(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)October 26, 2011

(MAHWAH, NJ) – Queensboro UNICO Distinguished Professor of Italian & Italian American Studies at Hofstra University Stanislao Pugliese spoke on October 26 under the auspices of the Italian Club and the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of Ramapo College.

Pugliese discussed “Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism after the Fall,” which alludes to the debate that surfaced immediately after his1987 death as a result falling down a stairwell as to whether Levi’s demise was the result of an accident or a suicide. His death as a possible suicide, which Pugliese called into question, marked a reinterpretation of his legacy as a writer and survivor.

Stan Pugliese, a specialist on the Italian anti-Fascist resistance and Italian Jews, explored Levi’s legacy in terms of his writings as charting a course to help understand what actually occurred on a human level in the Holocaust. In Promo Levi’s telling of the tragedy that befell the Jews of Europe, according to Pugliese, we see revealed the second “fall” of humankind in which barbarity became commonplace and ordinary to the point that even liberators of concentration camps felt collective shame.

Pugliese graduated from Hofstra University (B.A. 1987) and the City College of New York (M.A. 1990), and earned his Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 1995, after which he joined the Faculty of Hofstra University. He has been Queensboro UNICO Distinguished Professor of Italian & Italian American Studies since 2009.

Pugliese has spoken at Ramapo College on several occasions, the last time about his book, “Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone,” which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2009.

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