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The poetry and socio-linguistic scholarship of Crescenzo Del Monte (Rome, 1868-1935) represent an important contribution to the understanding and preservation of Giudaico-Romanesco, the dialect of the Jews of Rome. Del Monte's assertion that Giudaico-Romanesco represents the closest living descendent of the spoken language of Ancient Rome and the medieval Italian vernacular of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, came into irreconcilable conflict with the anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and dialectophobic policies of the regime as the Fascists took control of Italy and exercised ever stricter control over cultural production. Del Monte's work remains fundamental to an understanding of the culture and language of the Jews of Rome in the decades leading up to and following their political emancipation.

This study analyzes late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs in a family album belonging to Roman Jews. The album was compiled at a crucial moment for Italy and for Italian Jews: after the wake of Italy's national unification. For many Roman Jews the risorgimento and Italian unification in 1870 resulted in liberation from crushing poverty, disease, and abuses under the papal state. These years coincided with the invention and development of photography. This article explores how Jewish emancipation and liberation from ghetto life, alongside the rise of photography, influenced the construction of images and photographic portraits of Roman Jews through the analysis of one family album.

In Surviving the Ghetto, Serena Di Nepi recounts the first fifty years of the ghetto, exploring the social and cultural strategies that allowed the Jews of Rome to preserve their identity and resist Catholic conversion over three long centuries (1555-1870).

Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. \"Not a typical city,\" as one observer noted in the late 1970s, \"but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form.\" Mapping Declineexamines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the \"white flight\" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy-and often sheer folly-of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Declineis the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps-rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records-illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.

No detailed description available for \"Theater of Acculturation\".

Holocaust artworks intuitively must fulfill at least two criteria: artistic (lest they be merely historical documents) and historical (lest they distort the Holocaust or become merely artworks). The Sense of Semblance locates this problematic within philosophical aesthetics, as a version of the conflict between aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy, and argues that Adorno's dialectic of aesthetic semblance describes the normative demand that artworks maintain a dynamic tension between the two. The Sense of Semblance aims to move beyond familiar debates surrounding postmodernism by demonstrating the usefulness of contemporary theories of meaning and understanding, including those from the analytic tradition. Pickford shows how the causal theory of names, the philosophy of tacit knowledge, the analytic philosophy of quotation, Sartre's theory of the imaginary, the epistemology of testimony, and Walter Benjamin's dialectical image can help explicate how individual artworks fulfill artistic and historical desiderata. In close readings of Celan's poetry, Holocaust memorials in Berlin, the quotational artist Heimrad Backer, Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus, Pickford offers interpretations that, in their precision, specificity, and clarity, inaugurate a dialogue between contemporary analytic philosophy and contemporary art. The Sense of Semblance is the first book to incorporate contemporary analytic philosophy in interpretations of art and architecture, literature, and film about the Holocaust.

Travellers in the Mediterranean region around 1600 had long encountered the religious worlds of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. A journey from Tripoli in Lebanon to Venice meant leaving Muslim and entering Catholic territory. In Italy, migrants from the Ottoman Empire were confronted with a society unfamiliar with the status of the 'dhimmi', and if they were taken for renegades or New Christians they even risked persecution by the Roman Inquisition. Siebenhuner describes the reactions of travelers and migrants when faced with other religious culture by focusing on the story of Mariana di Fiori, a Jewish woman from Poland who immigrated to Italy from Danzig via Tripoli.

The Cinquecento was marked by the emergence of expanded and more formalized structures of self-government in Italy's Jewish communities. It is from this century that we begin to have written capitoli (constitutional agreements) and pinkasim (record books).2 By the middle of the century, as Robert Bonfil has demonstrated, the office of community-appointed rabbi had been created and regularized.3 Intense internecine struggles broke out for control over the new institutions, and contemporary rabbinic responsa attest to the slow and sometimes tortuous manner in which early modern Jews felt their way toward new working arrangements, procedures, and understandings.4

(24) It was also the case, however, that they opened Jewish spaces in a new set of texts. Because the buildings were perceived as turning points in the history and identity of their communities, they were invariably accompanied by narratives that sought to make this meaning explicit. [...]I look at a set of articles published during the demolition of the ghetto 15 years before the construction of the synagogue. (34) Like Muggia, they assumed that the synagogue should recall the place and architecture of Palestine at the time of the Temple. Because no monument of the period had survived, they argued that it was appropriate to adopt a style evoking the historical period in which the religious system, to which the new building would be devoted, had originated. [...]just as Sereni's speech marked an entrance into autonomous public discourse, the synagogue reclaimed the Jewish sign in Rome.

Roman Jewry was a composite group in the early sixteenth century, including new arrivals from southern Italy, as well as Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula. There were Italians Jews, and Ashkenazim. By the middle of the century, they had amalgamated well. The \"out-marriage\" rate between the different groups was constantly increasing. One reason for this was the need to unify administrative procedures. This is especially noticeable with respect to laws of inheritance, in which, thanks to the Jewish Rabbinic notaries, the father and son Judah and Isaac Piattelli, it had become standard for a widower to return to his father-in-law one-third of the dowry, irrespective of how long the marriage had lasted. Jews found themselves adopting Christian procedures, yet also modifying them for Jewish use, thus creating unified Jewish procedure, but allowing for continued acculturation, even during the ghetto period.