It’s Snowing Inside

It was so cold inside our apartment today, Jennifer covered our oldest dog, Raster, with a fleece blanket. Already wearing a sweater, the arthritis-ridden six-year-old Schnauzer is so easily impacted by the cold that his first impulse, whenever we take him outside, is to freeze. In his tracks, that is.

It has been a cold winter in Milan, the likes of which I haven’t experienced in years. Though Europe as a whole has been experiencing record low temperatures, we’ve been unfortunate enough to have our building’s heat switched off a total of fourteen days in the last twelve weeks.

Unbelievable, isn’t it? There is something distinctly cruel about it. However, the owners of the roof, who decided to build an entire new floor above us (we live on the top floor) say that there’s no way around it. What’s worse is that they have no inclination to warn anyone. We find out when we get cold.

The heat was turned off last Friday. Eager to warm myself up, I decided to take a walk, and shoot some pictures of falling snow. One block way. I found the dog above, relieving himself in front of these election posters, urging Milanese to vote for the Lega Nord, Italy’s leading anti-immigrant party.

Always Outsiders

His English isn’t very good, but the guy sure knows how to communicate with dogs. Whenever he sees me taking Pixel out for a walk, Antonello turns into a magnet. Within seconds, Pixel is at his feet, wagging his tail, as though he and our doorman have known each other for years.

However, get on the subject of politics, and Antonello is a completely different beast. Spying my camera the other day, he asked if he could take a look. Not realizing it was still on, I handed it to him, displaying this campaign poster. “I am Lega Nord,” he said rather nervously.

One of Italy’s biggest rightist parties, and a member of the present governing coalition, the Northern League, as it is called in English, is well-known for its anti-immigrant platform. “What interests you about this poster?” Not knowing how to put it, I replied “I’m Jewish. The refugee ship evokes memories.”

Antonello cleared his throat. Then, after a moment’s silence, he began to speak again. “You Jews are alright,” he stated, looking me right in the eye. “You people work hard, you study, you obviously have money. But these Africans and Muslims, they’re lazy and they’re poor. The come to Italy and cause lots of problems.”

I don’t know why I expected otherwise. By the time I figured out how to formulate a proper response in Italian, Antonello was gone, headed down the hallway towards Viale Andrea Dorea. If only I’d worked a little faster, to remind him that in Italy Jews aren’t foreigners, that we’ve been here for well over 2000 years.

They Call It Mimesis

One of my favorite parts of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s account of German anti-Semitism is their emphasis upon the the role of mimesis, or imitation, in racism. The Nazis did not want to destroy Jewish identity as much as take it over, they argued in their masterwork, The Dialectic of Enlighenment.

The strength of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument does not just lie in the correctness of their analysis. It is also present in its applicability to other instances of racism, apart from that which discriminates against Jews. Take this Northern League poster here in Milan as but one example.

Warning Italians that they risk becoming the equivalent of Native Americans confined to future reservations, this poster encourages voters to fear the demographic threat of foreign immigration. That many of these immigrants are actually indigenous Americans, from Latin America, is it’s own mimetic moment.

In the first installment of Everywhere But There, a new column I’ve begun writing for Zeek, I discuss tensions over race in Italy, from the vantage point of the Arab-Israeli conflict.