I lie awake thinking of Italy, love and broken illusions. And even the news of the return of the Hamas-held hostages to Israel does not dispel all my sadness.
I visualize some of the happiest times in my life. My parents and I, former refuseniks, coming to Rome in the summer of 1987 and tasting of freedom. My twenty-year-old self playing racchettoni on the Tyrrhenean beach and picking up first splashes of Italian from a group of Italian students who adopted me for the summer. And also standing on Ponte Vecchio, enveloped by such beauty that I felt all my senses exploding with joy. And then, years later, already an American, staying in Bellagio on Lake Como and Bogliasco outside Genova and doing some my best writing there, and also making annual visits to Italy with my wife and our daughters. We used to think of Italy as a zone of happiness, and no ski injuries in the Dolomites or misadventures in Sicily could change it. And that special connection I felt to academic and literary colleagues in Italy—I recall one particularly perfect evening in Bari Vecchia after a bookstore event for the Italian translation of my book “Waiting for America.” Our group, of which I was the only non-Italian and the only Jew, was at an outdoor restaurant run by a family out of their home kitchen, where we ate from a non-existent menu, drank Susumaniello, and traded critical reflections on Russia, America and Italy. Sharing was what I felt I could do with my Italian colleagues and friends—even if it meant crossing barriers of politics and origin and culture.
And then, in my insomniac hours of this forced separation from Italy, I keep replaying in my head the footage of the recent Italian demonstrations of “solidarity” with Palestine and the so-called “Global Sumud Flotilla.” Protesters carry Palestinian flags, flags of Italian labor unions, and red flags with hammers and sickles. Some of the banners have the words “Ieri partigiani oggi antisionisti e antifascisti” (“yesterday partisans, today anti-Zionists and anti-Fascists”) and declare support for “Palestinian resistance.” The term partigiani traditionally refers to members of the armed Italian resistance during World War 2, and the protesters’ revision of history strikes me as morbidly offensive. Banners also include slogans against the current Italian government. The demonstrators claim to be for peace, but their rage signals a thirst for destruction. Who would be the targets of erupted violence? Members of Italy’s small Jewish community? “Dirty Jews burn them all” (Ebrei di merda bruciate tutti) was graffitied on the kosher bakery on Via Avicenna in Rome on Oct. 5, 2025. Watching the protests, I get the distinct impression that in the eyes of the tens of thousands marching in Italian cities, Prime Minister Netanyahu, Prime Minister Meloni and President Trump have coalesced into a collective public enemy by the name of Israel—invoking the playbooks of crusades and pogroms, of Nazi spectacles of hate, and of Soviet antisemitic propaganda.
I cannot recognize my Italy. Yet, in retrospect, the writing had been on the walls since last summer, when my wife, younger daughter, and I returned from Italy after a sabbatical.
Let me backtrack and explain that there were things I chose to disregard, and others I couldn’t. In July 2025, the Academic Senate of the University of Pisa, where I was a visiting professor, jumped on the BDS wagon and recommended suspending agreements with Israeli universities. In its motion, the Senate “expresse[d] solidarity with Francesca Albanese.” This is the same Albanese, “United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories” and the University of Pisa’s infamous alumna, who on Sept. 30, 2025 said in a speech that the Hamas terrorists “have succeeded in bringing Palestine to the center of the debate, they are animating a global revolution [sta anuimando una revoluzione globale].” After I publicly objected, colleagues at the University of Pisa apologetically assured me that this would not affect relationships with “individual” Jewish or Israeli colleagues. But how could it not?
In the meantime, I was seeing more and more evidence that some Italian intellectuals felt emboldened to turn their anti-Zionism into attacks against all Israelis and Jews. For instance, in August 2025 Luca Nivarra, a University of Palermo law professor, called for Italians to “unfriend [their] Jewish friends on Facebook.” In a Facebook post on Aug. 25, 2025, Nivarra declared that “facts demonstrate that there are no good Israelis [non ci sone israeliani buoni]” and “Israel should be banished from the international community.” The rabid zeal with which some Italian activists sought to banish Israel was translating into an onslaught against all things Jewish. I learned that a Yiddish course at a university on the east coast of Italy was cancelled because students boycotted it. This was happening against the backdrop of a rise in antisemitic incidents against Jews in Italy, such as a mob beating a Jewish man in a kippah outside Milan. At the end of September 2025, a national survey revealed that “around 15% of Italians consider physical attacks on Jewish people ‘entirely or fairly justifiable’” and “some 18% of those interviewed also believe antisemitic graffiti on walls and other public spaces is legitimate.” I was also hearing that Jewish and Israeli expatriates were leaving Italy, including two families I personally knew in Florence.
I learned that a Yiddish course at a university on the East Coast of Italy was cancelled because students boycotted it.
And then came October and Yom Kippur, and with it, on Oct. 3, 2025, a nationwide general strike in Italy, which the labor union leaders officially called “to support the residents of Gaza and a humanitarian aid mission.” While mass anti-Israel rallies gripped other parts of Europe, Italy’s were the most numerous. What was happening struck me in a way that similar events in the UK or the Netherlands could not. I followed the protests not only through what was reported in the news but also though social media posts of Italian academics and authors I knew personally. An Italian translator of Jewish-Russian authors posted a selfie of themselves and another very elegantly dressed individual in a group of protesters in Milan, some of them keffiyeh-clad and carrying Palestinian flags. The caption read: “by boat and by bike,” and this referred to the flotilla led by Greta Thunberg and reportedly having had 45 Italian participants, the third largest national number after Turkey and Spain. One did not have to be a cultural historian to note that the selfie-indulgence of those Italian limo liberals paralleled the performative gestures of members of the Gaza flotilla. I commented, in Italian, “Is this what I think it is? Another demonstration of solidarity with Hamas? The Jewish writers you’ve written about and taught are turning in their graves at the sights of such demonstrations.” “Think what you want. We have nothing to say to each other,” my former acquaintance replied and unfriended me. Facebook partisans directed their ire at me, and the most telling comment was: “There is very little difference between Hamas and the government of Israel.” I don’t know why I even replied, but I did: “You have no moral right to judge Jews or the Jewish state. What you said is hateful and antisemitic.”
For me, the tipping point occurred on Oct. 4, 2025. A Scandinavian friend visiting Florence shared a photo of a poster glued to the wall two blocks from Palazzo Pitti. I have walked here many times, and back in April of 2025 I stood here with two colleagues, talking about Dostoevsky’s time in Florence. In 1868-1869 the writer and his family lived in this neighborhood, and here Dostoevsky wrote “Idiot,” my favorite of his novels. Florence inspired Dostoevsky to compose a novel of the second coming and of unrequited love. Placed in the center of the poster, against a sepia background, is a creased Israeli flag. Above it, in Gothic black script, are the words “Popolo eletto ad alzata di mano” (“People chosen/elected by show of hands”). Beneath the Israeli flag is a row of hands raised in the Nazi salute, and one of the hands has a red armband with a black border and a white circle with a black swastika. The row of raised hands renders even more ominous the words above the Israeli flag by obviating the wordplay between “chosen people,” that is, Jews, and “elected people,” that is, purportedly, the Jewish state elected by a Nazi salute. The poster appears to be by a Florentine artist by the name of Stefano Galli, who signs his works “Galli Artepiombo Firenze” and has a studio on the other side of the Arno, three blocks south of the Sinagoga. As I quickly discovered, back in June 2025 the artist had exhibited an installation titled “Macelleria Gaza” (“Gaza Butcher’s Shop”) as part of a Florentine show in support of Palestine. At the time another sick mind placed a Palestinian flag in the right hand of the equestrian statue of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici in Piazza della Signoria. The poster has been removed from the wall, but the “artist” still parades it on their Instagram and Facebook pages. It has these tags: #galliartepiombo #genocide #gaza #nocensura #libertàdiespressione #revolution #nocomplicità #artpower#palestine #nosilence and is accompanied by the song “Zu Asche, zu Staub” (“To Ashes, to Dust”), which had been made popular by the serial “Babylon Berlin.” I doubt that in Germany an artist would unabashedly display such works. Italy also has hate crime laws specifically enacted to punish incitement to racial, ethnic, or religious hatred, such as the Mancino Law No. 205/1993 and its more recent extension targeting incitement to hatred via the internet and social media. Yet the Florentine artist Stefano Galli appears unconcerned, and so do the artist’s fellow citizens.
I cannot brush the poster off because it revivifies the darkest pages of Soviet antisemitism. Following the Six-Day War in June 1967 and Israel’s victory over its Arab neighbors, who were intent on destroying the small Jewish state, anti-Zionism had become a central tenet of Soviet propaganda whereas “Zionism” was usually equated with self-conscious expressions of Jewishness. It was then that the antisemitic and Shoah-denying notion of Israel as an heir to Nazism and Fascism was popularized in the Soviet media. In political cartoons and Soviet propaganda art, swastikas were routinely intertwined with Stars of David, and the Israeli military portrayed as resembling Nazi—and specifically SS—troops. If there is a Soviet propaganda subtext that highlights the ideological and propagandistic roots of the recent Florentine poster, it would be “Fascism under a Blue Star,” the 1971 book by Evgeny Evseev. Evseev had served as an Arabic interpreter for both Khrushchev and Brezhnev and, by the late 1970s, had became one of the principle brains of the ultanationalist antisemitic movement in the USSR, know as the “Russian Party.” Evseev’s book carried a subtitle redolent of Marxist clichés: “Truth about contemporary Zionism: Its ideology, practice, and the organizational system of major Jewish bourgeoisie.” On the illustration printed next to the title page, there is a black spider with both a swastika and a Star of David on top of its body; the spider’s web has spread over the West, from the United States to the UK, France and Italy, as evident from architectural and sculptural references. Much has been written of late about the deep Soviet roots of today’s virulent anti-Zionism in the West. Some thirty-five years after the fall of the Soviet empire, the Soviet corpse continues to emit its infectious gases and poisons people’s minds and imaginations. In Italy, where the radical left has been historically very strong and where the Soviet Union once enjoyed a cult status among left-wing intellectuals and artists, the level of public activism against Israel has reached unprecedented heights. How could I, a former Soviet Jew who thought of Italy as my home in Europe, not despair?
How could I, a former Soviet Jew who thought of Italy as my home in Europe, not despair?
Now I must pause and speak of Jewish gratitude, and, specifically, of the gratitude of Jews from the former lands of the Russian Empire and of Eastern Europe. And to share my own Italian history.
After World War 2 and the Shoah, Italy opened its borders to Jewish survivors and refugees. Unable or unwilling to return to their prewar homes, they were trying to reach the Italian seaports, especially on the East Coast, to sail to the Promised Land where a Jewish state was about to be born. In the 1970s and 1980s, tens of thousands of stateless ex-Soviet Jews and their families (but also Jews fleeing other countries such as Iran) found themselves in Italy—mainly bound for the United States and Canada. Once again, Italy let us in and allowed us to stay, in a sense continuing the tradition of sheltering Jewish refugees.
Except for the latter years of the Fascist period, following the Manifesto della razza announced by Mussolini’s regime in August 1938, Italy had no practice of racialized antisemitism. Phenotypically speaking, Jews felt more comfortable in the streets of Italy than they did in Slavic or Germanic counties, where they often stood out and “looked” different, foreign. I remember how refreshing this was when my parents and I lived in Italy during the summer of 1987. My late father, the writer David Shrayer-Petrov, has written about the ubiquity of “Jewish genes” among Italians and about the experience of seeing himself reflected in the “biblical” faces of Italian men.
And just a bit more about my personal Italian connections. I have had three books published in Italian translation. Of all European countries, I have the greatest number of academic and literary ties in Italy. I felt comfortable among my Italian intellectual peers, with whom I shared—or thought I did—a fundamental understanding of the horrors of both Fascism and Communism. I even closed my eyes—something I now regret—at the lack of condemnation by Italian intellectuals of Russia’s neocolonial war and aggression in Ukraine. If something disharmonious had seeped into my personal chemistry with Italian colleagues since October 7 and the Hamas attack on Israel, I would chalk it up to the charged air of times. In 2025 I was “uninvited” from giving guest lectures at several Italian universities, and I surmised it had something to do with my expressed Zionism and Israelism but didn’t get fixated on it. There were other “feasts of friendship” to partake of.
I have also traveled extensively in Italy, often in search of Jewish memory. These travels were bittersweet. It was exhilarating to visit the former mikveh (Jewish ritual bath) on Ortigia Island in Siracusa, where a Jewish community used it from the 6th century BCE until the expulsion of Jews from Sicily in the late-15th century. It was often a melancholy experience to see what remains of Italy’s great Jewish communities—in Livorno, in Ferrara, in Padova—where armored vehicles stand guard outside synagogues and Jewish centers. In the North of Italy, signs and symbols of death and deportation usually punctuate the sites of Jewish memory. More and more, one sees the Stolpersteine installed in the sidewalks of Northern Italian cities. In early 2025, when I was based in Florence, I walked dozens of times by a building just a block from where we lived on Via Zara not far from Piazza della Libertà. I would lower my eyes and see two copper plates in the sidewalk in front of a residential building. And I would think of Bianca Bassano Cutri and Rita Bassano, two sisters, two Italian Jewish women in their sixties, who were taken from their home on 10 March 1944 and murdered at Auschwitz.
And yet, I have never personally known open antisemitic prejudice from a native Italian. (I wear a kippah, and also displayed yellow lapel pins for Israeli hostages). In public places, such as the tram I love riding in Florence, there were sometimes odd glances from people who looked like they had come from the Arab or Muslim world. There was the occasional glare of surprise in the eyes of an older Italian man on the intercity train. But never once—and one must speak of this with intellectual honesty—never once did I feel prejudice toward myself as a Jew from the local café owners, the baker or the green grocer, the tailor or the tobacconists who signed for our packages or from the neighbors in the apartment building where we rented an apartment. Only once was I accosted, in Joyce’s beloved Trieste of all places, by a drunk British tourist from a cruise ship who was muttering some rot about Israel. I must have been fortunate as I know other Jews and Israelis who have encountered antisemitism in Italy, including the taunting of their children at school as agents of “colonialism.”
And yet, I have never personally known open antisemitic prejudice from a native Italian.
And so, to resolve some of my inner turmoil, I decided to writer a letter. Over the course of three days during the week of Oct. 6, as we waited and hoped for an agreement on Israeli hostages and Gaza, I emailed letters, some in Italian and some in English, to Italian academics, intellectuals and authors I had come to know. The vast majority of them are based in Italy; a small number are Italian expatriates living in the U.S. For obvious reasons, I will not identify any of them. In the middle of the letter, I referenced the antisemitic poster in Florence; I will omit this section. The rest of the letter follows below:
Dear [Italian Friend],
Last week was very difficult for me. I have been following, with trepidation, the recent paroxysms of Israel-hate in Italy.
[…]
As you know, Italy is a special place for me, a place I used to think of as my home in Europe. I fear the protesters have crossed the line between advocacy for the Palestinian people and expression of open antisemitism. And what saddens me the most is that Italian intellectuals and artists, some of whom I know personally, are at the forefront of these demonstrations. Do they realize that they are not helping the peace process or alleviating the suffering in Gaza but rather emboldening Hamas to stay in control? Do they not want for Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace and dignity?
I feel like my love for Italy is being put to some unimaginable test. Please forgive this message of despair. I would appreciate your thoughts on the subject.
Warm regards and thanks,
Maxim
I emailed over twenty letters, to which I attached photos of the ghastly “Chosen People” poster by the Florentine artist Stefano Galli. As of this writing, I have heard back from seven people. It’s both hard and not so hard to interpret silences. Of the seven responses I received, three have unequivocally condemned the hate of the protesters toward Israel. Three have offered words of sympathy while also suggesting nuanced explanations that offered critical views of Netanyahu and Israel’s conduct in Gaza and of the Italian left. Two employed the word “genocide.” One response was distinctly terse and stated that one “idiot” artist did less harm than a government that “carried out genocide.” Three of my addressees felt it necessary to remind me that antisemitism does not have a strong Italian tradition or that the protests did not target Jews as such, only Israel and its government. And also that many Italians are angry with Prime Minister Meloni and her refusal to recognize a Palestinian state.
The most astute analysis came from an author based in a small Northern Italian city. They characterized what was happening in Italy as a “collective hysteria.” Many Italians, my colleague suggested, react to a mixture of facts, misinformation and propaganda by constructing a neoromantic notion of Palestinians as a symbol of their own, Italian anger and frustration. Many on Italy’s left exhibit multiple double standards as can be seen, for instance, in the dearth of support for Ukraine and the defense of “Russian interests.” This colleague told me that many older left-wing Italian intellectuals react to the present moment as if it were a renewal of the 1970s with its USSR versus USA Cold War stance, in which many of their sympathies were with the USSR.
One of my addressees sought to comfort me by referring to the results of the recent polls by Alessandra Paola Ghisleri. Despite the impression one gets from the coverage of last week’s Gaza protests in Italy, “in the streets, Italians appear more divided.” In her recent summary of the results of Ghisleri’s poll, the journalist Martina Carone reported that of the Italians surveyed, “44% judged [the protesters] to be peaceful overall while a third deemed them ‘violent or prone to violence.’ Only 27% believed [the protesters] had a positive impact on politics, while twice as many (55%) considered them harmful or useless.”
Finally, two of my Italian contacts stressed that most of the protestors were sincere in wanting to affect change in Palestine and did not espouse antisemitic beliefs. I would allow that some of the protesters “sincerely” thought it possible to judge—vilify—Israel without stoking popular anger with Jews. And this is why I must confront the question of the moral right of today’s Italians and other Europeans to sit in judgment of the Jewish state.
On Oct. 5, 2025, a rally against antisemitism took place in Munich. One of the speakers was Erich Sixt, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the car rental company Sixt. He was born in 1944, and in his remarks he quoted a famous line from Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”: “Death is a master from Germany.” At the heart of Sixt’s emotional speech was the question of the right of Germans to judge Israel:
There has been frequent talk here about criticism of Israel, about Israeli policy, about the two-state solution. And I’ll tell you one thing, it’s a matter of concern to me, a very personal concern: We as Germans—and I speak here as a German—are not permitted to voice criticism of Israel. […] Friends tell me, can we not speak then? No, we are not allowed to do that, not us, not Germans. [With it], we are only stirring up antisemitism, we are fueling antisemitism. […] Therefore: No, not a German. That is, that is not our role.
And what of Italians? How many of them would share Erich Sixt’s German perspective? Do the Italian protesters think they have a moral right to judge the Jewish state?
Do the Italian protesters think they have a moral right to judge the Jewish state?
And thus to Francesca Albanese, who made it her life’s mission to malign Israel, and to other instigators and enablers of the Italian Israel-hate, I have this to say: The nation that invented the ghetto; that in 1938 adopted racial laws based on the Nuremberg Laws, excluded Jews from all public spheres of life, and did not prevent the Nazis from (and in some cases assisted them with) the deportation of about one fifth of its nearly 39,000 Jews to the transit camps in its territory and then to the Nazi death camps, such a nation has no moral right to judge Israel.
Love, however, is not a matter of moral judgment. Love is what the heart feels and the soul disposes. A friend of mine, a professor at a university in Central Europe and a Jewish-Soviet expatriate like myself, recently texted me photographs of piazzas in Tuscan cities, where we once sat in trattorias and cafés with Italian colleagues. “We have our own Italy,” he wrote, trying to cheer me up. And I agree. It’s hard to unlove Italy.
But it’s equally difficult to unknow what happened. Through the recent wave of Israel-hate, Italy has resorted to national performances of rancor against the very promise of Jewish survival. That fact is undeniable and indelible—a red-brown stain on Italy’s postwar history.
Maxim D. Shrayer, a bilingual author and a professor at Boston College, is the author of over thirty books, most recently Parallel Letters and Zion Square.
