At the 2025 Primo Levi Prize award ceremony in Genoa, the great American writer Jonathan Safran Foer delivered a powerful speech on memory, responsibility, and contemporary indifference. In a clear nod to Levi’s thinking, he evoked Gaza, called for moral vigilance in the face of global suffering, urged us to turn turmoil into ethical strength rather than weakness, and warned against becoming shadows of ourselves.
*
Good evening.
I stand before you tonight deeply honored, but also unsettled—unsettled by the responsibility that comes with invoking the name of Primo Levi. This is only fitting. Levi did not write to comfort us. He did not write to entertain or even to redeem. He wrote to disturb. He believed, as he put it, that “it happened, therefore it can happen again.” The “it” is not the cataclysm of the Holocaust, but the unresponsiveness that allowed it to happen. There is a demand at the bottom of all of Levi’s work: stay awake. Not just alert to history, but vulnerable to the present.
Levi did not aim to shock, but to unsettle. His disturbance was not aesthetic or psychological—it was moral. It was meant to hold us in a kind of suspended unease. He was not merely a survivor recounting a moral catastrophe, but a Jewish thinker, deeply embedded in a tradition that mistrusts comfort and treats the settled soul with suspicion.
Judaism has always placed discomfort at the heart of moral awakening. Abraham, the patriarch of monotheism, is commanded not to stay where he is but to “go forth”—lech lecha—a dual command to leave the physical place and to depart from oneself, from one’s comfort, from stasis. Moses does not become a prophet by virtue of his lineage or intellect, but because he stops to notice the violence being done against a slave. His greatness begins in attention, disturbance.
The prophets of the Torah are profoundly disturbed figures. They walk through their cities howling about injustice, their words like sirens against the complacency of the comfortable. They were not revered in their own time. They were mocked, exiled, ignored. And yet, in Jewish consciousness, they are the conscience of the people. The ones who would not allow suffering to be normalized. In the words of the prophet Amos: “Woe to those who are at ease.” Not because ease is inherently wrong, but because it breeds forgetfulness. And forgetfulness is the seed of cruelty.
To be disturbed, in the Jewish moral imagination, is not a weakness. It is a form of strength. It is what God praises in Job—his refusal to accept unjust suffering silently. Job argues with God. Abraham argues with God. Moses argues with God. The defining trait of the Jewish moral exemplar is protest. And not protest as noise, but protest as empathy—as unwillingness to accept a world in which human wellbeing is not protected at all costs.
In Hebrew, the word for compassion—rachamim—shares a root with rechem, meaning womb. Compassion in Judaism is not sentimental. It is not pity. It is fierce, embodied, generative. It arises from within us, like labor. It is painful. And it transforms us. The Talmud teaches that anyone who is not disturbed by the suffering of others is suspect—not just as a citizen, but as a human being. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “The opposite of good is not evil; it is indifference.”
Levi’s own disturbance was not performative. It was not self-congratulatory. It was exacting. He was a scientist and a writer, and he used the tools of both trades to illuminate the mechanisms of dehumanization: the language, systems, and silences. He showed us not only what happened in Auschwitz, but how it happened—how that unresponsiveness could happen anywhere.
And so tonight, I want to speak not only of Levi, but of this deeper tradition in which he worked. A tradition that says: to be human is to be disturbed.
Two weeks ago, the world lost Pope Francis—a man whose spiritual leadership was remarkable not because he offered comfort, but because he offered discomfort with grace. He warned us again and again of what he called the “globalization of indifference.” I can’t think of a more fitting or powerful description of our time. Globalized indifference is not passive. It is engineered. It is built into our economies, our technologies, our media cycles. It is the software running quietly in the background of daily life—casting shadows over what we see, what we feel, and whom we count as human.
Let us look around at the world we inhabit.
In Gaza, more than 30,000 civilians have been killed—many incinerated in their homes, their names never recorded, their lives barely mourned. This is an acknowledgement, an emergency, that comes become politics. Humans are not statistics. They are children seeking their mothers’ arms, mothers seeking to protect their children…
After a year and a half, Israeli hostages remain underground, many of their names forgotten by the headlines, their fates unspoken in daily conversation. Their captivity is a mirror of our own detachment. Each day they are not freed is a day that tests the depth of our empathy.
In Sudan, nearly nine million people have been displaced by war, famine, and political collapse. Cities burn, villages vanish. And yet, for most of us, Sudan remains a name on a map, a place we could not find, and would likely never try to.
In Ukraine, a war that once shocked the conscience of the West has become wallpaper. Each day, civilians die. Hospitals are shelled. Children sleep in basements. And yet we have moved on. We have learned to scroll past the suffering, to keep our eyes and mouths shut. But silence, as Levi knew, is not absence. It is complicity.
And while we quietly refresh our digital feeds, 45 million children under the age of five suffer from “wasting”—the most lethal form of malnutrition. That’s equal to the population of Spain. Pause for a moment and imagine the country of Spain inhabited entirely by starving children under the age of five. Try to conjure the image of them walking like zombies down Las Ramblas, sitting on the floors of the Reina Sofia, filling the foodless restaurants…
Eleven children die of hunger every minute. Pause for a moment and think about that. I was told that this speech should be no longer than thirty minutes. In that amount of time, 330 children will die of hunger. There are around 330 people are in this room. So imagine the seats filled with children. Imagine your seat filled by a child. And imagine that at the end of this speech, every one of those children will have died. They died not from drought. Not from scarcity. But from the deliberate and engineered inequities of our global systems. Because we, the people actually inhabiting this theater, decided it’s ok.
Almost one billion people go to bed hungry every night. Imagine the entire population of Genova going to bed hungry. Every grandfather and grandmother. Ever child. Every baby. Now imagine that it happens every single night. Now imagine 2,000 starving cities of Genova’s size. That is our situation right now. When was the last time you experienced hunger? Hunger without a known end? For me, and I assume for everyone in this room, hunger is an idea. But for those who need food, it is not abstract. It is a child crying herself to sleep. It is a mother pretending she has already eaten so her son can finish the last spoon of rice.
This is not just a shame, not just a tragedy. It is a heresy—a betrayal of the sacred notion that all humans have dignity.
Primo Levi understood something essential: atrocity does not begin with brutality. It begins with shrugging. It begins with quiet bureaucracies and dispassionate administrators, with what Levi called “the functionaries ready to believe and to act without questioning.”
Levi’s writing placed the human being—not the historical fact—at the center of the event. He gave us not data, but texture. And that texture—of hunger, humiliation, memory—is disturbing not only because of what it reveals, but because of how it resists being resolved. His witness is not a closed chapter. It is an open wound.
Our greatest danger today is not any external threat, but that we are no longer sufficiently horrified.
We say, “This is terrible,” and move on. We say, “I can’t take it anymore,” as if it were a burden on us, and not the death of someone else’s child.
And yet, disturbance is not despair. To be disturbed is not to be paralyzed. It is to be alive. It is to care—often inconveniently, often painfully. Disturbance is the immune response of the soul.
In the Talmud, there is a teaching: “Whoever can protest against the wrongdoing of their household and does not, is held responsible for the wrongdoing of their household. Whoever can protest against the wrongdoing of their city and does not, is held responsible for the wrongdoing of their city. And whoever can protest against the wrongdoing of the world and does not, is held responsible for the wrongdoing of the world.” Silence, in this tradition, is culpability.
In his final public sermons, Pope Francis insisted that our hope lies in what he called a “culture of encounter.” Not charity from a distance, not pity from a screen, but encounter. As he said: “We must open our hearts to those who are discarded, and recognize them not as a burden, but as a mirror.”
This is not poetry. It is strategy.
We do not fight indifference with statistics. We fight it with faces, with names, with stories. This is what literature is for: not to distract us, but to disarm us. To make us feel more than is comfortable. To re-humanize what the world has made anonymous—to cast light where the shadows have settled deepest.
Disturbance is not our natural state. It must be chosen. Nurtured. Protected. And so often, we fail. I am constantly failing. I see headlines I don’t click because I don’t want to know. Every day of my life I walk past suffering with practiced blindness. I let urgent, righteous requests for donations sit unread. There are so many times I’ve mistaken sympathy for action, or anger for courage.
There’s a strange comfort in outrage—it makes us feel awake, righteous, busy. But outrage without action is theater. And I have so often been such a performer. So I do not speak to you tonight from any distance of moral clarity. I am beside you as someone trying, again and again, to stay disturbed. And failing. And trying again.
The word “disturb” comes from the Latin disturbare: dis, meaning “apart,” and turbare, “to throw into disorder, to agitate.” To be disturbed is to be thrown off balance, pulled apart from comfort. But etymology also reveals a deeper truth: if we are to create change, we must first allow ourselves to be disordered. The world cannot be made new if we ourselves are never unmade.
Where to begin? The avalanche of suffering does not live only in headlines from faraway countries. It lives in our neighborhoods. It hides in plain sight.
Here in Genova, fifteen percent of the elderly live in poverty—quietly, invisibly, often alone. Behind shuttered windows, there are lives slowly dimming not from some incurable disease, but from abandonment. And what do we call a society in which the old are left behind? We don’t notice it enough to give it a name. At most we shrug.
In classrooms across Liguria, one in ten young people cannot read well enough to understand the text of this speech. What does that mean for their futures? What does it mean that we don’t consider it a civic emergency? In the Talmud, the illiterate child is not merely uneducated—they are unprotected. Because literacy is not just a skill, it is armor against invisibility.
This is a region so rich in history, rich in wealth, rich in beauty. And yet, what is done with the inheritance? What does it mean to live surrounded by cathedrals and archives and marble plazas, while the human beings in our midst disappear beneath economic statistics and bureaucratic categories? There is a kind of quiet violence in this, too—a violence of erasure.
What would it mean to look at the homeless? Not the archetype, but the individuals? The man who sleeps near the train station wrapped in scavenged blankets. The woman who mutters to herself near the grocery store, whose shopping cart holds remnants of a former life. We see them. But we do not see them. And that seeing without seeing is not neutral—it is corrosive, to our society, and to our own hearts.
What about the child who eats only at school, for whom summer vacation is a season of hunger? What about the mentally ill neighbor whose name we do not know, whose suffering is endured behind closed doors, unspoken and unaided? Or the immigrant whose qualifications are never recognized, who drives a taxi instead of practicing medicine? Their lives are not footnotes in our lives. They are their own texts—sacred texts. And we are skipping over them.
Primo Levi demanded that we stop and read them.
Levi did not only write about Auschwitz. He wrote from within Auschwitz, and even more importantly, from beyond it. He wrote in a way that attempted to preserve not just memory, but moral capacity. His words refuse abstraction. His details are not metaphors—they are anchors, fastening his readers to the reality he bore witness to: a tattooed number, a stolen spoon, a chemical formula recited to stay sane.
In Judaism, God is approached through action, through ritual, through relation. “Do and hear”—na’aseh v’nishma—is the people’s response at Sinai. First the deed, then the comprehension. Ethics precedes theology.
Levi’s ethical imagination belongs to this tradition. His writing is a form of bearing witness, not merely to horror, but to the structure of conscience. In this, his work echoes the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who taught that the face of the other is the beginning of all ethics. For Levinas, the human face is not a mask—it is a summons. It says, without words: “Thou shalt not kill.” But only if we look at it.
Martin Buber, another Jewish thinker whose influence shadows Levi’s work, wrote of the “I-Thou” relationship—that space in which one human being turns fully toward another, not as an object, but as a presence. Buber’s ethics begins not with laws, but with encounter. And Levi’s work is filled with such encounters: the fellow prisoner he cannot forget, the guard whose name he never knew, the moments of unexpected kindness that pierced the fog of atrocity. These are not sentimental moments. They are ethical events.
Hannah Arendt, herself shaped by the traumas of totalitarianism, argued that evil often takes the form of banality—not monsters, but functionaries. Levi knew this, too. He wrote not just about cruelty, but about order. About people who followed rules. Who checked boxes. Who never raised their voices. And yet whose silence facilitated mass death. This is what he meant when he warned us: it happened, therefore it can happen again.
This insight is not pessimism. It is moral realism. Levi is not telling us to despair. He is asking us to see. To remain disturbed by the small signs: the euphemism, the shrug, the fatigue. These are the beginnings. And what begins in indifference ends in annihilation.
The Jewish tradition has long treated memory not as a passive act of recall, but as a form of resistance. The Torah commands, again and again: zachor—remember. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. Remember what Amalek did to you on the way. Remember the Sabbath. Remember the stranger. In Judaism, memory is not a warehouse of the past—it is a summons to act in the present.
To remember is to bind oneself to moral continuity. It is to understand that we do not move on from history; history moves through us. We are not the end of the story. We are its current chapter. And every act of forgetting is a form of rupture—a failure to carry the moral weight of what has come before.This is why Levi wrote. And this is why we must be readers—of books, but also of our fellow human beings. To read Survival in Auschwitz is not to mourn the dead, but to read their faces, and by so doing, make their memory a protest against the world as it is.
But memory alone is not enough. Action is required. The Talmud tells us that in a world adrift, every small deed becomes an anchor. To visit the sick. To clothe the naked. To educate the ignorant. These are not charitable options—they are obligations.
Our burden is not to be heroic. It is to choose small acts of human attention: loving the elderly even when they are not related to us; tutoring someone else’s child; making eye contact with the refugee mother in the train station instead of looking past her; showing up at a food bank, not because we are saviors, but because we are neighbors.
The concept of tikkun olam, the repair of the world, is fundamental to Judaism. It does not mean fixing everything. It means refusing to fix nothing. It means understanding that each act of kindness is a stitch in the torn fabric of creation. And that no act is too small to matter.
Yes, the world is vast. Yes, its wounds are deep. But we must resist the paralysis of scale. We must choose: attention over distraction, encounter over evasion, conscience over comfort.
We must interrupt the machinery of injustice with our presence.
Even to notice is a kind of protest. To say: I see you. You are not a shadow. You are not noise. You are not other. Your life matters in the same ways, and the same amount, that my life matters.
We need to teach this to our children. We need to build rituals of remembrance that are not just commemorations, but commitments. We need our holidays to be haunted by conscience.
The Jewish people has always defined itself by memory and presence: we were slaves in Egypt and so we marched in Selma. Ours is a tradition of disruption, not detachment. And yet, today, we often look away.
This must disturb us. Primo Levi would be disturbed.
He who chronicled not only the atrocity of the camps but the incremental yielding of conscience—he would be pained by the insulation that affluence brings. By the way Jewish comfort in the West has, in too many corners, dulled our prophetic impulse. Once a people whose moral antennae quivered at every injustice, we have become dulled by our own success.
We are heirs to Abraham, who bargained with God for the lives of strangers; to Moses, who shattered tablets rather than ignore idolatry; to Esther, who risked her family to save her people. And to Levi, who understood that to survive is not enough—one must bear witness.
What would Levi make of a community that raises millions for museums but stays silent as neighbors go hungry? That tells the story of its own historical bondage without reacting with urgency to the present bondage of others? That has as its core value: “Whoever saves one life, it is as if they saved an entire world,” but in practice often allows for death.
Let us not only remember Jewish suffering but reawaken Jewish responsibility.
Let every seder plate bear not just the symbols of our past, but the questions of our present: Who is enslaved today? Who is invisible at our gates?
The synagogue was never meant to be a shelter from the world. It was meant to be its engine of radical compassion. A place not where the world disappears, but where it is brought into sharper focus—where injustice is not escaped, but named, studied, and confronted. Where we articulate our responsibilities.
What is the worth of a prayer that does not disturb and change us?
The Judaism we have made too often avoids the street. It speaks softly around dinner tables, not loudly in marches. It blesses its own children, but forgets the hungry, exposed, and oppressed. It holds up the suffering of our ancestors, while averting its eyes from the suffering everywhere around us, including that which we help inflict.
We speak of the prophets, but we do not speak like them.
A Judaism that does not dedicate itself to the needs of the world is no Judaism at all.
The Talmud teaches: “Torah was not given in a city, but in a desert.”
Because Torah must travel. Torah must be portable. Torah must be taken into the chaos.
Our Judaism too often fears the chaos.We fear the noise of the street, the grief of the protestor, the fury of the unheard. We understand judgement as an act of violence, rather than a gift. We suppress our own doubts.
The prophets did not remain in the synagogue. Jeremiah wept in the ruins. Isaiah thundered from the public square. Amos called out the hypocrisy of ritual divorced from righteousness: “I hate, I despise your festivals. Let justice roll down like waters.” They knew what we must remember: God is not only found in a text in the ark, but in the faces of others in the world.
So what would it mean to remake our sanctuaries into engines of conscience?
Let the synagogue become a base for organizing, not just a museum for memory. Let the rabbi be an agitator of comfort, not its chaplain. Let the prayer book open with: Whose children are hungry? Whose homes were lost? Whose voices were not heard this week? Let the Torah be read alongside eviction notices and voter suppression maps.
Let the Kiddush cup be lifted to toast not only wine, but every human dignity reclaimed. Let Shabbat be a time not only to rest from labor, but to rededicate ourselves to the labor of compassion.
And let us not only welcome the stranger into the synagogue—that is only the very beginning of our duty. Let us walk out and find them, in shelters and courtrooms, in refugee camps and classrooms and prisons, and bring our Judaism there. Not as charity, but as covenant.
Judaism must live in the world. Because the world is crying out, and it is not asking if we lit candles on Friday night. It is asking: Where were you when the child needed protection? When the fellow human being, no less deserving, starved within walking distance of your home? When the vote was stolen? When the refugee was deported? When the father held his dead baby above his head?
And we must be able to answer, not with theories or defenses, but with trembling and truth: We were there. Our Judaism led us there.
None of us need to be saviors. We need to be participants. Witnesses. Neighbors. Readers of each other.
Levi reminded us that “the aims of fascism were achieved not by convincing but by wearing down, by transforming people into shadows.” Our task, as readers and writers, as citizens and neighbors, as the religious and non-religious, as those lucky enough to be alive and able, is to transform shadows into people: to insist on color, on individuality, on humanity.
Thank you.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American writer born in Washington in 1977. He rose to fame with Everything Is Illuminated (2002), a novel about memory and Jewish identity. He has since published Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and several politically engaged essays, including Eating Animals. His work explores themes of transmission, moral responsibility, and contemporary forms of indifference.
