Maura Hametz

Bio: Maura Hametz is an academic researcher from Old Dominion University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Population & The Holocaust. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 17 publications receiving 122 citations.

L'Italia e il confine orientale

Abstract: Marina Cattaruzza (2007) L'Italia e il confine orientale (Bologna: Il Mulino), 391 pp., ISBN 9788815113948, [euro]27.00, soft cover How successful were Italy's attempts to extend the Italian ‘natio...

Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy

Abstract: example. The UCII then took a pro-active role, seeking and identifying a non-Jewish historian to produce a history of the persecutions that the Committee would underwrite and disseminate. This, then, is the origin ofRenzoDeFelice’s Storia degli ebrei in Italia sotto il fascismo, researched and written in just over one year and first published in 1961. Schwarz sees De Felice’s book as, inevitably, reaffirming the vision of Italy as the ‘victim itself of a racial delirium considered decidedly foreign to its own sensibility and history’ (p. 163); he is more severe regarding De Felice’s defence of this view years later, in subsequent editions. Schwarz devotes the final chapter and conclusion to a discussion of Italian-Jewish selfrepresentation, evaluating the causes that led to a ‘repression’ and ‘concealment of the trauma’ (p. 175) in the first decades after the war. Among these was the need, shared with all Italians, for a ‘reconciliatory memory’. Even more significant in the case of the Jews, according to Schwarz, was their adherence to the pact of emancipation that idealized Italy and reinforced the perspective that Jews should show gratitude and prove worthy of their promotion into society. Only since the 1980s, he contends, have new ways of conceiving citizenship, and the consequences of Israeli politics, worked to dislodge the emancipation paradigm. Schwarz concludes with a reflection on the fragility of a modern Jewish identity grounded too firmly in the Shoah. This is an extremely thoughtful and well-documented work, a must-read for those interested in Italian Jewish history, certainly, but also contemporary Italian history and historiography in general. The English edition is a somewhat modified and expanded version of the original Italian version that appeared in 2004. The translation by Giovanni Noor Mazhar reads extremely well, suffering from only very occasional infelicities of tense or word choice. The book does not present itself in a particularly neat package: a major shift in perspective and sources occurs between Parts 1 and 2; chapters range in length from five to thirty-three pages; and the time period announced in the preface (1943–61) proves misleading by the end, when the concluding discussion extends to the 1980s–1990s and beyond. Because the revision of historiographical and popular perspectives on the Fascist anti-Jewish campaign and the discrediting of the idea of Italian exceptionalism are a crucial endpoint of this story, it would have been helpful if the author had not limited himself to brief references to the recent scholarship in these areas. These remain minor points, however, and what should be emphasized is that Schwarz’s ambitious, probing study substantially advances our understanding of Jewish experience, self-representation and self-understanding after Mussolini.

Naming Italians in the borderland, 1926–1943

Abstract: This article places the surname Italianization campaign in Italy's Adriatic borderlands from 1927 to 1943 in the broader context of fascist schemes to promote Italian nationalism and construct the Italian national community. A facet of legislative ethnic engineering, surname alteration policy was common to most successor states in the interwar period. In eastern Italy, while ethnic Slovenes and Croats bore the brunt of forcible acculturation, the measures intended to support nationalist, irredentist and imperial aspirations not to persecute Slavs. The fascist authorities' approach to minorities was more nuanced than scholars have recognized in their attentions to competition between west and east, ‘European’ and ‘Balkan’, Italian and Slav.

The carabinieri stood by: The Italian state and the "slavic threat" in Trieste, 1919‐1922

Abstract: On 2 August 1919 in the Upper Adriatic port city of Trieste (as it was called in Italian) or Trst (as it was referred to in Slavic languages), nationalist youths harassed socialist children returning from a group outing. The incident escalated into a riot. Police opened fire, and one nationalist was killed. On 12 July 1920, a nationalist mob incited by Fascists looted and burned Narodni Dom, the Slovene cultural center. The carabinieri, Italy's state police, collaborated in the attack, or at the very least stood by and watched as the building was torched using gasoline obtained from the nearby barracks. The next day, Italian nationalist demonstrators torched the Croatian-managed Adriatic Bank. Police at the scene stood on the sidelines and watched the bank burn. In the autumn of 1920, Fascist squads attacked a funeral procession mourning a socialist worker killed in a general strike. The socialists erected barricades in the streets of the San Giacomo quarter, a working class neighborhood. Police leveled the undefended barricades and intimidated the quarter's residents during a house-to-house search. In 1921, a firebomb exploded in the offices of Il Lavoratore, the local socialist newspaper. Police watched the premises burn. In all five instances, the forces of public security in Trieste stood by, unable or unwilling to stem violence and restore order in the city newly annexed to Italy from the Habsburg empire. The Italian liberal authorities officially disavowed mistreatment of ethnic minorities and members of the political opposition, but they found themselves unable to deal effectively with the clash among ethnic groups and political parties precipitated by the transfer of the territory to Italian sovereignty. They sympathized with those adopting extra-legal and violent strategies that they perceived as useful to further state political agendas and promote assimilation, or at least quiescence, of the border population.

Bibliography “Food as Heritage”

Abstract: The following bibliography is conceived as a selection of international literature on food as heritage and as a marker of identity within the huge amount of works recently produced on the topic of food. The bibliography has been produced within the “Food as heritage” project, performed at University of Bologna and coordinated by Ilaria Porciani, with a team composed by Massimo Montanari, Paolo Capuzzo, Raffaele Laudani and Marica Tolomelli. “Food as heritage” is part of a wider projec...

Women and food chains: the gendered politics of food.

Abstract: In nearly all societies women bear responsibility for the mental and manual labor of food provision, from field to table. Their involvement with food constructs who they are in the world—as family members, workers, and people—in deep, complex, and often contradictory ways. While food work often serves as a component of women’s identity, it also serves as a key factor in their exploitation, oppression, and, accordingly, their resistance. In this article we identify three domains that define women’s relationship to food—the material, the socio-cultural, and the corporeal. We find that, although the agrifood system is going through a period of rapid change, gender relations in the agrifood system remain surprisingly static. Through the lenses of material, socio-cultural, and corporeal, we briefly describe the state of contemporary gender relations in the American agrifood system, highlight some of the ways in which women are working to reconfigure social and economic conditions through food work. We find that, while women are engaged in significant and far-reaching efforts to change the system, few of these efforts focus specifically on improving gender relations. We briefly review scholarly contributions to our understanding of the gendered food system, concluding that a new field of study is needed that integrates theory and practice in the effort to understand and change gender relations in the agrifood system.

Imagining the Balkans: Послепис

Abstract: Starting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continuing up to the present, Imagining the Balkans covers the Balkan's most formative years. From the down fall of the Ottoman Empire, through the turbulent nationalist years of the nineteenth century, up to World War I, the idea of the Balkans was fiercely, often violently, contested. In the wake of WWI, the beginnings of a tradition, largely enforced by academics, emerged stigmatizing the Balkans. Since then, the region has suffered from the neglect, abuse, and scant regard of both western Europe and the world. The result has been in many direct ways to compound the Balkan's poverty, internal violence, and lack of national self-image. A startling history of ideas, Imagining the Balkans provides a much needed exploration into a region too long neglected.