This article examines Italian-Americans’ reaction to the Fascist embrace of anti-Semitism in 1938, primarily by means of a perusal of the Italian-language press in the U.S. It argues that the newcomers and their offspring usually failed to distance themselves from the regime’s racial turn because of pre-existing rivalries and resentment towards U.S. Jews. It also holds that, although Italian-Americans hardly subscribed to the Fascist ideology, which cannot be confined to anti-Jewish theories only, the notion that the Italian people were a race of their own helped the immigrants and their descendants strengthen a sense of ethnic identity based on their common national extraction and, thus, further allowed for the penetration of anti-Semitic propaganda into the Little Italies.
The Fascist Racial Turn: The View from the Italian-American Community in the United States
LUCONI, Stefano
2019
Abstract
This article examines Italian-Americans’ reaction to the Fascist embrace of anti-Semitism in 1938, primarily by means of a perusal of the Italian-language press in the U.S. It argues that the newcomers and their offspring usually failed to distance themselves from the regime’s racial turn because of pre-existing rivalries and resentment towards U.S. Jews. It also holds that, although Italian-Americans hardly subscribed to the Fascist ideology, which cannot be confined to anti-Jewish theories only, the notion that the Italian people were a race of their own helped the immigrants and their descendants strengthen a sense of ethnic identity based on their common national extraction and, thus, further allowed for the penetration of anti-Semitic propaganda into the Little Italies.
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