On binging Primo Levi
This is about reading, and reading, and reading.
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: Next Monday, paid subscribers will get June’s ET Ask Home, a monthly questionnaire.
After that, however, ET Write Home will be going on its first ever month-long hiatus because I am (keynehore) having a baby in July. Thank you for understanding and I will see you right back here in August!
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about Holocaust comparisons and how people who claim to object in principle go on to make them, suggesting that their issue is actually the specific point the comparison is making, and why we should be honest about that.
Also for the Forward, I wrote about Zohran Mamdani and why I think the mode of “gotcha” antisemitism accusations in politics is counterproductive. (This week’s Political Cycle—the last before a summer hiatus and autumn relaunch—was also on Mamdani. It’s available here or wherever you get your podcasts.)
From the Guardian: “The US state department has been advised to terminate grants to nearly all remaining programs awarded under the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), which would effectively end the department’s role in funding pro-democracy programming in some of the world’s most hostile totalitarian nations.”
I found this interview by Sofia Coppola of her father, Francis Ford Coppola (her first ever!), very charming.
From the Washington Post, a reminder that, though it sometimes feels like things just get worse and we do, too, that isn’t always true: “In the decade since the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell, hundreds of thousands of gay couples have married, according to reports from Gallup, the Pew Center and the Williams Institute at UCLA Law. The organizations estimate there are now between 820,000 and 930,000 same-sex married couples — up from 390,000 in 2014. That increase has also marked an enormous shift in public opinion. Today, nearly 70 percent of Americans believe gay people should have the right to marry, according to Gallup, up from 27 percent three decades ago.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…binging Primo Levi!
Last year—or maybe it was the year before that?—Neil got me The Complete Works of Primo Levi. I had only read If This Is a Man. And it sat on my bookshelf and looked serious and beautiful and Primo Levi’s face would stare at me from the spines, but I did not actually read it.
But I’d been thinking a lot about Primo Levi, the chemist and writer and anti-fascist fighter and Holocaust survivor who probably, decades later, took his own life, and If This Is a Man and various passages and quotes from other writings I’d come across—particularly, “It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere,” the quote that greets visitors of the museum underneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin—as I worked on my book on Holocaust consciousness. So I decided that this year I would read through the whole thing. If you are a regular reader of this newsletter, you know this because I mention it all the time.
I will be honest and say, when I started this, that I thought it might be a chore, or something I did somewhat dutifully. I didn’t think that it would be the thing I look forward to doing at the end of the day, and I didn’t anticipate how often I would think about something that he wrote, but I do, and I think about it all the time.
I’ve been trying to think about why I’ve been so taken with this project and his writing and him. Why did I read a biography of Primo Levi as a break from reading Primo Levi on my mini vacation over Memorial Day Weekend? Why do I keep bringing him up in conversation? Why is this the thing of all things that I find kind of soothing? Why do I now want to go to Turin?
I think the thing about reading anything from one person in a relatively short period of time is that you can appreciate both their range and their consistency. That’s true, anyway, in Levi’s case: He wrote memoirs and short stories and a novel and essays and little (and not so little) articles. He wrote about witnessing and surviving the Holocaust, and pieces that were not about that but also, if you think about it, were. Some are wry and some are righteously indignant and some are nostalgic and some just break your heart. Some kind of wash over me and some stay with me and you can’t really predict which will be which. Why, for example, did I sit up last night reading an essay on how fleas jump, and how the religious and secular person’s explanation of why they desire to understand such a thing isn’t that different after all?
I think the most consistent thing across all those genres and subjects and approaches, and the reason I find myself walking around thinking about his writing now in particular, is that what Levi is really good at, besides writing clearly, is both being in a moment and observing that moment. There’s whatever he’s describing, be it something that happened to him or some idea he had, and there’s what he’s already thinking about doing with it, or what meaning it has, or what it might mean if others could see or imagine or feel this. It’s not that he’s both there and not there; he’s there and even more there. And thanks to reading him—and reading him, and reading him—I am, too.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
From Haaretz: “Israeli soldiers in Gaza told Haaretz that the army has deliberately fired at Palestinians near aid distribution sites over the past month.”
From JTA: “The federal government arrested a Maryland man accused of sending threatening letters to the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia and other Jewish institutions for over a year.”
The Forward has a report on YIVO’s centennial and the 100 years of history displayed in just three rooms.
Also from the Forward: “The Anti-Defamation League laid off 22 employees this week, roughly 4% of its workforce, as part of an effort to focus its work more narrowly on antisemitism as it shifts away from broader civil rights and public policy work.”
I don’t—how to put this—always feature sports in this section of the newsletter, so from Haaretz: “Ben Saraf and Danny Wolf are set to become the fourth and fifth Israelis to play in the NBA, after they were both picked by the Brooklyn Nets in Wednesday night's NBA Draft.”
-ET
Image by Gianni Giansanti/Corbis