# 280 / Editorial: A Week in Italy
During this summer break, K. Review is suspending its original publications. Until we return in the fall, we’ll be offering our readers a weekly feature showcasing a selection of texts organized around a specific theme. This is an opportunity to discover a text you may have overlooked, to rediscover one that resonated with you, and to share some of K.’s publications with friends who aren’t yet familiar with the review.
This week’s feature focuses on an eccentricity: that of an Italian Judaism unlike any other. Too ancient to be a story of immigration, too discreet to fuel folklore, too assimilated to be told as an ongoing tragedy—and yet permeated, from start to finish, by the question of what this country intends to do with its Jews, and what the Jews make of it. This feature opens with the ambiguous perspective that another eccentric, Pasolini, held on Jews and Israel. Defending the Jewish minority’s right to establish a refuge? Pasolini regarded this as a necessity. But, transformed by Israel into a “normal” majority, the Jews then became impossible to love in the way Pasolini loved the marginalized—Tristan Koskas examines the paradoxical position thus assigned to the Jews, caught between identification and unease. Ada Treves then takes up the thread, offering an insider’s portrait of this “inert” Italian Judaism—to use her uncle Primo Levi’s term—a minority even within a minority, lacking a grand narrative of exile or the shtetl, yet rich with a two-thousand-year-old presence that nestles behind anonymous facades, from Biella to Trieste via Venice. Finally, Simone Disegni brings to light the figures of Edgardo Mortara, torn from his family by the Vatican in 1858, and Franco Cesana, a thirteen-year-old partisan who fell fighting for the Resistance—two Jewish children from Bologna. Their story, in the era of Giorgia Meloni, raises the question that runs through this entire issue: to which homeland, to which nation, does today’s Italy intend to claim allegiance, and what place does it make there for those who, for two thousand years, have persisted there?
In the second episode of “Bitter Love. Israel or the Shores of Intimacy,” Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac recounts the obsessive turning point in his relationship with Israel, as the conflict with Lebanon dominated his adolescent imagination. It is also an opportunity to revisit the effervescent atmosphere at Radio Kol HaChalom in Grenoble, right up to the sedition and the discovery of the ambivalences surrounding the figure of the “critical Jew.”
As a reminder, our archives are open, and we invite you to explore the hundreds of articles we have published over the past five years.
