The New York Times
Malta, Emerges From the Waves of Time
A small rock set in the southern Mediterranean between Sicily and NorthAfrica, only 18 miles long, with a population of more than 300,000, the island of Malta is a palimpsest of cultures, developed over thousands of years of successive invasions by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and the Spanish, French and British. For nearly 300…
Continue readingWanted: Art Scholar, M.B.A. Required
When Jack Lane took over as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art three years ago, one of the first things he did was shut his office door. “The previous director’s door was open to everyone who wanted to talk to him,” Mr. Lane explains. “That just seemed unworkable. I wanted to clarify…
Continue readingFrom Italy’s Jewry Come 2,000 Years of Treasures
As published in The New York Times At the end of Primo Levi’s novel ”If Not Now, When?” a group of Eastern European Jews arrives by train in Milan and discovers to their surprise that there are Jews in Italy. ”Italian Jews are as odd as the Catholics,” Levi’s narrator thinks to himself. ”They don’t…
Continue readingPrimo Levi: Reconciling the Man and the Writer
As published in the New York Times WHEN a writer commits suicide it is difficult not to reinterpret his books in light of his final act. The temptation is particularly strong in the case of Primo Levi, much of whose work stemmed from his own experience at Auschwitz. The warmth and humanity of his writing…
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