Talk: Humanitarianism And The Century Of Wars

Historians Davide Rodogno (The Graduate Institute) and Sergio Luzzatto (University of Turin) will present and discuss their current research on cases in which, during the century that was theater to two world conflicts, the notion of humanitarian intervention took shape and and shaped the societies that received it as well as those that practiced it.

Admission: this program is primarily meant for an academic audience. A limited number of seats are available for the general public. Location: Wolff Conference Room, D1103, 6 East 16th Street.

The program is co-sponsored by the News School for Social Research, Department of History and is introduced and moderated by Federico Finchelstein (Department Chair, NSSR).

Davide Rodogno will present his research tentatively entitled: Night on Earth: Humanitarian Organisations’ Relief and Rehabilitation on Behalf of Civilian Populations (1918-1939). He will give some examples of the social engineering ambitions of a number of non-state actors, such as philanthropic foundations, international associations and organisations that operated in what they perceived to be “the faultlines of Western civilization” in between the two world wars. Some of their activities concerned agricultural, public health and educational programs, with a specific focus on refugees and children who, most of the time happened to be orphans.

Sergio Luzzatto will discuss his new book, Moshe’s Children (Einaudi 2018), the the story of a group of some 700 children who, after escaping the final solution, ended up at Selvino, near Bergamo in northern Italy, in what was then the largest refugees orphanage in Italy and one of the largest in Europe. It is also the story of Moshe Zeiri, who took responsibility for these orphans of the Holocaust, and created the conditions for them to have a second life in Eretz Israel. Moshe was trained as a carpenter and belonged to a small group of young Zionists from Eastern and Central Europe who had emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s, and returned to Europe between 1943 and 1945 to fight as volunteers with the British forces in the Italian peninsula. After a dramatic meeting with some young survivors, Moshe built a sort of republic of orphans at Selvino where a large number of Jewish refugees had gathered under the auspices of the Joint, Delasem and other local relief organizations.

The story of Moshe’s children is above all a tale of redemption, but it’s also a tale of illusions. After the war of independence of 1948, the Selvino kibbutz’s utopian ideals would come in conflict with new (and brutal) forces in the nascent state of Israel.

Where: The New School, 6 East 16th Street.