Monthly Archives: April 2021

The following excerpt from Roy SpeckhardtsCreating Change Through Humanism(Humanist Press, 2015) is part of theHumanist.coms month-long celebration of the AHAs 80th Anniversary in April.

Humanism has an impressive history. With deep roots in the early Greek philosophers and in Eastern thinkers well before them, humanism grew during the Renaissance. It continued to develop throughout the Reformation, Enlightenment, and scientific revolution and began to take its present shape in the late nineteenth century. As it took its present form it drew in knowledge and wisdom from still more sourcesfrom Jawaharlal Nehru to Nelson Mandela and more.

Beginning in 1927, a number of Unitarian professors and students at the University of Chicago who had moved away from theism organized the Humanist Fellowship. Soon they launched theNew Humanistmagazine, offering a path forward for the Unitarian movement. But most of the other church members were still thinking in terms of a capital G God as the glue necessary to bind ideas to people and people to each other.

Around the same time, Charles Francis Potter founded the First Humanist Society of New York. Formerly a Baptist and then a Unitarian minister, Potter began the society with the intent of it being a religious organization, calling humanism a new faith for a new age. Prominent members of this community included John Dewey, Julian Huxley, and Albert Einstein. Potter wrote a book entitledHumanism: A New Religion, outlining the basic premise and points of what he termed religious humanism. His philosophy openly rejected traditional Christian beliefs and replaced them with a humanist philosophy that incorporated various aspects of naturalism, materialism, rationalism, and socialism. Potters intent was to offer an ever-evolving philosophy that would update itself as new knowledge was gained.

A major humanist milestone was achieved in 1933 whenA Humanist Manifestowas written through the collaboration and agreement of thirty-four national leaders. This was a publicly signed document detailing the basic tenets of humanism. By 1935 the Humanist Fellowship was supplanted by the Humanist Press Association.

The American Humanist Association (AHA) was formed in 1941, when Curtis W. Reese and John H. Dietrich, two well-known Unitarian ministers and humanists, reorganized the Humanist Press Association in Chicago, into the American Humanist Association.

The goal was not to establish a religion as Potter had originally intended but instead to recognize the nontheistic and secular nature of humanism, organize its advocates, and align the organization for the mutual education of both its religious and nonreligious members. This makes the American Humanist Association the oldest organization addressing the breadth of humanism in the United States. The AHA began publishing theHumanistmagazine as the successor to the earlier publications, setting out to explore modern philosophical, cultural, social, and political issues from a humanist point of view.

At the end of the 1940s, the organization was supportive of Vashti McCollum in her fight against religious instruction in public schools. The mother of two boys, McCollum argued that religious instruction in public education violated the principle of separation of church and state. Her case traveled all the way to the US Supreme Court where, in 1948, she achieved a watershed ruling in her favor. In 1962, McCollum became the first woman to serve as AHA presidentlong before a number of Christian denominations began to ordain women.

Running parallel with this localizing and personalizing of the humanist philosophy was the empowerment of women within the organization. The second editor of theHumanistwas Priscilla Robertson, whose work began in 1956. One of the earliest of the AHAs Humanists of the Year was Margaret Sanger who received that award in 1957, honored for her activism for birth control and sex education. But Sanger was just the first of many of the leading feminist and reproductive rights activists to work closely with the AHA. Just among those in this category who received the AHAs top award were Mary Calderone and Betty Friedan in the 1970s, Faye Wattleton and Margaret Atwood in the 1980s, Kurt Vonnegut and Barbara Ehrenreich in the 1990s, and most recently Gloria Steinem in 2012.

In the 1960s, the AHA became active in challenging the illegality of abortion. It was the first national membership organization to support abortion rights, even before Planned Parenthood expanded to address the issue. Humanists were instrumental in the founding of leading pro-choice organizations, such as NARAL Pro-Choice America, which continue to defend and support elective abortion rights.

Humanism and the AHA reached another milestone during the 1970s when the AHA released a major new humanist text,Humanist Manifesto II. Drafted by Edwin H. Wilson and Paul Kurtz, the work was released in 1973 to unprecedented media fanfare including a New York Timesin-depth, front-page article exploring humanist philosophy and the new manifesto. Welcomed by many commentators, the manifesto was denounced by religious conservatives as anti-religious and anti-God.

Following this release, the AHA continued on its energized path of starting new endeavors and publishing major statements on death with dignity, objections to astrology, support of sexual rights, evolution, and discrimination in the workplace.

The 1980s saw the beginning of an onslaught of attacks by the Religious Right against secular humanism and the AHA. In an attempt to counter the smears, the AHA began its own campaign, which included media appearances, public debates, nationally published articles, press conferences, lobbying, and legal action. Interested in this debate, world-renowned author Isaac Asimov joined in as the elected president of the AHA in 1985.

As the AHA celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1991, theHumanistbecame a major alternative medium for social and political commentary. Through such efforts, the magazine has attracted and published the writing of such luminaries as Alice Walker, Lester R. Brown, Aung Sung Suu Kyi, Noam Chomsky, Ted Turner, and many other leading journalists, writers, political leaders, and activists.

Kurt Vonnegut was named Humanist of the Year in 1992 and went on to become the AHAs honorary president. Always true to his character, Vonnegut wrote a decade later to the AHA offices: Find here my permission for you to quote any damn fool thing Ive ever said or written, through all eternity, and without further notice or compensation to me.

The AHA was one of the first organizations to become fully active online with the introduction of its website in 1995. It remains a leader in online and social media communications with hundreds of thousands of followers throughout its active presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

One of the AHA leaderships biggest decisions was to move the organization to Washington DC. Previously the AHA had moved from Yellow Springs, Ohio, to San Francisco, California, to Amherst, New York. Matters of convenience and economy had dictated the selection of each of these locations. But now the organization made a strategic choice: A move to Washington DC would take humanism to the center of power and influence.

This wouldnt have been possible without the support of the AHAs endowment fund, now called the Humanist Foundation, along with a seed grant from Lloyd Morain for a building in the nations capital. Relocation to the new Humanist Center was completed in 2002 under the leadership of Executive Director Tony Hileman. Through this move, the AHA was empowered to substantially increase the humanist voice in the public debate. [In 2017, the AHA made another move to an upgraded national headquarters in the heart of Washington, DC.]

The philosophy of humanism itself took a major evolutionary step in 2003 with the release ofHumanism and its Aspirations, the third humanist manifesto, signed by two dozen Nobel Prize winners. More concise than its two predecessors, the third manifesto set out to continue the trend of clarifying the humanist philosophy in a way that paid tribute to core humanist values while challenging humanists to take action toward making this world a better place.

It was in DC where the AHA began to take advantage of best non-profit practices, achieving full ratings by charitable accountability organizations such as the Better Business Bureau, Charity Navigator, and GuideStar. The AHA maintained and improved theHumanistmagazine, created the weekly digital newsletter theHumanist.com, and added theEssays in the Philosophy of Humanismpeer-reviewed journal.

The gradual conversion of the organization, from a merely philosophically forward-looking organization to its current capability to actually accomplish humanistic change, created a new environment where advocacy for humanist values became the AHAs focus.

Looking ahead, the American Humanist Association, its members, chapters, affiliates, and publications vow to not only support and defend core humanist values but also to press the public to consider and discuss humanist issues and social concerns. Guided by reason and humanitys rapidly growing knowledge of the world, by ethics and compassion, and in the pursuit of fuller, more meaningful lives that add to the greater good of society and humanity, the members of the AHA envision a world of mutual care and concern where the lifestance of humanism is known and respected, and where people take responsibility for the world in which they live.

See more here:

AHA Through the Years - TheHumanist.com - The Humanist

Kolkata: The Communist Party of India (Marxist)s West Bengal state secretary alleged that the Election Commission is biased and accused it of allowing undue concessions to the ruling parties at both the Centre and in West Bengal, at a press conference on April 8.

The veteran CPI(M) leader was addressing a press conference at the Press Club in Kolkata, where he alleged that the EC has been prejudiced over the air transmission of the Prime Minister and other political leaders speech on poll days in West Bengal where Assembly elections are currently underway.

Notably, the serious allegation against the Election Commission has come at a time when the CPI(M) as well as the Sanjukto Morcha, the electoral alliance of which the Left party is a part, have been restrained over its comments on any quasi judicial body.

Dr Mishra alleged that the dates for the different phases have been arranged in such a manner that a single district is going to polls in several phases. As a result, speeches targetting live voters are being aired, but have been ignored by the Election Commission despite violating norms.

He also took a shot at incumbent Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for urging the voters, particularly in rural areas, to confront the central forces and criticised her for camping at a booth for over two hours. He further alleged that the elections are held in an atmosphere of communal polarisation created by the BJP and TMC and added that democracy and secularism are under attack by these forces.

Not only that, the CPI(M) state secretary levelled allegations against the central police force and a section of media who are trying to increase the politics of polarisation. The corporate funded elections are beneficial for the BJP and also the TMC, he claimed. We are telling the people that a vote to TMC will be like voting for BJP and vice versa. TMC cannot fight against the BJP, he said.

Highlighting that Election Commission is changing officers rapidly without any real gains, Dr Mishra said that the EC is adhering to the ruling partys demands, not checking the EPIC cards of central forces being one among such demands.

While rationalism is under attack, the Bihar election results have shown that the popular mandate is still with rationalists a fact visible from the minimum difference in vote share, he said, adding that allegations of CPI(M) of having a hand in poll attacks are false.

The Left leader also denied suggestions that the SM will extend support to the the TMC in case of lesser numbers, adding that there aim is to defeat both TMC and BJP by over 50% votes.

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Bengal Elections: EC Biased, Giving Concession to TMC and BJP, Alleges CPI(M) - NewsClick

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Our society has fabricated a self-pitiable education system in which qualifying exams has become a delusional testimony of how good or bad a person is.

A person who doesnt perform well in solving meaningless tasks of school program mostly monotonous, unimaginative, counter creative and barren are looked down upon as inferiors and face a life long social rejection while others are made to believe that they are valuable because they could fit into the uncreative monotony of a lifeless repetition.

Yes, a lifeless repetition, reducing the idea of expression to a mere function of capitalist utopia and completely doing away with emotions, experience and authenticity.

Dostoevsky had started warning against such utopianism. Converting human being into a pianno key, a rational computer, a robot.

He was followed by people like Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Jung, Adler, who showed to the western man that the problem with preaching thorough going rationalism, rational episteme, rational (blinding horizontal) mentality is that they wouldnt be even aware & their subconscious & unconscious would be dragging them to places.

This capitalist utopia sorts us into categories from the very childhood.

I remember when we were in school we were taught not to sit with, or befriend, those who were weaker students than us. One of our famous professors would tell us that if we didnt study we would end up being dukandaars. There were backbenchers and front seaters. When we could hardly differentiate a right from a wrong we had already been moulded into judging and discriminating between them and us, doctor and dukandaar, superior and inferior, material prosperity and poverty, we were initiated on a Capitalist note and its profit driven definitions of right and wrong.

Capitalism-inspired education got us into the habit of measuring things, and of believing that what cant be measured is either valueless or threatening.

The system trained students to conform to an alienated and class-stratified society, a society passive to realities of a social(ist) life. The class system in schools indoctrinated some children into feeling inferior to others, while others start believing they are better than the rest.

And it is this belief that the education system nurtures, the belief that some people are less valuable than others, hence helping in perpetuation of inequality and discrimination. The discrimination, the covet capitalist agenda is inculcated through a hidden curriculum that bases itself on principles of external rewards, subservience to the bourgeois norms, and an utmost focus on competition rather than team work.

Fidel Castro compares competition to hypocrisy and war when he finds capitalism repugnant, filthy, gross and alienating because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.

Capitalist pedagogy reduced student achievement to mere income and employment, with absolutely no role in social justice and inclusion. It laid the cornerstone of the neo-liberal consumerism which has plagued the whole social fibre of the world.

As Michael Moore said, Capitalism is an organized system to guarantee that greed becomes the primary force of our economic system and allows the few at the top to get very wealthy and has the rest of us riding around thinking we can be that way, too if we just work hard enough, sell enough Tupperware and Amway products, we can get a pink Cadillac.

The greed is imbibed from the earliest, through a reward driven repetitions of school system.

Schools in the current times are institutions set up to fulfil the popular political narratives. Spending the first quarter of their life in school, children are taught to do exactly what they are asked to. They are indoctrinated into conformism, and scepticism towards the higher authority is discouraged.

They are subtly manipulated into believing in the infallibility of official figures and accounts. They grow up with a notion that large media agencies are the most trusted source of information. Focus on life skills, civil freedoms and liberties is diminished. Once children leave the capitalist school they are unable to question its authority, they are rendered incapable of their own observations about the nature of events and are unable to find a meaning in anything beyond what is proposed by the political.

Kozol wrote in 1975: School does not exist to foster ethics and upheaval. It exists to stabilize the status quo. It exists to train a population which is subject to the power of such instruments of mass persuasion as the social order has at hand. It exists to get its citizens prepared for moral compromise. The first and primary goal of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people but good citizens. It is the function which we call in enemy nations,state indoctrination.

The only point of view possible to us (including me) is the capitalist point of view.

Capitalist philosophy has assumed almost an ontological form. It is crime against current standards of humanity to question science and its industry, to doubt the education and its indoctrination, to put class segregation and its watchdogs at stake, to see prodigious mechanisation as gigantic rape of everything intimate. Anything sane spoken against those these scandalous standards sounds outrageous.

And it is precisely this that all of us need de-schooling, if we want a social change.Khawar Khan Achakzaiis a published author, a medical Doctor by profession, and a student of history.

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Education, and pedagogy: Why we need de-schooling - Free Press Kashmir

It would be banal and nevertheless true to emphasize how much we miss the voice of Primo Levi today, in times of rising xenophobia, racism, and far-right movements, at a time in which public intellectuals have almost disappeared in Italy. But lamentation was never Primo Levis style of thought, and is best avoided.

The destiny of classics is to be permanently reinterpreted, and Levi does not escape this. There are, however, certain misconceptions concerning his legacy. His relation to Enlightenment thought, his definition as a Jewish writer, and, last but not least, Levis role as a literary witness of the Holocaust a word he disliked and with which today he is completely identified have been misconstrued in recent decades.

Over twenty years ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote Remnants of Auschwitz, a remarkable book built on a sort of posthumous dialogue with Primo Levi, notably through a rereading of his last essay, The Drowned and theSaved (1986). Drawing on Levi, Agamben proposed a vision of the extermination camps as the secret law of Western civilization and the naked life of the deported (the Muselmann) as the modern expression of its underlying paradigm, homo sacer.

By invoking Levi in this way, Agamben unwittingly encouraged the misconception that the author of If This Is a Manwas somehow the forerunner of a radical break with the Enlightenment tradition. But, in fact, it was that very tradition that defined the philosophical horizons of Primo Levi. He may have pushed this tradition to its limits, almost putting it into question, but Primo Levi remained a critical enlightener, a writer for whom reality was a material, anthropological, cultural, and historical product rather than a linguistic construction or a semantic structure. In spite of their missed dialogue, he probably shared Jean Amrys stoic claim of a positivist spirit: the spirit of somebody who believes in experience, who clings to reality and its enunciation.

Classicism and positivism are the pillars of Levis first books. If This Is a Man (1947) is shaped into the model of Dantes Inferno deportation as a fall into Hades, the camp with its circles, the inexhaustible variety of the pains inflicted on the inmates, and the great diversity of its characters, from his suffering comrades to the omnipotent torturers whereas The Truce (1963) tells of his coming back to life: the journey that allowed him, after his liberation from Auschwitz in January 1945 and an interminable peregrination throughout Central Europe, to reach his home in Turin.

Besides Dantes literary model, If This Is a Man reveals a second, fundamental source, which is a scientific paradigm: the legacy of a chemist who describes, orders, classifies, and scrutinizes the overwhelming experience endured in Auschwitz. The literary sensitivity of the writer and the analytical gaze of the chemist are the foundations of his entire work. The Nazi camps were for him an anthropological laboratory in which, besides the serial destruction of lives, the human condition revealed its extreme limits. Of this anthropological laboratory, Levi was first a fragment what the Nazi lexicon called technically a piece (stck), i.e., a victim and then a witness; even more than a witness: an analyst.

Witnesses always filter their experience through their own culture, select and interpret their recollections according to their own knowledge and questions. Witnesses ask themselves what is the meaning of their suffering, and their answers are neither unique nor immutable. In the eyes of Levi, the Holocaust remained a black hole, a definition borrowed from the language of natural sciences, but this mysterious abyss had to be explored, studied, and possibly understood. He explained this is the legacy of his books that it is impossible to investigate the Nazi camps without the testimony of the deportees. The point was not to add a touch of color or authenticity to a whole of facts clearly established; the point was to use an irreplaceable source for understanding the extermination camps, for penetrating both the phenomenology and the meaning of an experience that transcended the archival materials and whose evidence its architects had tried to erase. This is why If This Is a Man has become a fundamental link in the chain of an open discussion on the conflicted yet nonetheless vital relationship between memory and history.

This posture reveals a form of rationalism that Levi had inherited from his scientific education, a rationalism that guided his career as a chemist and became a permanent feature of his mind. One of the lines describing the diagram that opens his personal anthology, The Search for Roots, reads the salvation of understanding (la salvazione del capire). It is marked by four names tracing, from antiquity to the twentieth century, a scientific and rational canon that inspired his intellectual journey: Lucretius, Darwin, Bragg, and Clarke. As Levi stressed during his conversations with Tullio Regge, he was attached to a romantic vision of science: a science with a human face, he said, that carried on the joyful explorations of the Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars, opposed to the lethal performances of instrumental reason. In his few science-fiction stories, he warned against Promethean and totalitarian projects for dominating nature and annihilating humankind by means of modern technology.

Primo Levis work thus has to be put under a pre-Foucault lens, even if his definition of Auschwitz as a gigantic biological and social experience clearly suggests a definition of National Socialism as what Foucault called a biopolitical power. This is an example of how Levi reinterpreted and pushed to the limits the classical tradition from which he came.

It is interesting, from this point of view, to compare Levi with Jean Amry (Hans Mayer), the Austrian writer and critic and author of Jenseits von Schuld und Shne who was also deported to Auschwitz (where he pretended to have met Levi). Amry too claimed the legacy of the Enlightenment, which he defined as a kind of philosophia perennis; he never denied his intellectual roots in the tradition of Austrian logical positivism; and he did not hesitate to defend Jean-Paul Sartres humanism against the offensive of French structuralism, which he perceived as a betrayal. Interpreting history as the structuralists did as a process without a subject was nonsense, and the epistemological posture of Foucault, who stunningly proclaimed the death of subject, appeared to him as a provocation coming from the most dangerous enemy of Enlightenment (der gefhrlichste Gegenaufklrer).

As staunch Aufklrer (enlighteners), Levi and Amry did not endorse irrationalism or mysticism, and certainly would not have subscribed to Elie Wiesels famous sentence defining the Holocaust as an event transcending history but a gap remained between explaining (spiegare; erklren) and understanding (capire; verstehen). Critical reason might explain Nazi violence and grasp its roots, describe its historical background and deconstruct its context, distinguish its steps and indicate its actors, analyze its internal logic and point out its peculiar combination of archaic mythology and rational modernity, a spiral resulting in complete destruction but this is not yet understanding. All in all, Auschwitz remained, in their eyes, a black box of understanding: Levi defined it a black hole (un buco nero) and Amry a dark riddle (einem finsteren Rtsel).

The attempts to explain the Holocaust through a Sonderweg (special path) in which, from Luther to National Socialism, Germany would have deviated from the path of a supposed Western paradigm of modernity, were naive ways out, just like the Marxist efforts to grasp in the Nazi crimes sometimes an economic rationality and sometimes a symptom of a late capitalist eclipse of reason. To the eyewitness, none of these explanations were satisfactory none of them were able to resolve this black hole or dark riddle.

This posture should not be confused with that later formulated by Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker of Shoah, which often took a mystical, almost obscurantist slant. Neither Amry nor Levi posited the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust hier ist kein warum (there is no why) as a dogma that automatically stigmatized as obscene any attempt to historical understanding. Amry and Levi did not consider the Holocaust as a non-realm of memory (non-lieu de mmoire), a trauma that could only be resurrected by testimony but neither transmitted nor historicized. They never thought to celebrate a defeat of the intellect. Not only did such a mystical posture not correspond with their mental constitutions they probably would have rejected it as both ethically and politically unacceptable.

The second widespread misunderstanding of Primo Levi deals with his Jewishness: the tendency to classify him as a Jewish writer. Undoubtedly, Levi was a Jew. He never tried to hide this obvious fact: he had been persecuted and deported to Auschwitz as a Jew and spent most of his intellectual life bearing testimony to the Nazi extermination of the European Jews. Nonetheless, he was not a Jewish writer like Elie Wiesel, Aharon Appelfeld, or Philip Roth, to mention some of his contemporaries. The Italian-Jewish writers of the twentieth century deeply differed from their Israeli fellows, as well as from the New York intellectuals, however diverse the latter could be. Not only did he never consider himself the representative of a religious community his attachment to the tradition of science and the Enlightenment implied a radical form of atheism, which his experience of deportation strongly reinforced, even if he always expressed respectful feelings toward believers but he probably never felt part of a Jewish milieu with clearly defined social and cultural boundaries.

Rather than as an Italian Jew a definition in which Jew is the substantive and Italian the adjective he preferred to depict himself as an italiano ebreo, a Jewish Italian.

Interviewed by Risa Sodi after his successful lecture tour of the United States in 1985, he stressed that in Italy the notion of Jewish writer was very difficult to define. There, he said, I am known as a writer who, among other things, is Jewish, whereas in the United States he felt as if [he] had worn again the Star of David! Of course, he was joking, but he wished to emphasize that his education and his cultural formation had not been particularly Jewish, and that most of his friends as well as the overwhelming majority of the Italian readers of his books were not Jewish. In a lecture given in 1982, he admitted that he had finally resigned himself to accept the label of Jewish writer, but not immediately and not without reservations. This remark could be extended to most Jewish writers of twentieth-century Italian literature, from Italo Svevo to Alberto Moravia, from Giorgio Bassani to Natalia Ginzburg, and many others.

Between 1938 and the end of the Second World War (i.e., between the promulgation of fascist racial laws and his liberation from Auschwitz), Levi probably fit the famous Sartrian definition of the Jew: The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew . . . for it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew. In a conversation with Ferdinando Camon, he mentioned his Jewishness as a purely cultural fact. If not for the racial laws and the concentration camp, he said, I probably would no longer be a Jew, except for my last name. Instead this dual experience, the racial law and the concentration camp, stamped me the way you stamp a steel plate: at this point I am a Jew, they have sewn the star of David on me and not only on my clothes.

Levi certainly was a Godless Jew (gottloser Jude), as Peter Gay depicted Sigmund Freud, but he probably would not have inscribed himself into the noble gallery of those whom Isaac Deutscher called the non-Jewish Jews (i.e., the Jewish heretics). After the war, Primo Levi did not feel targeted by antisemitism and considered emancipation from religious alienation and obscurantism a legacy of the Enlightenment rather than a task of the present. He did not consider himself an iconoclast or a dissenter within Judaism. He simply was not a believer or a religious man.

In many articles and interviews, Levi repeatedly affirmed that his Italian roots shaped his way of writing books such as The Periodic Table and The Wrench celebrate the Piedmontese Jewish culture and even the Piedmont dialect but had to be projected into a broader world. Auschwitz was the paradoxical site where, as an Italian Jew, he discovered cosmopolitanism. One of the first chapters of If This Is a Man significantly titled Initiation depicts the camp as a Tower of Babel where people spoke dozens of languages and where the capacity to overcome these linguistic boundaries became a condition of survival. Like The Truce, the book offers an extraordinary gallery of characters belonging to different cultures, from Poles to Russians, from Ukrainians to Greeks, from Frenchmen to Germans, as well as to different social layers, but merged in a world in which all traditional cleavages and hierarchies were turned upside down. Whereas in Italy, as a Jew, he was a member of a minority, in Auschwitz his particularism was Italian, not Jewish.

In both If This Is a Man and The Truce, his Italian origins become a prism through which he discovers and describes other cultures distant and unknown to him. This is true, first of all, for Yiddish culture, which appeared very strange, not to say exotic, to an Italian Jew. But he also reversed this gaze: in the eyes of a Russian or Polish Jew, the image of a Jew in a gondola or at the top of Vesuvius was just as exotic. Today, Auschwitz has become the locus par excellence of a Western memory of the Holocaust, but the world he described in such a colorful and sympathetic way is an Eastern Jewish, Slavonic, Yiddish, Central European, and Balkan world. And the richness of his books lies in this contrast. In Auschwitz, he learned of the existence of a national Jewry, with its own language and culture, made of traditions, practices, and rituals. His last novel, If Not Now, When? , is a saga of the Jewish resistance in Poland, experienced as a sort of national redemption. He was fascinated by this Judaism, a Judaism of which he had learned the history, celebrated the greatness, and mourned the destruction, but which was not his own.

Against the clich portraying the modern Jewish intellectual as a figure of exile and extraterritoriality, Levi was a striking example of rootedness in a national society, language, and culture. We could almost speak of physical roots, if we simply recall the words with which he evoked his family house in Turin, where he was born on July 31, 1919, and where he committed suicide on April 11, 1987. Presenting himself as an extreme example of sedentary life, he wrote that he had become encrusted in his apartment as seaweed fixes itself on a stone, builds its shell and doesnt move any more for the rest of its life. He passionately described the streets, the river, and the surrounding mountains of Turin, as well as the austere and industrious character of its inhabitants. In 1976, he portrayed his town with the following words:

I am very linked to my little fatherland (patria). I was born in Turin; all my ancestors were Piedmontese; in Turin I discovered my vocation, I studied at University, I have always lived, I have written and published my books with a publisher very rooted in this town despite its international reputation. I like this town, its dialect, its streets, its paving stones, its boulevards, its hills, its surrounding mountains I scaled when I was young; I like the highlander and country origins of its population.

In short, he was a rooted writer, who needed a deep anchorage in a particular social, cultural, national, and even regional background in order to express the universality of his themes and messages.

Maybe, he added, it was because of this remarkable rootedness that journey was the topos of so many of his books. Just as his melancholic Enlightenment was antithetical to the cult of science and conquering technology, his sedentary life was neither provincial nor nationalist. For him, science was not a blind, instrumental rationality, but rather a universal language inseparable from classical humanism (a category he never put into question, unlike postmodernists or structuralists); likewise, his Italian identity, both Jewish and Piedmontese, was able to enter into dialogue with any culture, just as how Faussone, the hero of The Wrench, traveled around the world to build bridges, barrages, and power plants.

A third misunderstanding of Primo Levis work deals with his role as a witness. After his death, he has been canonized as a witness par excellence of the Holocaust, and thus achieved the status of a paradigmatic victim which he did not have during his life. He wrote most of his books at a time in which the Holocaust had not yet entered our common historical consciousness as a central event of the twentieth century or even, in broader terms, of Western civilization. When he published If This Is a Man, the word Holocaust did not exist for defining the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and, later, he pointed out that this word, etymologically meaning a sacrifice offered to the gods, was inappropriate, rhetorical, and, finally, mistaken.

The memorial turn in Western culture the rise of memory as a central topic of public debates, the cultural industry, and academic scholarship took place precisely in the middle of the 1980s. Its symbolic landmarks were successful works such as Zakhor by Josef Hayim Yerushalmi in the United States; Realms of Memory, the collective volumes edited by Pierre Nora, and Shoah, a nine-hour movie by Claude Lanzmann, in France; the so-called Historikerstreit around the Nazi past that will not pass in Germany; and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi himself. Thus, Levi powerfully contributed to the emergence of memory in the public sphere, but this happened at the end of his life and most of his work should be located before this memorial turn. He observed this change with a critical eye I would say with a certain skepticism and felt unsettled by this metamorphosis in both the perception and the representation of the past, as his last, testimonial essay clearly shows.

Two features of this new era of commemorations are particularly significant: first, the transformation of the remembrance of the Holocaust into a sort of civil religion of the West and, second, its separation from the memory of anti-fascism, which had been a dominant memory for three decades in postwar Italy. The civil religion of the Holocaust aims at making sacred the foundational values of our democracies by commemorating the Jewish victims of National Socialism in a liturgical, institutionally ritualized way. It turns the survivors into iconic figures who witness violence and human suffering in their own bodies in short, homines sacri in the opposite sense of Agambens definition: not the ones permissible to kill but rather the selected ones to be commemorated.

Many of Levis remarks in his last essay, The Drowned and the Saved, today sound like warnings against the dangers of this civil religion of the Holocaust. He always rejected the temptation to turn victims into heroes. He refused to present the survivors as the best, those who put up the most relentless resistance to oppression. As he explained, his survival in Auschwitz was fortuitous, simply a matter of luck: the chemistry exam that spared him from being immediately selected for the gas chambers; the extra soup ration which he received daily from his friend Lorenzo Perrone; and his sickness, in January 1945, at the moment of the evacuation of the camp, which spared him the death marches. Thus, he deliberately chose to write If This Is a Man by adopting the calm and sober language of the witness, not the complaining voice of the victim, nor the angered tone of revenge.

Levi refused to judge and played his role as a witness with great humility: The history of the Nazi camps has been written almost exclusively by those who, like myself, never fathomed them to the bottom. Those who did so did not return, or their capacity for observation was paralyzed by suffering and incomprehension. The survivors could witness their experience, a fragment of the historical event in which they had been involved, but their testimony did not reveal any transcendent truth. In other words, the drowned (sommersi) who had been swallowed up by the gas chambers could not come back to bear witness. They, rather than the survivors, were the complete witnesses.

In The Drowned and the Saved, he wrote that the survivors were not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority; they were those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but theyre the Muslims, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.

When Levi wrote about the ethical and political duty of witnessing carried out by the Holocaust survivors, this formula had not yet become a rhetorical ploy of the dominant discourse on memory. He stressed that the survivors not only could not, but would not forget, and wanted the world not to forget, because they felt forgetting to be the most dangerous threat. Overcoming the past (die Bewltigung der Vergangenheit): this catchword, Levi observed, is a stereotype, a euphemism of todays Germany, where it is universally understood as redemption from Nazism.

When he wrote these words, in the middle of the 1960s, a Holocaust Memorial in the heart of Berlin was simply unthinkable. In Levis writings, memory never appears as a Hegelian overcoming of the contradictions of history; its function is cognitive, not allowing repair or reconciliation. We can learn from history, but the past cannot be redeemed. At best, recollections could fulfill a therapeutic function, as for writing If This Is a Man, an act he experienced as the equivalent of Freuds divan. In short, Levis claim of the duty of memory has been consecrated in our age of obsession for the past, but it was conceived of in a time of collective amnesia. The duty of memory is not a timeless and universal principle; it needs to be understood historically.

Memory of the offense means facing some fundamental ethical issues, notably that of guilt both individual and collective and pardon. In the 1960s, historicizing National Socialism meant first of all turning the page or, according to the conventional formula, Bewltigung der Vergangenheit (coming to terms with the past). Amry sarcastically evoked this formula in the subtitle of his essay, Bewltigungsversuche eines berwltigten (Overcoming attempts by an overwhelmed). Reconciliation was an empty word if it did not mean the resentment of the victims on the one hand and, on the other hand, the self-mistrust (Selbstmisstrauen) of the offenders. Such a recognition of historical responsibility, inescapable even for the generation that came after the war, was the only premise for remaking history that is, metaphorically turning back time and moralizing it (Moralisierung der Geschichte).

Levi did not express a similar resentment. His obstinate trust in the virtues of human reason was the deepest source of his anthropological optimism. To my short and tragic experience of being deported, he wrote in 1976, another one, more complex and longer, was superposed, that of writer and witness. The result was clearly positive, because such a past enriched and consolidated me. . . . Living, writing and meditating on my experience I have learnt a lot about men and their world. Amry did not share this view and accused Levi of being a forgiver (Vergeber). Levi denied the allegation, but at the same time confessed that he could not share the Austrian-Belgian writers resentment.

In the last pages of The Truce, Levi described the Germans he saw in Munich in October 1945 as a mass of insolvent debtors, and in his correspondence with Dr Ferdinand Meyer, one of the German chemists at the I. G. Farben laboratory of Buna-Monowitz in Auschwitz, he refused to pardon him: I would like to help you come to terms with your past, he wrote, but I doubt that I am able. Nevertheless, he accepted the principle of forgiveness.

To forgive and even love ones enemies is possible, he wrote, but only when they show unequivocal signs of repentance, in other words when they cease to be enemies. Curiously, Levi did not quote the best-known and most controversial book on this subject, Die Schuldfrage, by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who had tried to distinguish different aspects of German guilt (penal, political, personal, and metaphysical guilt). Like the German philosopher, however, he raised the problem of our historical responsibility for the past.

In short, Levi could not forgive his persecutors but did not share Amrys resentment. Both of them recognized that they had been incapable of expressing joy when they were liberated from Auschwitz. But after this common admission, their paths diverged. According to Amry, Auschwitzs violence had broken human beings faculty to communicate, making them strangers to the world. Levi, on the contrary, could still see, among the skeletal figures of the death camps, a remote possibility of good.

These debates of the postwar years on guilt and victimhood belong to a finished time, when the past legacy heavily burdened the present. Today, the civil religion of the Holocaust tends to depoliticize memory, focusing on innocent victims as objects of compassion. It has emerged from a radical break with anti-fascist memory, which focused on the celebration of fallen fighters rather than victims. Nor is it by accident that the rise of the Holocaust memory has corresponded with the decline of anti-fascist memory. In many of his writings, Levi distinguished between Jewish and political deportation. In his eyes, this difference should not be hidden or diminished, but neither should it be stressed as a dividing line. He had been deported as a Jew, but had been arrested as a partisan, and when he wrote If This Is a Manafter coming back to Turin, he decided to publish some chapters in a small magazine of Piedmontese Resistance: LAmico del popolo. In his view, Jewish and anti-fascist memories could only exist together, as twin memories.

In 1978, Levi wrote a short text for the Italian pavilion of the Auschwitz Museum, which is a strong defense of anti-fascism. In the last decades, this pavilion, commissioned by the National Association of Ex-Deportees and realized by a team of committed authors the architect Ludovico di Belgiojoso, the composer Luigi Nono, and the painter Mario Samon had become a realm of memory of Italian anti-fascism. But it no longer fit the current standards of public memory and was finally closed.

Anti-fascism a particular form of anti-fascism, made of a fusion of the critical Enlightenment and left-wing republicanism was the political background of Primo Levi, but he never claimed the anti-fascist rhetoric of postwar Italy. His books share little with the epic and heroic tales of a resistance struggle for national liberation. In The Drowned and the Saved, he described himself as the worst of the partisans, lacking physical courage, experience, and political education, and he emphasized that his career as a partisan had been very brief, painful, stupid and tragic: I had taken a role that was not mine.

The tragic legacy of his experience as a partisan is summarized in a handful of passages in The Periodic Table. Levi referred to an ugly secret: the execution of two of his comrades accused of betrayal something quite common in partisan warfare that burdened his consciousness and destroyed him psychologically, depriving him of the necessary resources for carrying on the struggle.

In the last years of his life, which were punctuated by repeated and deepening depressions, Levi grew obsessed with the gray zone, the area of indistinctness where the boundaries between persecutors and victims, good and evil, were blurred; an ambiguous space whose incredibly complicated internal structure hindered the faculty of judgment. It was in this period that he depicted the Muselmann the dehumanized inmate, the embodiment of another intermediate area suspended between life and death as the complete witness of the Nazi camps. Survivors were simply vicarious representatives of these complete witnesses, who could not speak.

Levi remained a melancholic enlightener, but his optimism had disappeared. He bore testimony without considering himself a true witness, and defended anti-fascism in spite of portraying himself as a pitiful partisan. In short, he believed in the necessary search for truth, but he never preached truths; he rather tried to excavate them, to problematize them, by both recognizing their contradictions and exploring their darkest shadows.

This critical skepticism did not spare his Jewish identity and his role as a witness. In 1967, he took a position in defense of Israel, which he felt was threatened with destruction, defining it, in several interviews, as his second homeland. In 1982, at the moment of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, he denounced this aggression and warned against the birth of a paradoxical form of Israeli fascism embodied by leaders such as Menachem Begin, whom he stigmatized as a disciple of Zeev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini. He knew that many of the founders of Israel had been people who, like him, had survived the Holocaust, but could not come back to their homes. This was a matter of fact, but it did not immunize them nor Israel against fascism. This was another dimension of the gray zone.

In an interview in 1983, Primo Levi admitted his exhaustion. He no longer wished to meet pupils and students who repeated the same questions, but he also added that he was not satisfied by his own answers. He described having been deeply unsettled by a question asked by two adolescents in a school: Why do you still come to tell us your story, forty years later, after Vietnam, the Stalin camps and Cambodia, after all this Why? He remained in front of them, voiceless, mouth agape, as a witness retreating back into himself. His convictions, his pedagogical talents and rhetorical skills, his long career of witnessing suddenly seemed useless in front of this simple question. He felt overwhelmed by shame, the human shame he had discovered in Auschwitz and which he met again translating Franz Kafkas The Trial. The past is an inexhaustible receptacle of materials for literary creation, but, unfortunately, history is not a magistra vitae.

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