient gasoline for the round trip in our 1940 Chrysler.

For many people, “Key West” conjures up a menagerie of Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall films, home of Ernest Hemmingway, quirky residents and visitors, set in a hurricane-prone resort town adorned with beautiful sunsets.

Arlo Haskell’s The Jews of Key West: Smugglers, Cigar Makers, and Revolutionaries (Sand Paper Press) shows us another dimension of America’s southernmost island city in his skillful portrayal of its 195-year-old Jewish community.
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The author, executive director of the Key West Literary Seminar, introduces us to a robust gallery of Jewish “conchs” (the affectionate name for Key West denizens), including sailors, religious leaders, smugglers, cigar makers, tavern owners, Cuban independence supporters, and activists who helped smuggle European Jewish refugees into the United States from nearby Cuba during the 1920s and 1930s.