On Italy
This is about daydreams
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: Next Monday, paid subscribers will get this month’s ET Read Home, a monthly book club of sorts, with a mini essay on Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words.
I’m sorry this is a day late. I held it to be able to include the link to the piece in the top bullet. I hope you’ll read it and think to yourself that it made the wait worth it.
With that! Onto news, Jews, and views.
NEWS
For Haaretz, I wrote about the current flowering of American Jewish lifestyle content, and whether it constitutes avoidance or engagement.
From the New York Times: “With showbiz hoopla and solemn ceremony, President Trump and Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday jumped into the final stretch of an election campaign in Hungary, heaping lavish praise on Prime Minister Viktor Orban just five days before a vote that most polls predict his party could lose.”
Relatedly, from Reuters: “The European Union should end sanctions on Russian oil and gas imports, take steps to restore Druzhba oil pipeline flows and end the war in Ukraine to tackle the energy crisis stemming from the war in Iran, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said on Saturday.”
From CNBC: “‘The thaw is real’: Indian delegation visits China to talk EVs and more”
In the Guardian, Sergey Radchenko has an essay about renouncing his Russian citizenship that is also about identity, roots, geopolitics, guilt, and whom and what we owe.
MY VIEWS ON…
…Italy!
A very strange thing is happening to me.
If there is a part of the world to which I have been drawn without totally understanding why, it is Central and Eastern Europe. It’s been that way since I was a freshman in college and took a (great) class called “The Politics of Hatred and Fear” on the region from the Berlin Congress to the Hungarian Revolution. I was a Russian literature major. My Fulbright project was on Soviet Russian dissidence. My graduate degree is in Russian and East European Studies. The city I am most likely to try to sneak a trip to is Prague. In the summer of 2024, I took a trip for book research to Warsaw, Krakow, Prague, and Berlin, and I thought that it was the best possible itinerary I could have had. I’ve been to Italy several times, and I’ve loved every visit, but it’s rarely been the place I have caught myself daydreaming about. And it’s not the focus of my professional life, either: My mother’s father was from Sicily, but this newsletter isn’t dedicated to “news, views, and Sicilians.” My second book isn’t Bad Sicilians even though, as she has pointed out, her family has stories, too.
And yet, at this moment of personal stress and geopolitical crisis, I keep thinking of Italy.
I think part of this is that I have read everything by Primo Levi that I can read in English, and have read a lot—not everything, of course, but a lot—about him in English, too, and I reached out to some Italian Levi scholars to see if their works on his relationship to Jewishness and Israel were available in English only to be told that, no, they have only been published in Italian. And this makes sense, but I am frustrated that I can only go so far into my amateur Primo Levi study because of the barrier of language. But what am I going to do? Start learning Italian to better read Primo Levi? I don’t think I can, and I say this as someone who takes a Zoom Czech class on the weekend for fun. So I have settled on thinking about how I would like to go to his Turin and drag my family to all things Primo Levi.
I also think part of it was the Winter Olympics. Didn’t they look fun? Weren’t all those little vignettes filmed with Stanley Tucci tasteful? Don’t you find yourself wishing there were a new season of his rebooted Italy show that you could watch right now? And then plan a trip?
I finally read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Penguin collection of Italian short stories, which is really quite excellent, and I just watched La Dolce Vita, which is, too (you may not have heard but this “Fellini” is very talented). I look at various reels and posts about traveling to and eating and drinking in Italy on my Instagram explore page, which I am trying to train to show me travel and parenting content as often as it shows me Jewish merchandise and stuff about reality television (it’s my own fault because I click on posts about Summer House—Team Ciara, obviously, though I don’t watch the show—and then it shows me more).
I catch myself imagining a time when my personal life is less stressful and the political and geopolitical reality less hellish, and maybe when Italian politics are better, too. I imagine tracing Primo Levi’s life in Turin and, why not, going over to Milan, and also going back to Venice and to Rome and maybe one day down south to meet my mother’s family in Sicily. I imagine introducing them to my husband and our baby. I imagine a day when things aren’t so hard, when I’m not so worried about everyone and everything in my little life, and when planes can fly for non-exorbitant rates because there isn’t a war in which tens, hundreds, thousands of people are losing their lives and about which the president issues genocidal posts on his social media platform. I imagine Italy long enough to pretend I’m not imagining a day when I won’t need to imagine Italy.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
From the Forward: “Jews paused Indiana’s abortion ban — by turning a religious freedom law against the evangelical right”
Also from the Forward: “Two women race to save Persian Jewish music before it fades”
One last one from the Forward, a great profile of Mahmoud Khalil: “The major reason that Khalil put on a baseball hat and sunglasses and traveled from Brooklyn to a conference room in Manhattan last week to meet with the Forward is that he believes misplaced Jewish fear remains a major obstacle to achieving what he and other protesters consider to be the liberation of Palestine.”
From the New York Times: ‘In ‘Here Where We Live Is Our Country,’ Molly Crabapple tells the story of a Jewish labor movement that fought antisemitism and nationalism with equal fervor.” (I will admit that I am, of course, jealous that a book on Jewish history got this kind of attention and praise from the New York Times, but not so much that I won’t share it here and say, earnestly, that I’m excited to read the book.)
From Politico: “In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the ‘fragility of democracy.’”
From JTA: “Iranian state media claimed on Tuesday that a synagogue in Tehran was “completely destroyed” by a U.S.-Israeli strike.”
Also from JTA: “A national nonprofit that supports interfaith Jewish families has slashed its workforce after facing an unanticipated budget shortfall.”
One last one from JTA: “Six in 10 Americans say they have a very or somewhat unfavorable view of Israel, up 20 points since 2022, according to a new Pew Research Center survey released this week.”
From Haaretz: “Shots were fired at a Jewish-owned restaurant in Toronto over the Passover holiday, police confirmed, in the latest in a spate of shootings reported at synagogues and other Jewish institutions across Canada’s largest city.”
-ET
"Snow in Italy" by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC BY 2.0.