Primo Levi opened a universal platform with his reflections on human nature. You are the Director and one of the founding members of the Primo Levi Center in New York. What is the purpose of this center? The Center was born in 1998 to sustain the conversation and...
Artists are the leaders of the 21st Century. Ik-Joong Kang is one of South Korea’s most renowned and celebrated multimedia artists. His works are poignant symbols of hope for reunification, particularly of North and South Korea. This September at Robilant+Voena’s...
“In Florence exhibitions on old masters are more successful than exhibitions on contemporary artists!” Eike Schmidt was appointed Director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence by Dario Franceschini, the Italian Minister of Culture. He is the first non-Italian to be...
"In the USA we are recognised as a food supplement and as a provider of massage. Ayurvedic medicine is the medicine of comfort, leading to cure and preservation of life." Dr Doja Purkit, MD BSc DSc MBRCP is an Ayurvedic doctor who gained his degrees in India at Jaipur...
"People Pray For My Characters." Did you think Downton Abbey would be such a success? No. The received truth at the time of the film "Gosford Park" was that the audience had gone. It was one of those fabulously inaccurate prophecies that show business...
Ruth Direktor is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (TAMA). Can you describe your Museum and its permanent collection? The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is a museum of modern and contemporary art, the oldest art museum in Israel. It was founded in...
Dr Alexander Sturgis is a British art historian and museum curator. He is the current Director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. "Museums have never been so popular.... So much of our experience becomes virtual that the importance of the real actually becomes...
We re-publish this 2014 interview with Elie Wiesel in grateful commemoration of his life and his humanity. Elie has been a longtime friend and an example of Jewish life. I will remember his voice, his words, his love for literature. When together we used to speak...
H.E. Mark Regev is the Ambassador of Israel to the United Kingdom since April 2016. He was the chief spokesman for the Prime Minister of Israel from 2007 to 2015. You have been Ambassador in the UK for a few months and had to face the Livingstone affair, when the...
The planetary architect of today delivers a well considered response to human, cultural and geographic diversity. The leading architect David Adjaye OBE set up his first office in 1994, where his ingenious use of materials and his sculptural ability established him as...
You started your life as an artist and exposed your work at Mario Tazzoli’s Galleria “Galatea” in Milan in 1974. Then you stopped painting for many years, and worked as curator and director of various museums and art institutions - in the United States, in...
It is very sad to have to say that this is the last Rene interview, because the death of a poet is the end of a voice. In any generation there are very few voices like that of Rene. So I think that all the American people who love poetry and art will want to mourn...
Lorin Stein is Editor of The Paris Review. Lorin, you had a prestigious job as senior editor of the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. What made you accept the challenge of becoming the editor of The Paris Review and what does it mean? I should say that my...
It was with great sadness that we learnt of the death of Umberto Eco on February 19th, 2016 at the age of 84. We remember him with huge admiration. He was a magnificent intellectual and a great Italian who made Italians proud of being Italian all over the world. We...
"My American students have exceeded all my expectations." Valerio Magrelli is Professor of French Literature at the University of Cassino, which is situated between Rome and Naples. He is the author of six poetry collections for which he has won many prestigious...
On a rainy April afternoon I met with Jonas Mekas in a little bar in the Lower East Side next to the Anthology Film Archives (AFA), the institution that he founded and has run for very many years. The Anthology Film Archives is at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 2nd...
Jonathan Galassi has translated the poems of Primo Levi from Italian for a new edition of his Complete Works, edited by Ann Goldstein. Galassi is President of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), one of the most prestigious publishing companies in the United States. As...
The Italian Cultural Institute of New York is an office of the Italian government, dedicated to the promotion of Italian language and culture in the United States through the organisation of cultural events. You have now been Director of the Italian Cultural Institute...
My love for animals made me vegan. People should not buy animal products. You were a famous debutante, and then you became a vegan, interested and deeply involved in animal rights? Yes, and I also became an actress and I still do movies. I have been surrounded by...
Napoleon intended Brera Pinacoteca to be the Louvre of Italy. Dr. James M. Bradburne is a British-Canadian architect, designer and museum specialist who is the newly appointed Director General of Pinacoteca di Brera e Biblioteca nazionale Braidense in Milan. His aim...
The Englishman from Paris. A rising star. Benjamin Clementine is a Mercury Prize-winning pianist, poet, singer and songwriter. He was recently featured on the cover of T, The New York Times Style Magazine. Benjamin, when did you discover that you were a poet and a...
John Richardson died on 12th March 2019. We are sad to have lost a friend with such great talent and intelligence. "I am still obsessed by Picasso." The wind is blowing on a very cold New York winter day when I arrive in the downtown 5th Avenue building where I am...
You are Director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, where you have now been for seven years. Can you explain why the Kimbell is such an important museum? There are three factors that make the museum important internationally. First there is the...
The Music and Energy of Poems. Why is "Widening Income Inequality" the title of your new collection of poems, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and coming out in America now? The title is used with some considerable irony. It is a very common phrase, used by...
Antisemitism is a societal disease. Professor Manuela Consonni is Director of The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism in Jerusalem Professor Consonni, can you tell us about your new prestigious role at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University as...
How is it to be back at the National Gallery, now as the Director? Thrilling, after 13 years away. I have been devoted to the institution since I was a child and it is very exciting to be here at this moment. Why? First of all the sheer beauty and quality of the...
Faith doesn’t generate hate. Ruth Dureghello is president of Rome’s Jewish community. Last Sunday, before Pope Francis, Chief Rabbi Disegni, and the entire Roman Jewish community which had gathered at the Great Synagogue to welcome the pontiff, you said, “With this...
Mr Disegni, you were recently appointed president of MEIS (which is the foundation behind the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Holocaust) by the Minister of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Dario Franceschini. You’ve taken over from writer Riccardo Calimani...
In great sadness we commemorate the inestimable Aharon Appelfeld, who has so sadly died aged 85. He was a personal lifetime friend, a great writer and a poet who has devoted his life through his many books to remember again and again the horror of the...
What inspired you to launch your new magazine Cabana? What inspired me was on one hand a passion for the visual world, and on the other it was a great feeling of the type of world that was about to become mainstream visual inspiration. I clearly did not invent...
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Money Must Stay in the Family
The plot of Money Must Stay in the Family, unfolds around the family matriarch’s last will and traces the story of an upper class Jewish family from Turin, the fictional Ottolenghis. The multigenerational saga begins with the flight from Mussolini’s Racial Laws of 1938 and continues with the arrival in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the dispersion from New York to Rome, Paris, Tuscany, South America, and Jerusalem.
// PUBLICATIONS
