Italian Jews: Memory, Music, Celebration

The program

A culture remembered in film, sound and speech

The Italian Jewish experience is both deeply local and widely scattered, shaped by the cities of Italy and by the journeys that carried families across the Mediterranean. This festival set out to hold several of those threads together in one program.

Across two weeks the Institute presented films, music and a symposium. The film program explored the Italian Jewish experience, including Rome and its Jewish community during the war years. Concerts and celebration gave the program its sound and its warmth, while the symposium placed the material in a scholarly frame.

Made with partners

The festival was produced with the cosponsorship of cultural and academic institutions and with the support of community organisations. Partners included the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Los Angeles, the center for European and Russian studies and the center for medieval and renaissance studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel, the center for Jewish studies and Hillel at the same university, a university archive of folklore, and the Skirball Cultural Center. Cultural affairs support came from the Italian consulate and from the consulate of Israel, and the Slow Food convivium of Los Angeles took part.

What it left behind

Like the Institute's other public programs, the festival fed back into the archive. Recordings, photographs and papers connected with the event joined the collection, where they remain available to researchers who want to understand how a community presents its own memory.