Ghosts of Fascism

“Levis Sullam’s book is innovative and fills a significant gap.” - Enzo Traverso, Cornell University “Did Italian intellectuals come to terms with the Fascist era? And to what extent did they contribute to the collective repression that still characterizes much of our nation? According to Simon Levis Sullam, the author of an impassioned essay on the metamorphoses of our leading thinkers, the verdict is clear: in the period after World War II, prominent members of Italy’s intellectual class chose to erase, censor, or minimize their involvement with the regime, representing their pasts as unblemished and consistently anti-Fascist.”- (La Repubblica, praise for the Italian-language edition) “Perhaps more than any other author, Levis Sullam has investigated Italy’s Fascist era in the same way that scientists identify cells and researchers create vaccines. Levis Sullam’s method is to retrace the footsteps of major anti-Fascist figures and tell us what we had not known about them; to acknowledge aspects and phases of their lives that the various historical and biographical accounts had previously set aside.”- (Il Fatto Quotidiano, praise for the Italian-language edition)

Simon Levis Sullam is a professor of modern history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, specializing in modern Italy, Jewish history, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. Among his books translated into English are Giuseppe Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism and The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews in Italy, as well as the coedited volume Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A Global History.

Stuart Oglethorpe specializes in translating modern Italian history into English. His recent translations include Alberto Mario Banti’s The Nation of the Risorgimento: Kinship, Sanctity, and Honour in the Origins of Unified Italy and Francesco Cassata’s Racism and Antisemitism in Fascist Italy: The Politics, Ideology, and Imagery of “La Difesa della razza.”