The influential philosopher and fanatical Israel-hater Judith Butler has favorably cited Primo Levi’s public criticism of the Jewish state’s war in Lebanon in the early 1980s to make him into a literary saint of anti-Zionism. But such a reading of the Italian-Jewish novelist and Holocaust memoirist requires ignoring what he had earlier written on the subject, explains Alvin Rosenfeld. Levi’s first encounters with Zionism came in Auschwitz, and later with the Jews he met while wandering Eastern Europe after the war:
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More about: Holocaust, Jewish literature, Judith Butler, Primo Levi