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Emanuele Artom: Hero of the Italian Resistance, Dedicated Jew, and Diarist

Born in Turin in 1915 to a prominent Jewish family, Emanuel Artom joined the anti-Mussolini partisans in 1943; a year later he was captured by the Nazis and tortured to death. He had been a promising scholar before the war, and had, among other things, authored a children’s book outlining Jewish history from biblical times to the present. While he is well known in Italy, he remains nearly unheard of elsewhere, perhaps because his remarkable diaries have remained untranslated. Siân Gibby writes:

Emanuele was the elder child of the mathematicians Emilio and Amalia Artom. Together with his brother, Ennio, he founded a Jewish culture group, which included Primo Levi and his sister Anna Maria. . . . He had learned Hebrew to read and discuss Talmud and Torah with his father. Levi’s biographer, Carole Angier, says that the Artoms were a devout family but that Emanuele didn’t develop his personal religious feeling until adulthood. . . .

[Artom possessed] a keen awareness and expressive ability that, had he survived, would surely have placed him squarely in Primo Levi’s company as one of the greatest Jewish chroniclers of the wartime experience. [His diaries] include his literary musings—on Dostoyevsky, 19th-century Italian poetry, and a French edition of A Thousand and One Nights. He records dreams, worries about his parents, meditates on Zionism, and references his engagement to a woman he shyly refers to as “M.” . . .

Eventually, along with all these ordinary experiences of being an extraordinary young man in wartime Italy, he begins to write about the darkening political scene and the Jews’ place in it.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Fascism, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Italian Jewry, Primo Levi

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic