Lotta all'antisemitismo : cultura storica e azione politica

In Italy today the will to combat anti-Semitism coexists with wide-spread sympathies for the regime that in 1938 promulgated the racial laws. To explain this situation, the author compares the results of historical research on anti-Semitism and racism with a series of parliamentary initiatives. Such initiatives are designed to remember and combat the persecution of Jews as well as an intolerance towards "difference", which some political forces have identified with migrants from Africa and the Middle East. Since the 1990s there has been a remarkable level of progress in research, which has cast new light, not only on the world of the victims, but also on the persecutors and the "spectators".

However, on the political and juridical level, repeated attempts to remember the Holocaust with International Holocaust Remembrance Day (2000) and to sanction negationism (2016), turned out to be lacking in historical consistency and very contradictory, in a debate where the immediate and contingent interests of political parties has prevailed. [Publishers' text].