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New York University Professor of Italian Studies and History Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses her new book Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema. This interview aired on our TV show and is now available online.

What is a genocide and how does it occur? This is a question that we Italians can and should ask as Remembrance Day (January 27th) approaches again this year. We should ask ourselves if what e remember and how we remember is enough. And, we should take into consideration the sense of saturation that this institutional recurrence can provoke in some of us. Can we try to ask some new historiographical questions this year, seventy years after the beginnings of the deportation from Italy? Is the category of genocide useful for the historical interpretation of the Holocaust in Italy, and specifically of the Italian participation in the deportations and extermination of Jews in 1943-45?

EDITORS' NOTE: Mr. Jasha M. Levi, a Yugoslav Jewish antifascist in the 1930s and a fighter against dictatorships and genocides for all his life, fled the Nazis and his native Sarajevo for Italy. Here he—as a foreigner whose whereabouts remained unknown "to the Nazis and their Italian collaborators"—was spared "the cruel fate suffered by Italian Jews deported in cattle cars from Milan or burned in a crematorium in Trieste." Mr. Levi, who recounted his personal experience in a political memoir, "Requiem For A Country," asked i-Italy to publish the following short essay. In complying with his request, we believe that his balanced personal account not only, as he concludes, "does not diminish the memory of the eight thousand murdered Italian Jews," but may actually contribute to a better understanding of their tragedy—of which Italians, as a government and as a people, bear a collective historical responsibility, despite the good that some of them may have done in helping hundreds like Mr. Levi to survive.

"I wrote this a few weeks ago but the intolerance is growing... The most venomous blabber so far has been the Newt's equating of Moslems to NAZIs and 9/11 to the Shoah. Given his recently reported conversion to Roman Catholicism, I assume the next Newt revision is the Inquisition and the Crusades and then, I assume, there is more to come. In Europe such Newtish hate mongering gets quickly labeled neo- or not-so-neo-Fascism. Here in the USA it simply gets iterated to the point of Foxy 'fair and balanced' 'facts.' ... But a far more serious threat to the usually 'tolerant' climate of New York City is the real, but mostly imaginary, insults used by intolerance mongers to sell one or another politically partisan product such as a plethora of pandering candidates for local or statewide office..."