Antisemitism, Racism, and Genocide. The Question of Liberty.

Manuela Consonni (The Hebrew University and Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism). Introduced and moderated by Federico Finchelstein (The New School for Social Research).

Copresented by the History Department at Eugene Lang College, the New School for Social Research and The Janey Program in Latin American Studies. Free admission.

Through a re-reading of seminal reflections by Levinas, Arendt, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Cassirer, the seminar explores the question of antisemitism, racism, and genocide, as a symptom of a fracture in Western history and its alleged civilization. As noted in Françoise Collin’s inspiring essay, this fracture requires an analysis of the conditions and possibility of a shared world.  While the extermination of the Jews stands in the background of their analysis of antisemitism, these thinkers go further in the investigation of the political and cultural aspect of the nation-state and the coercive character of state sovereignty. The seminar will address not only the obvious case of the totalitarian system but also the less obvious one of the liberal democratic system.

Manuela Consonni is the Pela and Adam Starkopf Chair in Holocaust Studies at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, at the School of History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the head of the Department of Romance Studies and the director of the Italian Studies Program. Consonni is currently the Director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. She is the author of Resistance or Holocaust: The Memory of the Deportation and Extermination in Italy, 1945-1985 (Magnes Press, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2010, Hebrew) and L’eclisse dell’antifascismo. Resistenza, questione ebraica e cultura politica in Italia dal 1943 al 1989 (Laterza Publisher 2015) that was awarded the 2016 Polonsky Prize for Originality and Novelty in the Humanities. She is working on a forthcoming book on Julius Evola, Spiritual antisemitism  and the Modern Political Myth. Consonni is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journals: Rassegna Mensile di Israel, Roma and Studies in Antisemitism, Indiana University Press and the editor, with Martina Weisz of The Vidal Sassoon Studies in Antisemitism, Racism and Prejudice, for De Gruyter Publishing House.

This series of programs marks the eightieth anniversary of the promulgation of the racial laws in Italy.

A collaboration of Centro Primo Levi with NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò and Department of Italian, The New School for Social Research, Eugene Lang College and the Columbia Seminar for Modern Italian Studies.

From the Primo Levi Center of New York.