JEWS AS VICTIMS
Politicized Suffering and Appropriated Legacies:
Self-Serving Representations of Jews in the Italian Media
Juliana Brint
May 9, 2011
Senior Thesis
Program for Jewish Civilization
Georgetown University
Table of Contents
Introduction … 1
Historical Background … 4
Literature Review … 6
Methodology … 12
Framing the Jews as Victims … 16
Variation One: Jews as Victims of the Holocaust … 16
Variation Two: Jews as Victims of Anti-Semitism … 20
Variation Three: Jews as Victims of Muslim Antipathy … 23
Variation Four: Jews as Victims of Liberal Prejudice … 27
The Issue of Israel … 29
Deliberate Neutrality in Coverage of the Israel-Lebanon War … 31
Corriere’s Bold Assertions of Israeli Victimization … 32
Repubblica’s Subtle Positioning of Israel as Aggressor … 36
The Peace Problem: Equidistance v. Two State Solution … 39
Case Study: Israel and Iran … 41
Covering Judaism in an (Inter)religious Context … 43
Invisible Jewish Religiosity … 43
Israel’s Impact on the Salience of Islam … 45
Framing Jewish-Catholic Relations as Historically Problematic … 46
Individuals and Stereotypes: Jewish Identity in Shorthand … 47
Who Are the Jews? Individuals as Examples … 48
Quarantining Negative Stereotypes … 49
Conclusion: Evaluating the Role of Jews in Italian Society … 53
Introduction
In analyzing the representations of Jews in Italian media, what emerges is not a unified or dynamic depiction of the position of Jews in contemporary Italian society, but rather an overarching tendency to use Jews as a political tool by framing them as victims. The fact that the media’s choice of which aspects of Jewish victimization to focus on varies strictly based on political affiliation lays bare the ultimate purpose of this deliberate and widespread framing: to flatter the political ideologies associated with specific media organizations by presenting them as the defender of the victimized Jews. This compulsion to use Jewish experiences as a tool of political posturing pervades not only articles that further the victim frame but also coverage of Israel, articles about Judaism in contact with other religions, and how Jewish identity is defined through the use of specific Jewish individuals or traditional stereotypes about the Jews. All these aspects of representations of Jews in the Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, Italy’s two most popular and influential newspapers, will be deconstructed and analyzed to show how they politicize Jewish experiences to advantage specific political ideologies. Such an analysis will also allow us to tease out the mixed messages sent by the media about the position and degree of inclusion of Jews in Italian society.
The troubled legacy of Fascism fundamentally altered the position of Jews in Italy, and Italians in general—including the Italian press—have not fully processed their country’s complicity in the Holocaust.[1] In newspaper coverage of Jews and Judaism, this is tension is manifested as a pervasive framing of Jews as victims. The employment of this frame differs dramatically along on political lines, however. The left-leaning Repubblica, which can claim ties with the Italian resistance movement,[2] often focuses on the victimization of Jews during the Holocaust. Meanwhile Repubblica’s conservative counterpart, Corriere, is allied with a political movement that retains significant connections with and ideological similarities to Mussolini’s regime.[3] As a result of this problematic history, Corriere is much more likely to focus on the contemporary victimization of Jews, most frequently at the hands of Muslims or the Italian left. The political implications of these newspapers’ choices are clear: Jews are framed as victims in order to position the respective papers’ political allies as their defenders, thus shoring up their moral authority.
This politicization of Jewish victimization can also help us understand trends in the two papers’ coverage of Israel. While both papers make deliberate attempts to present their coverage of Israel as non-biased, particularly when Israel is involved in a high-profile conflict, their political interests nonetheless shine through. Corriere is noticeably more aggressive in its editorializing about Israel, offering up staunch defenses of Israeli policy in keeping with its other attempts to frame itself and the center-right politicians it represents as the contemporary defenders of Jews. Repubblica, by contrast, offers some subtle attacks on Israeli aggression, but mostly echoes the equidistance policy upheld by the leftist government in power in 2006, the period I focused on in my research. Although Repubblica did offer some subtle criticism of Israeli military and government policies, it is significant to note that it did not adopt the aggressive condemnations of Israel common among Western liberals.[4] Instead of upending the established victim frame when covering Israel, Repubblica took a more moderate approach, one that reflected the foreign policy of its political allies while allowing the paper not to contradict its established frame of liberals as the defenders of the Jews from the time of World War II on.
Within both papers, there is comparatively little focus on the cultural or religious traditions of the Jews, with most of the coverage directed instead at geopolitical issues and anti-Semitism. Articles in which the religious aspect of Judaism is salient are most likely focused on interreligious relations, usually with Muslims or Catholics. While less overtly political than the other categories of articles I have mentioned, these interreligious articles nonetheless demonstrate a political dimension, particularly in the increased salience of Islam in articles about Israel. Another curious characteristic of Italian media coverage of Judaism that can be explained by looking at the papers’ political motivations is the pronounced differences in the nationalities of Jewish individuals highlighted in these papers. A comparative analysis shows that Repubblica is much more likely than Corriere to feature Italian Jews in particular and European Jews in general—a tendency that harkens back to the Italian right’s lingering discomfort with presenting Jews in an Italian or European context due to the historical persecution of these communities in which it was complicit. It is also significant to note that in order to preserve the potency of Jews as political symbols, both papers shy away from using traditional stereotypes about Jews in their news coverage. These stereotypes are instead found in thoroughly non-political articles, particularly those in the entertainment and arts sections. It is arguable that these softer articles, in which bias is perhaps less rigorously edited out, are actually more reflective of Italian conceptions of Jews than their highly image-sensitive political counterparts.
Taken together, these trends in representations of Jews in the major Italian newspapers paint a complex story and offer us ambiguous messages about the extent of Jewish inclusion in contemporary Italian society. What is clear, however, is that the Holocaust and Italy’s role in World War II continue to have a major impact on how Jewish issues are covered, making Italians more conscious of how they treat Jews and transforming Jews into potent political symbols. Despite this sensitivity to the political value of positioning one’s political allies as the defenders of the Jews, subtle stereotyping in cultural coverage and a hesitancy, particularly within Corriere, to recognize the unique experiences of Italian Jews remain prevalent. Because the media plays such an instrumental role in both reflecting and shaping common perceptions,[5] I hope that a thorough analysis of the trends in representations of Jews in Italian newspapers will contribute to a better understanding of the position of Jews within contemporary Italian society. Moreover, I hope that such an analysis will help to illuminate how and why Italian political actors appropriate the historical and contemporary suffering of the Jews.
Historical Background
The history of the Jews in Italy is a surprising and nuanced one. While Jewish communities have existed in Italy for millennia, the Jewish population has always constituted a small minority—less than one percent of the general population—whose unifying characteristic is essentially at odds with one of the central aspects of Italian identity, Catholicism.[6] The Jewish experience in Italy from the Middle Ages to unification was dominated by the ghetto, although Jews did play an active role in political and cultural life during and after the Risorgimento.[7] However, the 20th century also marked one of the darkest chapters for the Jews of Italy: the rise of Fascism and the Holocaust. Italy’s Jewish population lost between 40 and 45 percent of its members between 1938, when the first Italian anti-Semitic policies were implemented, and 1948 due to emigration, casualties during the war, and Nazi atrocities.[8] Despite this significant loss, though, only approximately 25 percent of Italian Jews were victims of the Holocaust, one of the lowest rates in Europe—a statistic that is often used as a credit to the Italian resistance movement.[9] Since the end of World War II, relations between Jews and the Catholic majority in Italy have begun to heal, particularly after the adoption of Vatican II.
Since my thesis will focus on articles from 2006 for reasons discussed in the methodology section below, it is important to briefly comment on the political situation in Italy and Israel at that time. Silvio Berlusconi, a powerful media tycoon who has been a major force in right-wing Italian politics since the mid-1990s, was in charge at the start of the year, but national elections in April shifted power to a center-left coalition led by Romano Prodi.[10] Prodi’s government adopted an official policy of “equidistance” regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This official neutrality extended to the Israel-Lebanon War, although Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Massimo D’Alema did take an aggressive role in negotiations and committed to send in 3,000 Italian troops as part of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon.[11] For Israel, 2006 was marked by high-profile conflicts with both the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and Hezbollah in Lebanon.[12] Politically, Israel started the year in turmoil. In late 2005, Ariel Sharon left Likud to form a new party, Kadima. In January of 2006, however, a stroke left Sharon incapacitated and leadership fell to Ehud Olmert. Olmert was able to lead Kadima to victory in the March elections and took power on May 4, 2006.[13]
Literature Review
Because my thesis touches on a number of disparate topics—including media representations of Jews, Italian-Jewish relations, Italian journalism, and the 2006 Lebanon War—my literature review is fairly varied and broad. I began by reading about the general history of Jews and newspaper in Italy in order to better understand the cultural context of the articles I would be reading. With this context established, I transitioned to focusing on media analysis methods. My reading in this area included both general texts on news framing as well as more specific studies about media representations of Jews and analysis of coverage of the 2006 Lebanon War.
In order to fully understand the meaning and implications of articles about Jews in the Italian press, I believe it is essential to have a solid understanding of the historical position of Jews within Italy. The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity edited by Barbara Garvin and Bernard Cooperman offered a strong introduction to the topic.[14] The book traced the presence of Jews in Italy from ancient times to the 20th century, with a particular focus on the themes of the encounter between Jewish and European civilization, relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews, and the impact of Zionism. This volume was useful in providing not only historical information and analysis but also a thorough examination of Italian Jewish culture, including linguistic, culinary, and artistic traditions, with a focus on how Italian Jewish culture was impacted by and interacted with mainstream—which is to say Catholic—Italian culture. The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity also contains a section extensively analyzing the history and legacy of the Italy’s participation in World War II. Authors Anna Bravo and Michele Sarfatti argue that there has still not been an adequate recognition of the role Italians played in the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust.
Beside The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity, the other resource I found most useful in illustrating the position of Jews within Italian society was The Italian Jewish Experience edited by Thomas P. DiNapoli.[15] A collection of essays presented at a 2000 Forum Italicum conference, The Italian Jewish Experience offers both scholarly essays from Italians (most of who are not Jewish) and firsthand accounts from Italian Jews. The book contained interesting information about Jewish experiences in ghettos, in Southern Italy and in the Italian unification movement, but it was perhaps most useful for its firsthand accounts about life during the Fascist regime and Nazi occupation. The primary source accounts from Italian Jews who lived through this period painted a nuanced picture of the Italian response to Fascist and Nazi anti-Semitism, with some focusing on the widespread silence of the Italian people and the Church and others highlighting the humanitarian assistance the Jews received. Since the legacy of the Holocaust plays such a central role in contemporary perceptions of Jews, I found these accounts particularly enlightening and essential.
In conducting background research on Italian newspapers, I found it useful to focus both on the history of the industry and on the linguistic conventions of the newspaper format. The book I found most useful in presenting the history of Italy’s newspaper industry was Media in Italy: Press, Cinema and Broadcasting from Unification to Digital by Matthew Hibberd. Hibberd did a good job of establishing the basic historical narrative of the Italian newspaper industry, focusing in particular on how it was impacted by Italy’s political and economic journey during the 20th century.[16] Because the book focused on a variety of media formats, it was useful in providing not only a history of newspapers in Italy but also an analysis of the role they play in Italy’s wider journalistic panorama. According to Hibberd, Italy has one of the lowest newspaper readership rates in Europe, with most Italians instead choosing television for news coverage. However, Hibberd also documented the widespread problems with Italy’s television news system, first and foremost its domination by Silvio Berlusconi. This information was highly useful for me in deciding which medium to analyze in this thesis.
Because Italian journalistic style differs significantly from most other forms of written Italian, I felt the need to familiarize myself with its linguistic style before starting my research. In this area, I found Il linguaggio dei giornali italiani (The language of Italian newspapers) by Maurizio Dardano[17] and the chapter on “Il linguaggio giornalistico” (“The journalistic language”) by Gian Luigi Beccaria in I linguaggi settoriali in Italia (The sectoral languages in Italy)[18] particularly useful in explaining where Italian journalistic language fits into the linguistic spectrum of written Italian. While Beccaria focused primarily on how journalistic language relates to spoken language and other sectoral languages, Dardano was more concerned with how journalistic language draws on political, bureaucratic, technological, scientific, and other linguistic sub-codes as well as the reasoning behind the stylistic choices made by journalists.
The other text I found particularly useful in understanding the linguistic style of Italian newspapers was “La peculiarità del linguaggio giornalistico dal punto di vista sintattico: Lo stile ellittico” (“The peculiarity of journalistic language from a syntactic point of view: The elliptical style”) by Lucie Reiglovà.[19] This paper argued that the most important stylistic characteristic of Italian journalistic language is an “elliptical style” which facilitates an efficient conveyance of information. While efficient, this elliptical style is sometimes used at the expense of clarity, particularly for readers who are unfamiliar with the Italian political system. The final text that I found useful in understanding the style of Italian newspapers was Gabrina Pounds’s “Attitude and subjectivity in Italian and British hard-news reporting: The construction of a culture-specific ‘reporter’ voice.”[20] Pounds’s article offers a comparison between the reporting style of Italian and British newspapers and finds that there are much higher levels of subjectivity and emotion permitted in Italian newspapers than in British newspapers. This allowance for subjectivity differs from the American norms I am used to and thus was an important characteristic to keep in mind when analyzing Italian newspaper articles.
Before starting to analyze specific newspaper articles, I thought it would be important to learn the general tenants of news analysis. News Narratives and News Framing by Karen S. Johnson-Cartee proved very useful in this regard.[21] In large part a compilation of important scholarship on news analysis, News Narratives and News Framing made compelling arguments about how mass media creates a common reality and political consciousness. The book also suggested ways for critically analyzing media output, focusing on the frames employed in specific stories, the tone of the piece, the individuals and organizations chosen as sources, the narrative construction choices made by the writer, the facts and data selected for inclusion, and the journalistic tendency to focus on conflicts. All these techniques were important in my in-depth textual analysis of articles. Another highly relevant point highlighted by Johnson-Cartee is the difference between low-threshold and high-threshold issues. Low threshold issues are those that readers have personal experience with in their every day lives whereas high-threshold issues are those that readers have no personal experience with. According to Johnson-Cartee, many scholars believe that the media has the greatest influence on high-threshold issues. This dynamic is highly important in analyzing reporting on Jews, who constitute a small minority in Italy, and especially coverage of Israel.
In studying media representations of Jews, the most relevant book I found was Jewish Images in the Media edited by Martin Liepach, Gabriele Melischek and Josef Seethaler.[22] The book contains essays on common stereotypical media representations of Jews, such as the wanderer or the greedy banker, as well as country-specific studies of media coverage. Of particular interest was Linards Udris and Mark Eisenegger’s “Jewish and Muslim Actors in the Media: Presentation of a Method for Capturing Typifications of Inclusion and Exclusion,” which presented a very useful model for analyzing news content based on typifications that were either inclusionary and sympathetic or exclusionary and unsympathetic. I found this model compelling and made efforts to incorporate it into my research, but ultimately found it to be of limited utility in the Italian context. The other main argument of their paper was that a control minority group, such as Muslims, is needed to accurately analyze the media representation of Jews. While I found this argument interesting, I was reluctant to incorporate it in to my own research because I believe that using any other minority group as a control sample would be highly problematic given the unique history of the Jews in Italy.
The other important chapter from Jewish Images in the Media was Roland Schatz and Christian Kolmer’s “The Portrayal of the War in the Middle East: Media Analysis of News Coverage by ARD and ZDF.” This article was doubly interesting to me because it dealt with coverage of the 2006 Lebanon War. Schatz and Kolmer based much more of their analysis on objective factors, such as reporting location, references to refusals of the ceasefire by Hezbollah and Israel, and time dedicated to military personal, government leaders, and victims of violence within Israel and Lebanon. The one more subjective, qualitative analysis category the authors employed that seemed particularly useful was whether Israel was portrayed as the aggressor or the victim. I incorporated many of their analytical techniques into my research, particularly in my analysis of articles about Israel.
Another book that proved useful as an introduction to Jewish representations in the media was Jews, Muslims and Mass Media: Mediating the ‘Other’ edited by Tudor Parfitt with Yulia Egorova.[23] The book’s introduction concisely summarized the overall message, declaring that “[the] image of Jews in the Western press continues to be complicated by old anti-Semitic stereotypes and frequently the coverage of Israel both in conflict and in peace is obfuscated by these images.”[24] Of particular interest in this book were “From Judeophobia to Islamophobia in the Italian media, with a special focus on the Northern League party media” by Emanuela Trevisan Semi, which argued that anti-Semitism in the publications of the Northern League has been replaced with Islamophobia, and “Reading The Guardian: Jews, Israel-Palestine and the origins of irritation” by Colin Shindler, which criticized The Guardian’s coverage of the 2006 Lebanon War for being unjustly anti-Israel. Shindler’s essay was of particular interest in that it identified and condemned what is often assumed to be the standard position of the Western left vis-à-vis Israel,[25] a position that is much more extreme in its anti-Israeli stridency than what I found in Repubblica. It should be noted that both these essays were significantly less explicit about their methodologies than the papers in Jewish Images in the Media.
The final focus of my literature review was to find thorough scholarship on media coverage of the 2006 Lebanon War. In addition to the two papers on the topic mentioned above, “The Portrayal of War in the Middle East” and “Reading The Guardian,” the most relevant source I was able to find was Jeff Tischauser’s Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim Bias in American Newspapers: How They Reported the 2006 Israeli Hezbollah and Israeli-Hamas Wars.[26] Although I found the book highly ideological, it presented a number of interesting observations about bias in the American media and had a very thorough methodology section. Perhaps the most relevant take-away for my purposes was Tischauser’s use of both qualitative textual analysis and more quantitative content analysis, a methodology I adopted for my own research.
Methodology
The first methodological choice I made when designing my thesis was which medium and which sources within that medium to analyze. Although television news is much more widely consumed in Italy than print media,[27] personal and practical factors convinced me to focus on newspapers. From a personal perspective, I have always been far more interested in print journalism than broadcast. But more importantly, analyzing newspaper articles instead of television stories offers a number of practical advantages.
While most major newspapers have thorough, searchable archives available either on their own websites or through database services, the major Italian television stations are significantly less accessible. Although their websites offer a fair amount of recent content, due to data constraints it is just not practical for them to host years old videos online. Furthermore, even those stations that do have video of broadcasts from 2006 do not offer the same level of searchability that newspapers do. Whereas newspaper archives allow you to search the entire text of an article for certain keywords, video results can only be found if the segment’s title or keywords match your search term. Similar problems exist for radio. Because I wanted to study the full range of Jewish representations in Italian media, it was important for me to capture even incidental or tangential references. In this regard, newspapers offered a significant advantage over television.
The other major advantage of utilizing newspapers instead of television news is that newspapers have greater independence and credibility. Thanks to the corporatization of major television channels, largely under current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the trustworthiness of Italian television news is highly questionable. A 2008 survey by TNS Global found that just 24 percent of Italians trusted television news while 32 percent trusted newspapers.[28] Although television news is more widely consumed, I would argue that newspapers are seen as a more authoritative source of information and thus still have a fairly large role in constructing a common Italian reality and political consciousness.
Having selected newspapers as the medium on which to focus my research, the next methodological decision was which specific papers to choose. I selected Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica because they are the two national dailies with the highest circulation. There is a clear divide between these two elite papers and other nationally-distributed newspapers, as is reflected in the fact that both Corriere and Repubblica sell nearly twice as much as their nearest competitor, La Stampa (which is outsold by the sports-only La Gazzetta dello Sport and the business paper Il Sole 24 Ore).[29] Corriere and Repubblica are also good research subjects because they each represent one of the two major political affiliations in Italy, center-right and center-left, respectively. They are also ideal because they both have archives from 2006 that are freely available and searchable, with Repubblica’s hosted on its website and Corriere’s accessible through the database Factiva. I decided to focus on the year 2006 because it would allow me sufficient distance from the current events while still remaining recent enough to be culturally accessible. The other major advantage of choosing this year was that it would allow me to see how coverage changed when Israel was involved in a high-profile conflict, specifically the Israel-Lebanon War, which lasted from July 12, 2006 to Aug. 14, 2006. All dates mentioned from this point forward should assumed to be in the year 2006 unless otherwise stated.
With my medium, specific sources, and date range decided, the next step was to choose appropriate search terms. I wanted terms that would be broad enough to return articles about all the various aspects of Jews and Judaism that might be covered by Italian newspapers, so I chose the following eight terms: Antisemit*, which will return Antisemita (Antisemite) and Antisemitismo (Antisemitism); Ebrai*, which will return Ebraico and Ebraica (male and female forms of Jewish) and Ebraismo (Judaism); Ebreo (Jew, male); Ebrea (Jew, female); Ebrei (Jews); Giudai*, which will return Giudaismo (Judaism) and Giudaico (Judaic); Israel*, which will return Israele (Israel), Israeliano (Israeli) and Israelite (Israelite); and Sionis*, which will return Sionismo (Zionism) and Sionista (Zionist).[30] The total number of articles returned for these keywords from both Il Corriere and La Repubblica is 12, 860, although there is probably significant overlap given that each term was searched for individually.
I decided to conduct both a quantitative content analysis of 2.5 percent of the corpus and an in-depth textual analysis of a smaller sample, 0.5 percent of the corpus. The quantitative content analysis was based on objective traits of the articles returned by searching for my keywords. For each article I recorded the date of publication, whether or not Jews or a term clearly relating to Jews are mentioned within the headline and if so in what context, the topic of the article (if readily discernible from the headline and first few sentences), the section and page of the newspaper the article ran in, and the location the article was reported from. I also quickly skimmed the body of the articles to code for whether the article focused on Jewish individuals; whether the article presented Jews as a religious, political, or cultural group; whether the article pertained to Jews in the Italian, Israeli, or International context; whether the article presented Judaism in an interreligious context, and if so whether Judaism was coupled with Islam or Christianity; whether anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, or Zionism were mentioned; and whether or not Jews or Judaism were a primary focus of the article. These basic questions did not take long to answer but yielded interesting data about the overall corpus of articles that contained representations of Jews or Judaism.
While I did glean interesting findings from my content analysis, it was also very important for me to conduct in-depth textual analysis. In addition to the basic observations made in the content analysis phase, the textual analysis studied the focus of the article’s first paragraph, the actors explicitly mentioned in the first paragraph, the sources quoted in the article, sympathetic and unsympathetic typifications of Jewish actors (the metric used by Udris and Eisenegger in their study[31]), whether Jews were characterized as victims or aggressors (a method employed by Schatz and Kolmer[32]), the centrality of Jews within the article, and any evocative phrases about Jews in the article. I used English translations of many of these phrases in this thesis.[33]
Because this textual analysis is such a time-consuming process, I only applied it to 0.5 percent of the overall corpus. For every keyword, I selected one article out of every 200 to analyze, using a random number generator to determine which one to pick. Since the content analysis process was less time-consuming, I was able to apply this analysis 2.5 percent of the overall corpus, using a similar random number process. Using the 2.5 percent threshold allowed me enough time to conduct meaningful rather than superficial content analysis while also being sufficiently broad as to ensure confidence in the statistical significance of my data.
Framing the Jews as Victims
The single most prevalent trend in my textual analysis was the tendency to frame Jews as victims. The victim frame was present in 25 of the 43 articles from Corriere della Sera and 19 of the 43 articles from La Repubblica included in my textual analysis sample. Although the sample size is quite small, I believe this differential reflects the political legacy of World War II in Italy, a legacy that empowers the left to be more critical of Jews and Israel thanks to their participation in the Resistance movement while compelling the right to defensively assert its solidarity with the Jewish community in contemporary contexts. Within my textual analysis corpus, this victim frame was manifested in four specific thematic variations: Jews as victims of the Holocaust, Jews as victims of anti-Semitism, Jews as victims of Muslim antipathy, and Jews as victims of bias on the part of the Italian left. A noticeable divide was evident in which variations were adopted by the left-leaning Repubblica and which were maintained by the more conservative Corriere, a divide that further reflected the political legacy of World War II. Because each of these four variations has specific theoretical roots and implications, I will examine each of them individually. There were also a number of examples of articles in which Israel is depicted as the victim. Because there are important differences between the press’s treatment of Jews and their treatment of Israel, though, those will be discussed in the section on representations of Israel.
Variation One: Jews as Victims of the Holocaust
The “Jews as victims of the Holocaust” variation is one of the most common and emotionally compelling within Repubblica. Among the randomly selected articles that I analyzed, there were numerous articles about World War II and the Holocaust that mentioned the Jews as well as stories about the contemporary legacy of and remembrances of the Holocaust. Although over sixty years have passed since the end of the war, Jews remain strongly associated with the Holocaust within the Italian media, particularly in the left-leaning segments of the media. Perhaps most interesting is how Italian newspapers tend to use the Holocaust as a tool for signaling the morality of their subjects. Identifying as or aiding the Nazis is used as shorthand for evil, for example, while assisting Jews is established as strong positive trait. This moralistic use of the “Jews as victims of the Holocaust” frame allows Italian newspapers to remain seemingly unbiased while efficiently presenting moral judgments of their subjects. It also tended to favor—and thus be more heavily utilized by—the left as represented by Repubblica because of that political tradition’s connection with the Italian resistance movement.
There were several articles in the textual analysis corpus that spoke to the suffering endured by Jews during the Holocaust and the need to remember the Shoah. Jewish suffering during the Holocaust was most explicitly illustrated in a July 11 letter to the editor of Repubblica which contained a first-hand account of the experiences of an Italian Jew in the context of a plea for state support for Italian Holocaust survivors.[34] Furthermore, there were several articles about Holocaust remembrance, including listings for shows about “The persecution of Jews in Italy”[35] and a visit by Italian high school students to Auschwitz. The most expressive article about Holocaust remembrance opened as follows:
Memory is hope, strength and liberty. Desire for redemption and the glimmer of survival. From today through Friday at Bari’s Teatro Duse the performance is memory: that of the Shoah, the genocide of the Jews, the extermination of the populations of the Israelite religion and of the Yiddish language and traditions.[36]
This article, which ran in Repubblica on Jan. 25, was interesting because it highlighted a performance that focused not only on the human toll of the Holocaust, but also on its cultural impact. Furthermore, memory of the Holocaust is explicitly connected to the loftiest of ideals—strength, liberty and redemption—as a means of reflecting the perceived importance of Holocaust remembrance. Taken together, these articles show that the theme of victimization during the Holocaust still remains extremely salient in coverage of Jews in the Italian media. Significantly, all three were found in Repubblica, indicating a deliberate attempt on that paper’s part to keep the Holocaust relevant.
Moreover, responses to the Holocaust are often used as an indicator of morality. Articles focusing on the Italian treatment of Jews and reaction to the Holocaust are very common and inevitably contain an element of moral approbation or condemnation. A Feb. 8 Repubblica article announcing a lecture about Italian priests Vincenzo Lastrina and Francesco Repetto, for example, emphasizes that Lastrina and Reptto were “actively engaged in favor of the Resistance and of the Jews under the Republic of Salò.”[37] In this case, Lastrina and Repetto’s support for the Jews is used to illustrate their good moral character and the value of holding a lecture about them, a moral message that could easily be subconsciously extended to much of the Italian left. In another Repubblica article, Pope Pius XII is defended against accusations of silence with the argument that he “feared that a public condemnation of Nazism on the part of the Church would have caused a retaliation against the Jews and many Catholics.”[38] In this case, Pius’s concern for the safety of the Jews is used as evidence of his moral fortitude. Within my textual analysis of Repubblica articles a clear trend emerged of Italian treatment of Jews during the Holocaust being used as a clear-cut marker of morality.
Corriere meanwhile demonstrates an interesting spin on this tendency to treat responses to the Holocaust as a measure of judging moral character in a March 25 article titled “Italians, good people: The shattered myth.” The article, a review of the scholarly debate over whether the idea of Italiani brava gente (“Italians are good people”)[39] is still a convincing argument to explain Italian involvement in the Holocaust, begins:
Italians, truly good people? Or, rather, responsible for summary executions, burning of villages, looting, pillaging, rapes? Italians guilty of rounding up civilians and sending them to concentrations camps, and even unleashing a pogrom against the Jewish community in Split on June 12, 1942?[40]
The article presents Italian goodness as contingent upon the treatment of Jews, adding later, “The most important point of the ‘innocentist thesis’ concerns the story of 5,000 Yugoslav Jews.” These assertions are predicated on the paradigm that society is judged by how it treats its weakest members—and the implication that the Jews are the weakest members, the ultimate victims. By making response to the Holocaust the primary factor for judging morality, the article strongly reinforces the victim frame, reminding readers of the suffering of Jews while establishing them as victims par excellence. However, it is particularly interesting that such an article appeared in Corriere rather than Repubblica, which otherwise dominates the category of articles about Jews as the victims of the Holocaust. This oddity can best be understood in terms of political legacies: because this article stands as a challenge to the traditional conception of the morality of the Italian resistance movement in World War II, it was a politically advantageous article to run in Corriere in that it undermines many of the claims implicit in Repubblica’s coverage.
The ‘Jews as victims of the Holocaust’ variation on the victim frame is extremely significant in that it underlies so much of what is written about Jews in the Italian media. From my textual analysis, it is readily apparent that the Holocaust remains one of the most salient issues when Jews are mentioned in the Italian media, particularly the left-leaning elements of the press. Furthermore, Italian newspapers—especially Repubblica—often use responses to Jewish victimization during the Holocaust to signify moral character, further solidifying the victim frame by presenting the Jews as the ultimate pitiable people. Because this dimension of the Jewish experience is one of unambiguous victimization and is also accompanied by such a strong moralistic aspect, it serves as an important cornerstone of the broader victim frame. This specific variation on the victim frame is also a useful starting point in that it gives us good insight into how Jewish victimization is employed in politically advantageous terms.
Variation Two: Jews as Victims of Anti-Semitism
Another important theme within the victim frame is that of Jews as victims of anti-Semitism. A significant number of articles advancing the victim frame contain discussion of anti-Semitism, either historical or contemporary. In all of the examples I read, anti-Semitism presented as backward and wrong, implying that the reader should feel solidarity with the Jews rather than the anti-Semites.
Most of the articles in my corpus addressing anti-Semitism in a historical context other than the Holocaust were discussions of anti-Semitism on the part of the Church, a theme surprisingly common in the more religiously oriented Corriere. One April 15 Corriere article discussed “the connection between Catholic anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism.”[41] Another Corriere article from Dec. 29 skewers the argument by Father Bonsirven that anti-Semitism is based on the fact that Judaism has “failed” in its original vocation.[42] The article in my corpus that most directly addresses the issue of Catholic anti-Semitism, though, is the Jan. 18, 2006 article in Corriere titled “Vatican and Jewish state: Unedited documents in a essay by Uri Bialer.” In discussing diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel, the article argues that Nostra Aetate “marks a decisive break with the ambiguities of Catholic anti-Semitism (and/or anti-Judaism)” and quotes Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first minister of foreign affairs, saying that the Vatican did not want an Jewish state because Catholic dogma defined the Jews as a wandering people.[43]
This willingness within Corriere to highlight historical Catholic anti-Semitism is surprising but can be understood as part of a larger movement to highlight the improvements in Jewish-Catholic relations. While these articles draw attention to the prejudice faced by Jews in the past, they also present Catholic anti-Semitism as a relic of the past. In fact, the one notable article about contemporary anti-Semitism involving Catholics covers the Vatican’s decision to take over an ultra-right-wing Catholic radio station in Poland after “violent anti-Semitic tirades” were made on air, including accusations that the Jews “had turned the Holocaust into a ‘lucrative business.’”[44] Thus Catholic anti-Semitism is on the whole presented as a historical mistake that the Church has moved past. This tendency within the more religiously devout Corriere to focus on the improvements in modern relations between Jews and Catholics will be further discussed in my analysis of interreligious articles.
While historical anti-Semitism is presented as an objective fact, its contemporary manifestations are more problematized. Apart from articles about Muslim anti-Semitism (which will be discussed in the following section), condemnations of contemporary anti-Semitism are often articulated by Jewish community leaders rather than assumed to be self-evident. An Aug. 11 Repubblica article about a pro-Lebanon rally in which some protesters wore swastikas quotes Yasha Reibman, spokesman of the Jewish community of Milan, saying “it is very sad to see here with us such extreme positions.”[45] Likewise, in an article about an anti-Israel cartoon in an Italian far-left newspaper, Ehud Gol, the Israeli ambassador to Italy, is quoted in Corriere decrying the cartoon as “shameful and anti-Semitic.”[46] These articles show that journalists covering contemporary rather than historical incidents are much more likely to seek comment from Jewish community leaders as a means of defining and condemning alleged anti-Semitism. They also implicitly shift the focus more directly to the impact of anti-Semitism on Jews themselves rather than concentrating exclusively on the perpetrators of anti-Semitism.
This tendency to cite Jewish leaders as authorities on modern anti-Semitism is also evident in a July 3, 2006 Corriere della Sera article about the most recent meeting of the Union of Jewish Communities of Italy, which highlights as a major agenda item discussion of “conservation and preservation of Jewish cultural and artistic heritage in the country [and] the ‘strategies and projects against resurgent anti-Semitism.’” The article is comfortable paraphrasing the Union’s language about Jewish culture, but is clearly more tentative when the issue of modern anti-Semitism arises. The practice of quoting Jewish community leaders in discussions of modern anti-Semitism buttresses the image of journalists as impartial recorders of modern life. But because Jews are so often the only ones explicitly condemning incidents as anti-Semitic (particularly those occurring in Italy), it also creates the impression that contemporary European anti-Semitism is a concern only for Jews themselves. This reflects a wider hesitancy on the part of both Corriere and Repubblica to take an aggressive stance on the issue of contemporary anti-Semitism unless, as we will soon see, there are political advantages to doing so.
Variation Three: Jews as Victims of Muslim Antipathy
A separate category of articles in which Jews are depicted as the victims of modern anti-Semitism is that in which the perpetrators of anti-Semitism are Muslim. I decided to treat this kind of article as a separate sub-category within the victim frame because the Italian press presents the relationship between Jews and Muslims as markedly different than that between Jews and Europeans (who are implicitly expected to be Christian). Furthermore, these articles are often accompanied by discussions of very specific sociopolitical issues, such as terrorism and Islamophobia. When discussing Muslim animosity toward Jews, there is even more overlap between comments about Israel and comments about Jews. For the purposes of this section, though, I am focusing on statements primarily directed toward Jews as a people rather than Israel as a state. Articles about Muslim anti-Semitism can generally be divided into two major groups: articles about Muslim “terrorists” or “extremists” making anti-Semitic threats and articles about other non-radical Muslims professing or accepting anti-Semitic attitudes. The interesting fact that Corriere is more likely to display the former while Repubblica more consistently uses the latter reveals important trends in how each of these papers conceptualize Jewish victimization.
Many of the Corriere articles about Jews that depicted Jews as victims of Muslim “terrorists” or “extremists” highlight anti-Semitic threats to reinforce and justify the “terrorist” and “extremist” labels. In a July 16 article in Corriere, for example, Hezbollah is described as “nourishing the most vicious stereotypes of anti-Semitic hatred.”[47] In this context, stoking the flames of anti-Semitism is presented as evidence of Hezbollah’s radicalism and positions Jews as the undeserving victims of their illogical wrath. Also significant is the Jan. 20 Corriere article about the latest videotape released by Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The one quote that was chosen to be included in the article’s lead sentence was bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of an “International Islamic front for the sacred war against the Jews and the Crusaders.”[48] Instead of beginning the article with a quote from the most recent video, the author decided to ignore the principle of timeliness and instead use a much older quote targeting Jews specifically. Because this quote is used so early in the article, its function is clearly to establish bin Laden’s negative moral character and justify subsequent references to him as a “terrorist.” Due to journalistic conventions about bias, making unsubstantiated claims that individuals or groups are terrorists or extremists is problematic. Including and highlighting the importance of anti-Semitic threats made by these actors allows the authors to safely classify them as terrorists or extremists without sacrificing credibility or the appearance of objectivity.
One interesting article that bridges the gap between articles about anti-Semitism on the part of the Muslim “terrorists” or “extremists” and the broader Muslim populace is the Jan. 8 Repubblica article about Israel’s prospects after Ariel Sharon’s cerebral hemorrhage. In cataloguing the dangers that confront contemporary Israel, the author writes, “A few kilometers from Jerusalem, in schools organized by Hamas, children learn that the conflict in Palestine can only be solved when there is no longer the state of the Jews.”[49] The article puts most of the blame for this anti-Semitic viewpoint on Hamas for spreading it among the Palestinian population, but also presents Palestinian children as receptive—or at least not resistant—to the idea. In this way it synthesizes the two major variations on the “Jews as victims of Muslim antipathy” theme by arguing that while anti-Semitism is incited by extremist groups—who can be defined as extreme in large part due to their positions on Jews—it is widely adopted by the Muslim populace.
The above article can arguably be seen as part of a larger class of articles, most commonly found in Repubblica, that depict widespread anti-Jewish sentiment among Muslims. In almost all of the cases that I found, this sentiment is represented as stemming from resentment about Israel but also contains a religious dimension. A March 14 article in Repubblica, for example, asserts that, “what for the Jews is a ‘return’ to Jerusalem, for the Arabs is a profanation.”[50] This article ascribes anti-Jewish sentiment very broadly, alleging that this perspective is widespread to the point of being universal, making the Jews the victims of the prejudice of millions. Using the religiously tinged term “profanation” also subtly positions Arab sentiment as connected to religious bigotry rather than political rationality. The complicating implications of religious-based animosity are evident in another Repubblica article from Feb. 11, the reporter questions Egyptian leaders about the state television’s decision to a satirical series based on the Protocols of Zion. In responses to questions about whether or not the programming was important, one Egyptian religious leader is quoted saying, “I believe that it didn’t condemn the Jewish religion, but rather certain attitudes of the founders of Zionism.”[51] This comment shows that while there is generally little sympathy for anti-Jewish sentiment on overtly religious grounds, the same statements are more acceptable of they are explained as directed only at Israel. In a similar vein, when the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy came under fire for asserting that “Nazi massacres = Israeli massacres,” their defense was that “None of the affirmations were made in regards to religion. The relationship between the Muslim and Jewish community in Italy is based on reciprocal respect.”[52] The overarching dynamic within articles that frame Jews as the victims of bias from the moderate Muslim masses a tendency to parse whether the comments apply to Judaism as a religion or Israel as a state, a level of nuance entirely absent from Corriere’s focus on the anti-Semitic statements of terrorist leaders.
On the whole, articles that position Jews as the victims of Muslim bias can be divided into two categories. The first type, primarily found in Corriere, cites the usage of anti-Semitic threats to justify the labels of “terrorists” and “extremists.” In the second type, mostly used by Repubblica, it is more moderate Muslims displaying bias. Within this second category there is strong tendency to connect anti-Jewish sentiment among the Muslim general population to Israeli policies but there is also a high degree of sensitivity to the potential religious foundations of this sentiment. The divide in which newspapers most frequently use these different types of articles reveals important distinctions in how the two papers and the political groups they represent understand the relationship between Jews and Muslims and, more broadly, how they conceptualize patterns of Jewish victimization. Corriere is more likely to frame anti-Jewish sentiment among Muslims as existing independent of the actions of Israel and emanating from prominent extremists. In Corriere, little attention is paid to the sentiments of the wider Muslim community and there is no discussion of the theological implications of such anti-Semitism—trends that stand in stark contrast with Repubblica’s editorial tendencies. While Corriere continues to insist on the contemporary victimization of Jews—in this case at the hands of Muslim terrorists—in order to gain moral authority by defending them, Repubblica is likely to see Jewish vicitmization in more historical terms that flatter their political predecessors while framing the current tensions between Jews and Muslims as both religiously and politically motivated, a frame that allows them to disengage from conflicts involving Israel. Regardless of the political differences underlying these two sub-categories, though, both kinds of articles reinforce the victim frame by asserting the enemies of Jews are either extremely radicalized or extremely numerous.
Variation Four: Jews as Victims of Liberal Prejudice
The final thematic variation within the victim frame presents Jews as victims of bias from the Italian left. While this frame is extremely popular in the right-leaning Corriere, it is almost entirely absent from the leftist Repubblica. Even within my small sample size, the examples of Corriere criticizing the attitudes of the Italian left toward Jews as bigoted were plentiful. For example, A Feb. 20 article in Corriere about the burning of Israeli flags slams “the widespread mood at the [left-wing] protests in which the heroes are invariably the terrorists of Hamas and the bad guys are wearing the Star of David symbol” and laments, “no one teaches them that anti-Zionist hatred carries too high a price.”[53] Articles like this are political advantageous for Corriere because they allow the paper to criticize its political opponents as prejudiced while positioning itself as the moral defender of the victimized Jews. In the process, they are further solidifying the victim frame by presenting yet another group—the Italian left—as irrationally antagonistic toward the Jewish people.
Many Corriere articles argue that this irrational anti-Jewish prejudice is manifested as a systemic unwillingness to recognize aggression against Israel. An excellent example of this trend can be found in a March 5 Corriere article that attacks both Gad Lerner, a left-leaning Italian journalist who is Jewish, and Massimo D’Alema, then Minister of Foreign Affairs under Romano Prodi’s left-leaning government. The article slams Lerner for “saying that Hamas is not Nazism while at the same time Hamas reiterated (without even resorting to “taqiyya”[54]) its intention to eliminate Israel from the map.”[55] Lerner, and by extension the Italian left in general, is presented as being too busy defending Hamas from criticism to actually pay attention to their attacks on Israel. The gratuitous use of the Arabic term “taqiyya” attempts to further highlights the radicalism and difference of Hamas, thus further associating the left with these thoroughly “other” Muslim terrorists. The article also takes D’Alema to task in a similar manner:
On the question of the Middle East, D’Alema had words of compassion only for the Palestinians and Hamas and not a word, a single word, of understanding for the victims of suicide terrorism, not a word of condemnation of the persistent aggression behind the Kassam missiles from the same Gaza that Israel withdrew from, not a word of condemnation for the threats of destruction of president Ahmadinejad.[56]
Just as with Lerner, the article juxtaposes D’Alema’s defense of Hamas with the organization’s antagonistic stance on Israel to create the impression that the left is blind to the threats against Israel. The author’s choice to highlight suicide bombings, Kassam missiles and Ahmadinejad’s threats while also squeezing in a mention of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza creates the impression that Israel is besieged no matter how conciliatory its policies are, and that the Italian left willfully ignores this dilemma. This article is just one of many that I found in my small textual analysis sample of Corriere articles that presented the left as unwilling to recognize attacks on Israel. Another Corriere article summarizes this trend nicely when it writes that, in Italy, “support for the cause of a Palestinian state is accompanied by an impressive ideological automatism of systematic cancellation of the reasons of the State of Israel.”[57] This is one of the most effective tactics that the Corriere uses to frame the Italian left’s Middle Eastern policies not as pro-Palestinian but rather as anti-Israeli—and by extension anti-Jewish.
Another way Corriere illustrates the idea of Israel’s systematic victimization by the Italian left is through the use of emotionally charged flag imagery. One Nov. 19 article asserts, “10, 100, 1,000 Palestinian flags in Milan—sacrosanct. But Israeli ones? … The Magen David does not have the right to be shown.”[58] A Feb. 20 Corriere article takes this targeted flag imagery one step further, lamenting that “in Italy, he who sets fire to Israel flags does not need to be paid—the hatred of Israel springs spontaneously, without the aid of substantial material incentives.”[59] By focusing on attacks on the Israeli flag—a very well-recognized symbol that makes concrete Israel’s Jewish identity through its prominent use of the Star of David—Corriere makes the argument that the Italian left’s marginalization of Israeli concerns constitutes victimization of Jews in symbolic and emotionally powerful terms. This type of imagery contributes to the perception that, as a Nov. 14 Repubblica article about the relationship between the Italian left and Israel put it, “there exists in Italy a left that seems rather more anti-Israeli than filo-Palestinian.” Corriere’s coverage of the Italian left’s relationship with Israel certainly plays into this perception while also adding a new, highly political dimension to the extremely common victim frame.
The Issue of Israel
As we have seen, the victim frame is often used in articles from the right about the left’s relationship with Israel and, by extension, the Jewish people as a whole. But that is just one aspect of how Israel is represented in the Italian press. One of the chief differences between Corriere and Repubblica is the centrality of Israel to coverage of Jews. In my content analysis corpus, 73 percent of articles from Corriere included some mention of Israel, while only 60 percent of articles from Repubblica did. When I excluded articles found using the keyword Israel*, the difference became even more pronounced—55 percent of these articles from Corriere had an Israeli dimension while only 28 percent of those in Repubblica did. I believe this gap is yet another reflection of the enduring political legacy of Italy’s participation in World War II. Thanks to the Italian right’s continuing discomfort about their involvement with crimes of Nazi Germany, Corriere is less likely to focus on the experiences of Jews in Italy and more likely to concentrate on their close relationship with Israel as a means of guarding against accusations of lingering anti-Semitism.
Also interesting, though, is that Corriere was slightly more likely than Repubblica to show Israel as involved in conflict. Of articles in which Israel was mentioned, 73 percent in Corriere presented Israel as involved in conflict while only 66 of Republica articles did so. This gap is partially due to the fact that Repubblica focuses more on cultural aspects of Israeli society, often writing about Israeli musicians or artists. But it is also emblematic of ideological differences between the two papers. As mentioned above, one of the major themes in Corriere’s coverage of Jews is the left’s unwillingness to recognize acts of aggression against Israel. Highlighting these conflicts thus seems to serve as a mark of distinction for the Italian right and a gesture of solidarity with Israel, particularly since Corriere is much more likely to depict Israel as the victim of aggression than Repubblica is.
Broadly speaking, articles about Israel engaged in conflict can be divided into two groups—those that present Israel as the aggressor and those that present Israel as the victim. It would be easy to guess that Repubblica’s coverage accounts for most of the former while Corriere provides the latter. These expected trends are generally borne out by my research, although the presence of a high-profile Israeli conflict does serve to complicate matters. When Israel is involved in high-profile conflict, such as the 2006 Lebanon War, it seems that the media is much more conscious of issues of biased reporting. Although both Corriere and Repubblica went to lengths to present their coverage of the Lebanon War as balanced, some elements of ideological preference seeped through. These ideological responses to Israel are, however, much more thoroughly articulated in articles that are not about the Lebanon War and are generally made in more stringent terms in Corriere than in Repubblica. Regardless of the level of subtlety used, though, by looking at how Israel is presented as aggressor or victim we can better understand how Israel is used as a tool of political debate in the Italian media.
Deliberate Neutrality in Coverage of the Israel-Lebanon War
In news reports from both Repubblica and Corriere, discussion of the damage caused during the Israel-Lebanon War is often very deliberate and measured. For instance, a July 19 Repubblica article opens with “The Israeli attacks on Lebanon and the rain of Hezbollah rockets on the cities of the Jewish State continue.”[60] In reporting on such a highly charged conflict, Repubblica was careful not to explicitly privilege the aggression of one side over the other. A similar tendency can be found in articles from Corriere. The lede from a July 25 Corriere article reads, “The increasingly bitter conflict in the Middle East: bombs and rockets on Lebanon (dozens of civilian victims), Hezbollah missiles on Israel closer to Tel Aviv.”[61] The fact that both papers chose to begin stories about the war with this same parallel construction is a manifestation of the overriding journalistic desire to appear unbiased when covering current events, particularly such high-profile ones.[62]
This striving for parity extends not only to reports of military actions but also to the more practical implications of those attacks. An Aug. 15 Corriere article reads, “In Israel, rows of cars crammed with baggage have retaken the road North. The UN calculates that 500,000 have left home. At least 700 thousand on the other side. Beirut counts the damages at 2.5 million dollars.”[63] The tit-for-tat approach to recounting damages suffered can be interpreted as an attempt by Italian journalists to present their reporting on the conflict as ideologically neutral.
Corriere’s Bold Assertions of Israeli Victimization
Of course, this ideological neutrality only extends so far, particularly in Corriere. In the articles I examined in my textual analysis, the right-leaning paper was often more than willing to editorialize in support of Israel. One of the most common themes in Corriere’s defenses of Israel was a consistent attempt to frame Israel as the victim rather than the aggressor. Among the most prominent techniques used to accomplish this were focusing on attacks on Israel and depicting Israel’s enemies in the Middle East as unreasonable and formidable. These tactics were employed to support the overarching principle that Israel’s need to defend itself justified its military decisions.
Even within my small textual analysis sample, Corriere articles that framed Israel as under attack were common. These articles were most effective when they highlighted the human toll that Israel has suffered in the recent past, and thus many came in the form of coverage of past suicide bombing attacks. A Jan. 7 Corriere article about Ariel Sharon’s cerebral hemorrhage noted that “The suicide bombings of buses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv began after the historic signing of the peace agreement between Rabin and Arafat at the White House on Sept. 13, 1993, because this Palestinian terrorism does not recognize Israel’s right to exist.”[64] Corriere’s tendency to highlight past suicide bombing attacks is also present in a Jan. 27 article that focused on “the first attack” on Israel by Hamas, opening dramatically with, “October 19, 1994, Dizengoff Street, Tel Aviv. It is a date that enters in the history of Israel and of Hamas. The group, which in 2003 rejected the Oslo accords, sent its first suicide bombers. It caused 22 deaths on ‘bus n. 5.’”[65] A similar focus on past suicide bombing attacks is absent from the Repubblica articles I analyzed. The prevalence past suicide bombings in Corriere thus can be seen as providing the foundation for that paper’s presentation of Israel as a nation under siege.
Corriere’s consistent framing of Israel as a country under attack carries over to coverage of contemporary events with in-depth accounts about the suffering of Israelis. One such article is a July 14 piece that focuses on Dani Reshef, an Israeli living in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya. The author writes, “Dani has always known that he is still on the front lines. Before a commando of Lebanese extremists killed three soldiers and kidnapped two, before the Katyusha began to fall among the houses in a continuous bombardment.”[66] The article further hammers home the idea of Israel being under attack with lines like “the bombs of Hezbollah empty the coastal city [of Nahariya]” and “Yesterday, 80 Katyusha and mortar shells have fallen on the North, killing two women.”[67] These sorts of statements not only engender sympathy for Israel but also support the idea that Israel is facing serious security threats, thus allowing Corriere to tacitly classify Israeli military action not as aggression but rather as justified self-defense.
Corriere further supports its tacit argument that Israeli military action is justified by presenting Israel’s enemies as both formidable and unreasonable. The article about Dani Reshef quotes him saying that “Hezbollah has become systematic, methodical and professional.”[68] By quoting Reshef talking up the efficacy of Hezbollah, Corriere aims to frame Hezbollah as a serious threat to Israel’s security, reinforcing the idea of Israel being preyed upon and implicitly contradicting the claims, then common throughout the West,[69] that Israel’s military response to Hezbollah attacks was disproportionate. Another example of how Corriere emphasizes the strength of Hezbollah as a means of framing Israel as the legitimately threatened victim comes from an Aug. 15 article that analyzes the conflict as follows:
Today the myth of the victory of 1967 has been exhausted. Israel has smashed Lebanon to pieces, but her soldiers have been stopped by Hezbollah. They thought perhaps it was like against the PLO in 1982, or against the Shiite Amal shortly after. Instead they found themselves having to fight people who are ready to die, who even see the “martyrdom” in battle as the ascent to heaven.[70]
Like Reshef’s quote, this passage frames Hezbollah as a serious opponent for Israel by emphasizing their strength. But while Reshef focused on Hezbollah’s efficacy, this article instead concentrates on how their ideology differentiates them from the opponents Israel triumphed over in the past. Although the characteristics they emphasize are different, both articles serve the same purpose: to stress the strength of Hezbollah, thus justifying Israel’s military responses as legitimate defense rather than aggression.
Another key tactic frequently used in Corriere to define Israel’s role as that of the victim acting out of self-defense is underscoring how unreasonable Israel’s enemies are. Corriere writers often reference Hezbollah’s unwillingness to recognize Israel as a state as proof that Israel cannot deal with the group through traditional diplomatic measures. A July 16 article argues that Israelis feel “besieged by those who do not want to reach any compromise with Israel, denying it the right to existence and nurturing the most vicious stereotypes of anti-Semitic hatred.”[71] By coupling Hezbollah’s refusal to acknowledge Israel’s existence with its fostering of anti-Semitism, this article frames the group as irrationally prejudiced against Israel and its Jewish citizens. When combined with characterizations about the formidable strength of Hezbollah, this framing of the group as unreasonable and bigoted creates the impression that Israel is not only facing legitimate security threats, but is also facing an opponent who cannot be negotiated with effectively in a non-violent manner.
The upshot of this consistent framing of Israel as a country under attack and confronting opponents who are both formidable and unreasonable is staunch support from Corriere of Israeli military action as rational self-defense. This is evident in Corriere’s selection of quotes from political leaders who agree with the paper’s position on Israel. One good example of this is a July 17 interview with Giuliano Amato, then-Minister of the Interior, in which Amato contends that “Here what is in play is the survival of a nation. The plan of Hamas and Hezbollah is clear: to trigger the reaction in Tel Aviv and isolate the moderate voices in Palestine and Lebanon.”[72] This sentiment that Israeli military action is justified as self-defense carries over to Corriere’s editorial coverage of the Lebanon War. One interesting example of this is an Aug. 7 op-ed encouraging Israel to agree to a peace treaty. Although the author’s objective is actually to end Israeli military action, he begins by aligning himself with Corriere’s general editorial stance on the conflict by writing:
The aggression that the organization of Hezbollah has conducted against Israel within her territory—the killing and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and the firing of rockets into areas inhabited by civilians—forced Israel to undertake a vast military action in order to protect itself from the organization as well as from the Lebanese government, which provides protection and support for this bloodthirsty group that embraces the cause of the destruction of Israel.[73]
This passage is a clear illustration of how the trends discussed earlier—framing Israel as under attack and Israel’s enemies as strong and irrational—are combined in Corriere editorial writing to justify Israeli military action. A tweak of this formula can be found in an Aug. 27 analysis of military and diplomatic difficulties confronting Israel. In the article, the author writes, “It is possible that, thanks to the ‘disproportionate response’ (as the Europeans say) and the majnun-like[74] comportment (as many Arabs say), Israel may have succeeding in reestablishing its power of deterrence regarding Hezbollah and Lebanon.”[75] This article puts the conventional Corriere defense of Israel into more pure international relations terminology, arguing that what others judge as unjustified aggression is actual rational deterrence by virtue of Israel’s unique geopolitical position. These examples make clear that the end game of Corriere’s persistent presentation of Israel as the victim is the moral justification of Israeli military action. This stance is in line not only with general trends in the West of conservatives supporting Israel but also works in concert with Corriere’s politically advantageous use of the victim frame by further solidifying the idea that Corriere and its political allies are acting as the contemporary defenders of the victimized Jewish people.
Repubblica’s Subtle Positioning of Israel as Aggressor
As is to be expected given the general political trends in the West, left-leaning Repubblica is far more likely than center-right Corriere to show Israel as the aggressor. It is noteworthy, though, that Repubblica’s stance on Israel is overall very moderate, particularly when compared with the vitriol noted in other liberal European publications like the Guardian[76] and frequently attributed to the Italian left by Corriere. While Repubblica does subtly present Israel as the aggressor, its stance on the issue is generally reflective of the Prodi government’s “equidistance” policy and does little to substantively undermine the ‘Jews as victims’ frame it helped construct through its frequent references to Jewish experiences during World War II.
One of the most common ways in which Repubblica establishes Israel’s aggression is by quoting prominent liberal politicians criticizing the morality of Israeli military policies. A good example of this is a July 3 interview of Rifondazione Communista leader Franco Giordano that ran in Repubblica. In the interview, Giordano argues that “If every form of terrorism is unacceptable, than so is the Israel government’s invasion of the Palestinian territories with the arrest of Palestinian ministers and parliamentarians.”[77] This quote frames Israeli actions not just as aggressive but in fact as morally equivalent with terrorism. Similarly, A July 19 article about the war quotes then Minister of Foreign Affairs Massimo D’Alema as saying that “Israel’s blitz is ‘legitimate but disproportional.’”[78] D’Alema’s quote is much more moderate than Giordano’s, but it carries the same undertone of moral condemnation, and is all the more influential given D’Alema’s high-power position within the government at the time. Repubblica’s choice to showcase these quotes stands in contrast with Corriere’s coverage of the left’s reaction to Israel, which eschews direct quotations condemning Israel while instead citing such sentiments as evidence of the left’s refusal to recognize Israel’s security needs.
The use of quotes from high-profile left-wing politicians condemning Israel from a moral standpoint is complimented by subtle linguistic choices that solidify the idea of Israel as the aggressor. An Aug. 11 Repubblica article, for example, talks about peace protestors “having asked for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon.”[79] This language presents Israel as the party acting with agency—and the party preventing a peaceful resolution to the fighting—thus assigning to Israel responsibility for the conflict. Another example of Repubblica ascribing responsibility to Israel for the continuation of hostilities is the July 19 article that quotes D’Alema. This article also states, “Premier Ehud Olmert announced yesterday to UN mediators that the military operation in Lebanon against Hezbollah would not stop.”[80] Particularly when taken together with D’Alema’s quote about Israel’s blitz being “legitimate but disproportional,” it is clear that in this article Repubblica is framing the conflict as stemming from Israeli military decisions and thus subtly positioning Israel as the aggressor.
This tendency on the part of Repubblica to frame Israel as the aggressor is reinforced by its focus on the damage and suffering caused by Israeli actions. This comes through most clearly in articles about the Israel-Palestine conflict rather than the Lebanon War. On Sept. 25 Repubblica quoted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying “The Palestinian people have a right to live. Gaza has been bombarded. The cities have been destroyed. Why? Because some politicians in the United States insist on supporting the Zionists, at the cost of destroying the Palestinians.”[81] Although this bombastic quote comes from a highly questionable source, the choice to devote space to a fairly lengthy comment about the suffering of the Palestinian people is nonetheless significant. Another example of Repubblica’s fondness for focusing on the plight of the Palestinian people comes from a May 10 article about a collection of stories about Palestine. The article describes the book as a denunciation of “the tragedy of Palestine occupied and humiliated.”[82] This kind of highly charged language could not be used directly by Repubblica reporters in news coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but when the topic is raised in a cultural context the editorial standards are clearly more lax. This forthright quote offers us a clearer view of the paper’s often veiled but nonetheless prevalent perception that Israel often acts as the aggressor in the conflicts that it is involved in.
The Peace Problem: Equidistance v. Two-State Solution
Beyond the somewhat predictable divide between conservative and liberal conceptions of Israel as the victim or aggressor, respectively, the other major discrepancy between coverage of Israel in Corriere and Repubblica comes into play in articles about the Middle East peace process. Within the articles in my sample I found a marked difference in how the two papers presented Israeli participation in the peace process as well as differing understandings of the appropriate role for Italy in such a process.
While Corriere focused on the actions of Iraeli politicians, Repubblica instead framed the Israeli populace as the main actor attempting to move the peace process forward. Within my small textual analysis sample I found multiple Corriere articles that highlighted attempts by Israeli politicians to create peace. A July 16 article focused on Ariel Sharon’s 2005 decision to withdraw Israeli colonies from Gaza[83] while a May 16 article devoted substantial space to Ehud Olmert’s plan for unilateral disengagement.[84] In contrast, Repubblica focused instead on the desires of the Israeli people for peace, often framing these desires as somehow in conflict with the actions of their political representatives. Although Repubblica does frequently credit Sharon with facilitating this new consensus, it nonetheless presents the Israeli government as somehow incapable of realizing the desire for peace. Perhaps the strongest example of this is a Jan. 7 article that asserts that “today the consensus for in peace process is more widespread” but that “Israel is faced with a new big test. Its internal democratic structures must accompany the agreement on peace created unexpectedly by Sharon.”[85]
This differing understanding of how invested the Israeli government is in creating peace in the Middle East can be better understood when analyzed in light of the contemporary political situation. The Israeli government of the time had much more in common politically with the conservative segment of Italian politics associated with Corriere than with the Italian left represented by Repubblica. This dynamic of political solidarity helps explain the two papers’ divergent framing of Israel as either the victim or the aggressor. Framing the Israeli government as taking proactive steps to achieve peace, as Corriere frequently does, reinforces the idea of Israel as the victim. Likewise, framing the Israeli government as poorly equipped to participate in the peace process, as is found in Repubblica, fits in with the idea of Israel as favoring military aggression over diplomatic negotiation.
This differing presentation of the Israeli government’s involvement in the peace process also correlates with the two papers’ differing understandings of the appropriate level of Italian intervention in the Middle East. Corriere frequently mentions the peace process and the “two state solution,” creating the impression that peace in the Middle East is readily obtainable. One good example of this trend is a March 3 article that states, “It is clear to everyone that the large majority of Italians and politicians are committed to a policy that favors the security of the state of Israel pursuing a policy of peace.”[86] Under Corriere’s presentation of the situation in Israel, Italians are right to actively support Israel because Israel is both committing military actions based only on legitimate security needs and genuinely engaging in the peace process. Clearly, this assertion of the propriety of Italian support for Israel is implicitly based on the two other major trends we have noted in Corriere’s coverage, the tendency to present Israel the victim and the framing of the Israeli government as deeply invested in the peace process.
In contrast, Repubblica is much more likely to uphold the Prodi government’s official policy of “equidistance.” This policy can best be explained by a quote from then Minister of Foreign Affairs Massimo D’Alema in a July 18 interview with Repubblica. When asked about the Italian government’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, D’Alema explained “Ours is a position widely shared by the Italian people, which feels equally close to the tragedy of the Palestinian people as to that of the Israeli people.”[87] Support for this policy is manifested in the choices Repubblica makes about which politicians to quote, such as their decision to include in an Aug. 20 article the declaration that noted Christian Democrat Giulio Andreotti “defined as more than just the equidistance between Israel and Palestine.”[88] Repubblica’s tendency to hew to the official Prodi government policy of equidistance indicates not only doubts about the potential success of Italian intervention in the Middle East peace process but also demonstrates the paper’s broader tendency to cover Israeli issues with a studied neutrality.
Case Study: Israel and Iran
One of the clearest illustrations of the difference between Corriere’s interventionist coverage of Israel and Repubblica’s more deliberately objective approach is the two paper’s coverage of the tensions between Iran and Israel. In 2006, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a number of bombastic statements about Israel and Jews while also making aggressive moves toward securing nuclear weapons. In both papers, Iran and Ahmadinejad frequently came up in articles that also mentioned Israel. Within these articles, Repubblica was more likely to offer Ahmedinejad’s latest comments about Israel up without comment while Corriere frequently used them as a jumping off point for an editorial defense of Israel.
There are multiple examples of Repubblica devoting space to Ahmadinejad’s latest comments on Israel in my textual analysis sample. A Sept. 25 interview published in Repubblica, for example, quotes him saying in reference to Israel, “We think about the situation in the Middle East: 60 years of war, 60 years of deportations, 60 years of conflicts and not a day of peace. We think about the war in Lebanon, about the war in Gaza: we must confront and resolve the problem at its roots.”[89] Similarly, a July 9 Repubblica article reports, “The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad returns to attacking Israel’s right to exist. The presence of the Jewish State is ‘the largest threat’ to the Middle East.’”[90] Repubblica’s straightforward reporting of Ahmadinejad’s statements stands in sharp contrast with Corriere’s deeply editorial presentation of the Iranian president’s remarks. One of the strongest examples of this comes in a Dec. 12 Corriere article that declares, “It is the combination of the nuclear weapon and the reiterated desire to annihilate Israel that makes this Islamo-fascist regime the primary threat to world security.”[91] In this article, Corriere not only condemns Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel statements but actually frames them as constituting the primary threat to global stability.
In sum, these articles about Israel and Iran serve as a microcosm for how the two papers handle coverage of Israel more generally. Repubblica sticks to reserved reporting, not defending Israel but also not dismantling the victim frame established in their continuing coverage of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the fact that Corriere, uses Iranian actions to aggressively justify potential Israeli military action is indicative of both that paper’s tendency to present Jewish victimization as a contemporary phenomenon and their staunch, moralistic defense of Israel.
Covering Judaism in an (Inter)religious Context
Having discussed at length how Repubblica and Corriere perpetuate the cultural image of Jews as victims and how they cover the most highly politicized aspect of modern Judaism, Israel, questions remain about how they represent Judaism as a religion. The fact of the matter is that this aspect of Judaism receives comparatively little coverage in both Repubblica and Corriere, The most obvious explanation for this paucity of coverage is that articles about Jewish religiosity simple do not serve either paper’s political purposes. While articles about the religious dimensions of Judaism were scarce, articles that focused on Judaism in relation to other religious—most frequently Islam or Catholicism—were fairly common. Study of these articles reveals more interesting trends in the politicization of Jewish experiences.
Invisible Jewish Religiosity
Both Repubblica and Corriere were far more likely to focus on the cultural and political aspects of Judaism than they were to report on Judaism as a religion. Within my content analysis corpus, less than 20 percent of articles in each paper focused on the religious dimension of Judaism. In contrast, over 40 percent of articles in both papers focused on cultural issues relating to Judaism and over 50 percent in both papers focused on Judaism in a political context. Furthermore, the search term with the most direct religious connotations, giudai*, was the least frequently used keyword in both newspapers. Within my textual analysis, articles that focused on the religious dimension of Judaism alone were very rare. When Judaism was presented primarily as a religious tradition rather than as a cultural group or a political actor in the form of Israel, it was usually listed in conjunction with other faiths to illustrate either religious pluralism or interreligious contact. This focus on cultural and political dimensions of Judaism rather than its religious nature is indicative of general journalistic priorities that put a premium on conflict, particularly in the political realm,[92] but also reflect the limited political utility of focusing on Jewish religiosity.
Although neither paper had particularly robust coverage of Judaism as a religious tradition, Repubblica was more likely than Corriere to discuss the Jewish religion in a substantive way. This was most often accomplished by focusing on the intersection of Jewish religion and culture. Within my textual analysis corpus, I found Repubblica articles about synagogues,[93] kosher food,[94] and “the Israelite religion and Yiddish traditions.”[95] Often these articles were prompted by specific cultural events—a couple of the articles within my sample that fell into this category were pieces about the European Day of Jewish Culture[96] and another was about a play premiering in Bari about Jewish experiences during the Holocaust.[97] This focus on cultural events is consistent with Repubblica’s general trend to include more coverage of the cultural aspects of the Jewish experience than Corriere. In fact, I was unable to find a single Corriere article within my textual analysis sample that dealt directly with the cultural aspect of Jewish religion in Italy. I believe this divide can again ultimately be traced back to the papers’ differing levels of comfort with discussing Jewish cultural history thanks to the political legacy of Italian involvement in World War II.
Israel’s Impact on the Salience of Islam
Although Corriere’s coverage of Jewish religiosity was noticeably absent from my textual analysis sample, that does not mean its articles were devoid of religious contexts. In fact, in both Corriere and Repubblica, nearly 40 percent of the articles in my content analysis corpus contained an interreligious dimension—meaning that some religion other than Judaism, most frequently Islam or Christianity, was mentioned along with one of my Judaism-related keywords. The patterns of salience of Islam were particularly interesting. In both papers, Islam or Muslims were much more likely than Christianity or Christians to be mentioned in conjunction with Jewish search terms. As Table 1 illustrates, this polarization becomes starker in both papers when you look only at articles about Israel and starker still when you look only at articles about Israel involved in a conflict.
Table 1: Salience of Islam and Christianity with the content analysis corpus
| |Corriere articles |Repubblica articles |
|All articles |28.0% focus on Islam |32.7% focus on Islam |
| |21.1% focus on Christianity |20.8% focus on Christianity |
| |Differential: 6.9% |Differential: 11.9% |
|Articles about Israel |27.7% focus on Islam |36.4% focus on Islam |
| |8.5% focus on Christianity |16.5% focus on Christianity |
| |Differential: 19.2% |Differential: 19.9% |
|Articles about Israel in |38.7% focus on Islam |43.2% focus on Islam |
|conflict |9.7% focus on Christianity |18.2% focus on Christianity |
| |Differential: 29.0% |Differential: 25.0% |
As we can see from Table 1, Islam becomes more salient in articles about Israel, particularly those about Israel involved in conflict, while Christianity becomes less and less salient in those contexts.
Although on the surface this trend looks very similar in both papers and obviously points to a definite tendency in Italian newspapers to focus on the religious dimension of the Middle East conflict, my textual analysis shows that there are markedly different motivations for this trend within the two papers. In Repubblica, many of the mentions of Islam that I found that fit within this category spoke to a tendency to frame conflicts involving Israel as religious spats between Judaism and Islam. A March 14 Repubblica article, for example, describes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “a long intersemitic war between two tribes, two cultures, two people who have the same root.”[98] As this quote illustrates, Repubblica focuses on the interreligious dimension of Israeli conflicts in order to reinforce its framing of them as intractable and justify the Prodi government’s position of equidistance and limited intervention. By contrast, the increased salience of Islam in articles about Israel has very different implications when taken together with Corriere’s habit of framing Israel as the victim in that it implicitly positions Islam as the aggressor. This in turn serves to reinforce one of the principle variations of the victim frame that we discussed earlier, the ‘Jews as victims of Muslim antipathy’ variation.
Framing Jewish-Catholic Relations as Historically Problematic
As mentioned earlier in my section on the Jews as victims of anti-Semitism, there were a surprising number of articles within my textual analysis corpus that spoke to the problematic history of Jewish-Catholic relations in Italy. Corriere was most likely to focus on the historical problems between Jews and Catholics, presenting them as a relic of the past rather than a continuing conflict. One example of this is a Jan. 18 Corriere article about new documents from the Vatican archives quotes Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first minister of foreign affairs, alleging that “The Christians can tolerate Muslims governing the sacred sites, but not the miserable Jews. … The Vatican does not want Israel to govern here [because] we challenged Catholic dogma according to which Jews must wander the world.”[99] Clearly, Corriere does not shy away from reporting on the troubled history between the Catholic Church and the Jews.
However, Corriere clearly frames such conflicts as historical rather than contemporary problems. The same article that quoted Sharett asserts, “The conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate marks a decisive break with the ambiguity of Catholic anti-Semitism (and/or anti-Judaism).”[100] Similarly, an Oct. 19 Corriere article proclaims, “Today the death of Christ is seen in another light and is no longer interpreted as the fault or curse of the Jewish people.”[101] In these passages, Corriere clearly presents Jewish-Catholic friction as a historical problem that the Church addressed through reform.
Repubblica, by contrast, was more likely to present Jewish-Catholic tension as an issue with contemporary implications. A May 30 Repubblica article cites the Holocaust to call for more dialogue “between Catholics and Jews, between the Vatican and Israel.”[102] This article is interesting that it may help explain why Repubblica is more willing than Corriere to see contemporary Jewish-Catholic relations as not completely harmonious. It seems that Jewish-Catholic tensions and the Holocaust are closely connected within Italian popular memory—it is, after all, no coincidence that Vatican II occurred less than 20 years after the end of World War II. Comfort with exploring and highlighting the contemporary implications of historical animosity between Catholics and Jews may thus correlate with comfort in discussing Italy’s role in the Holocaust, a characteristic which we have seen varies greatly between and has vastly different political implications for Corriere and Repubblica.
Individuals and Stereotypes: Jewish Identity in Shorthand
Having discussed at length how Corriere and Repubblica frame Jews as victims, the differences in how they portray Israel, and how the religious dimensions of Judaism are illustrated primarily in interreligious contexts, we can conclude by examining how Jewish individuals are represented in the Italian media and how much these newspapers rely on stereotypes when discussing Jews and Judaism. Because in-depth discussions of contemporary Jewish identity would undermine the static victim identity that both Corriere and Repubblica find so politically useful, no such discussions were found in my textual analysis corpus. Instead, we can gain the most insight into these papers’ conceptions of Jewish identity beyond the traditional victim frame by looking at which Jewish individuals they choose to highlight and which stereotypes about Jews they draw on.
Who Are the Jews? Individuals as Examples
Before discussing the Jewish individuals highlighted in Corriere and Repubblica, it is important to bear in mind that newspaper articles by their very nature focus on high-profile individuals. Thus we should not put too much stock into the fact that the vast majority of Jews individually highlighted in articles are famous or notable. With this skewed sample issue in mind, we can nonetheless say that most of the Jewish individuals quoted or discussed in Corriere and Repubblica in both my textual and content analysis samples were either political leaders, cultural figures, or intellectuals. Within my textual analysis corpus, the largest category of Jewish individuals mentioned or quoted by Corriere was intellectuals. Corriere’s distinct tendency to spotlight Jewish intellectuals may be an attempt to align themselves more closely with the Jewish people—and by extension Israel—by highlighting the positive intellectual contributions of Jews. By contrast, the majority of Jewish individuals identified in Repubblica in my content analysis were either political or cultural figures, the second and third most popular categories in Corriere coverage. The relative abundance of Jewish cultural figures—a category that included diverse professions such as musician, athlete, model, actor, and author—in Repubblica is consistent with the paper’s more robust cultural coverage.
Perhaps more interesting than the professions of the Jewish individuals highlighted in news coverage, though, are the trends in their nationalities. Within my content analysis corpus, 59 percent of Jewish individuals quoted in each paper were Israelis. Although this number seems disproportionately high, it can be better understood when analyzed in light of my decision to include the search term Israel*. While useful in allowing us to measure the full range of depictions of Jews, the inclusion of this term creates something of a selection bias when conducting nationality analysis. What is more interesting, however, is the difference in the two papers’ focus on Italian and European Jewry. While 21 percent of Jews identified in Repubblica articles in my content analysis corpus were Italian, just 6 percent of those in Corriere were. This dramatic difference extends to Europe more broadly—32 percent of Jews in Repubblica’s coverage were European while only 18 percent of those in Corriere were. This reluctance on the part of Corriere to feature Italian Jews or European Jews more generally is in keeping with the general preference we have seen in their coverage to focus on Israel rather than on domestic issues involving Jews. Again, I believe this can best be understood as an enduring discomfort on the part of the Italian right to focus on Italian or European Jewry because of their more direct connection with the Holocaust. Repubblica, on the other hand, is more willing to write articles featuring Italian and European Jews because their political tradition is less complicit in the abuses committed against those populations.
Quarantining Negative Stereotypes
Although the number of stereotypical representations of Jews within my textual analysis corpus was fairly limited, I did find articles that drew from three common stereotypical tropes: Jews as an insular people, Jews as being closely associated with finance and materialism, and Jews as wanderers. It is arguable that the victim frame we discussed so extensively at the beginning of this paper also constitutes a stereotypical portrayal of Jews. But because it has so many variations and so many historical and political implications in the Italian context, I believe it is more useful to analyze the Italian media’s intense focus on Jewish victimization as a deliberate framing device rather than a frequently deployed stereotype. Furthermore, whereas the examples I found in my textual analysis corpus of articles that involve stereotypical representations of Jews draw on widespread cultural stereotypes to make a coded, shorthand statement about their subjects, articles that supported the victim frame are more accurately understood as actively constructing the idea of Jews as victims. Setting aside, then, the issue of whether or not the victim frame constitutes stereotyping, it is clear that in both papers the most blatantly stereotypical representations of Jews were most often found in cultural coverage rather than hard news reporting. This trend could be reflective of the stricter standards of objectivity expected in news reporting or a more direct desire to preserve the established victim frame by excluding negative stereotypes.
One of the more invidious stereotypes about Jews found in articles in my textual analysis sample—and one that deftly illustrates the divide between cultural articles and news coverage—is that of Jews being overly insular. This stereotype is employed in a March 27 Corriere summary of the newly released American film Prime. The article describes Meryl Streep’s character as “a Yiddish mother who does not want a non-Jewish daughter-in-law or grandchildren.”[103] While Corriere was accurately describing the plot of the movie, this piece nonetheless reinforces the stereotype that Jews are intentionally exclusionary and insular. Interestingly, this same stereotype is criticized in a Jan. 17 Corriere article about a piece in Unità, a far left Italian newspaper, in which writer Clara Sereni discussed the guilt of being a Jew in the Italian left. One of “the most banal prejudices” the Sereni says is commonplace among the Italian left is the idea that Judaism is “closed to those who are not born Jewish because you cannot convert.”[104] The difference in how this stereotype of Jewish insularity is presented in Corriere’s leisure and news sections is highly instructive. Whereas in the film review this cultural stereotype is presented without critical analysis, in the news article it is used as part of a broader critique about the left’s relationship with Judaism. The fact that the only two examples of this particular stereotype within my textual analysis corpus were found in Corriere is also interesting in light of that paper’s general paucity of coverage of Jews in Italian and European coverage. Viewed through this lens, the use of this particular stereotype may be indicative of a high degree of sensitivity about how separate Jews are from mainstream culture.
One of the other major prejudices that Sereni highlights, according to Corriere, is the Italian left’s belief that “the Jewish lobby governs the world’s banks.”[105] This clearly recalls—and implicitly condemns—the common stereotype that Jews exert undue control over global finances and harkens back to the centuries old idea of Jews as usurers.[106] The stereotypical connection between Jews and money is also connected to the idea that Jews are excessively materialistic. This stereotype comes into play in an April 4 Repubblica article about Jewish artist Tom Sachs, which states “Sachs says he developed an idiosyncrasy about status symbols during his adolescence in a rich Jewish suburb of Connecticut, when the sprint to the latest ‘brand’ pushed him to paint a fake logo on his skis.”[107] Repubblica is very deliberate in pointing out that this connection between the Jewish suburb Sachs grew up in and the materialistic impulses in his work was made by Sachs himself, but their decision to comment on this specific aspect of his biography is nonetheless telling.
The final negative stereotype found in my textual analysis corpus is that of Jews as wanderers. In a Sept. 25 article about a recent interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Repubblica quotes the Iranian president as declaring in reference to Israel, “Now that land is governed by a people without roots.”[108] Rootlessness, with all its negative connotations for loyalty and trustworthiness, is another trait that has traditionally been ascribed to the Jews in light of the Diaspora.[109] In this case, the traditional negative stereotype of Jews as wanderers is being employed by a highly controversial political figure to undermine Jewish authority over Israel. It is possible that Repubblica chose to include this quote in order to convey just how retrograde Ahmadinejead’s views about Jews are, but it is also important to understand its inclusion as part of a larger history of Jews being portrayed in the media as wanderers. Another example of this stereotype—albeit in a much less antagonistic context—is found in a Sep. 3 Repubblica article about the upcoming European Day of Jewish Culture. The article highlights a number of events and includes the recommendation that those who want “to understand the movements of the Jewish population in Italy should go to 1 Arco de’ Tolomei street and see ‘People who come, people who go.’”[110] This article and the holiday it is trumpeting are meant to highlight Jewish culture, yet even in this generally positive context one of the most historically problematic stereotypes is employed in a rather uncritical manner.
It is interesting that both examples of the Jews as wanderer stereotype come from Repubblica and not a single one could be found in Corriere. This may be in large part explained by the divergent geographic focuses in their coverage of Jews. The idea of the Jew as a wanderer has a long history and continuing relevance in Europe, an area that much of Repubblica’s Judaism-related coverage comes from. But Israel, the major focus of the bulk of Corriere’s articles about Jews and Judaism, in large part nullifies this traditional stereotype of Jews as a rootless people.
Conclusion: Evaluating The Role of Jews in Italian Society
Having discussed in detail various aspects of how Jews are represented within Italian newspapers—including the prevalent framing of Jews as victims, the politicized coverage of Israel, the varying relationships between Judaism and Islam and Christianity, and the use of Jewish individuals and traditional stereotypes about Jews to subtly define the parameters of Jewish identity—I think it is fitting to conclude by tackling what is perhaps the central question of this thesis, a question that runs through all the aforementioned trends: what role to Jews play in Italian society as represented in the media? It might seem that the most appropriate way to answer this question would be to measure the degree of inclusion or exclusion of Jews in Italian society, as Udris and Eisenegger suggested.[111] Approaching this question directly, however, gives us ambiguous results—examples can be found within my textual analysis of both inclusionary and exclusionary framing. But looking at these specific examples of inclusion and exclusion in concert with the other prevalent representational strategies highlighted in this paper makes it clear that that Jews are in fact presented as a distinct group, a group whose inclusion within Italian society is secondary to their utility as a tool of political posturing.
Directly analyzing the level of Jewish inclusion and exclusion in Italian society is inconclusive because there are so many conflicting representations. There are multiple examples within my limited textual analysis corpus of articles that take an inclusionary approach to representing the role of Jews in Italy. This group includes articles that highlight individuals like author Miriam Marino,[112] journalist Fausto Coen,[113] and left-wing politician Piero Fassino[114] that show Jews as important figures in Italian public life as well as articles that explicitly identify Jewish contributions to Western musical[115] or intellectual[116] culture. Other articles demonstrated inclusionary framing by presenting Judaism as part of a unified Judeo-Christian tradition.[117] It is worth noting that most of the articles incorporating this inclusionary framing come from Repubblica, which demonstrated through my nationality analysis a greater willingness to focus on Jews as part of Italian and European life. At the same, though, there is also no lack of articles from my textual analysis sample that adopt a more exclusionary frame. Some deliberately differentiate between Jews and mainstream Italian culture by focusing on the otherness of Jewish history[118] or culinary traditions.[119] Others—like a July 24 Repubblica article that asks Riccardo Di Segni, the head of the Jewish community in Rome, “How are the Roman Jews living in these days of crisis?”—use subtle linguistic cues to emphasize that Jews in Italy remain a people apart. The limited but often uncritical use of negative stereotypes about Jews discussed above, particularly that of Jews as insular, also plays into exclusionary framing. This brief examination of the degrees of inclusion and exclusion of Jews points to why a more in-depth analysis of this kind is unnecessary: there are simply too many contradictory messages.
Instead, it seems more meaningful conclusions about the role of Jews in Italy—or at least in Italy as depicted in the country’s leading newspapers—can be found not by measuring inclusion or exclusion but by looking at the role they play in public life. It is clear is that neither Repubblica nor Corriere is particularly concerned with how included or excluded Jews are in Italian society; what they are concerned with, though, is how the experience of Jews can be used to further their respective political agendas.
Nowhere is this clearer than in their promotion of the victim frame. While both papers consistently present Jews as victims, the variations on this frame that they choose to emphasize differ dramatically based on what is most expedient for the political ideologies they are aligned with. Repubblica focuses primarily on Jews as the victims of the Holocaust because it allows them to recall an era in which their liberal predecessors acted as protectors of the Jews by resisting the conservative elements in power that aided in the oppression of Italian Jewry. Similarly, Corriere chose to prioritize modern examples of anti-Semitism and other variations on Jewish victimization, particularly when it was coming at the hands of Muslims or Italian liberals, because they were more likely to put conservatives in the position of protector of the Jews. Likewise, how the two papers chose to cover Israel also had important political implications. While Corriere frequently adopted an aggressive defense of Israel, Repubblica was far more cautious in their coverage. While they did occasionally criticize the Israeli government and military, this criticism was relatively subtle and reflected the equidistance policy put in place by the liberal Prodi government.
While the political posturing related to interreligious representations of Judaism and the focus on Jewish individuals is harder to immediately detect, it is nonetheless important. The political dynamic of articles that focus on Judaism in relation with other religions is obvious in the increased salience of Islam in articles about Israel and particularly in articles about Israel in conflict. While Repubblica uses this to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a “intersemitic”[120] war and thus justify Italian non-engagement, Corriere increases the frequency of mentions of Islam in articles about Israel as a means of reinforcing one of their favored variations on the victim frame, that of Jews as victims of Muslim antipathy. Corriere’s bias against coverage of Jews in an Italian or European context—as revealed in my analysis of the nationalities of individual Jews featured in both papers—can also be understood in terms of the paper’s habitual use of Jews as a political tool. Because of the Italian right’s problematic history with European Jewry, it is more political advantageous for Corriere to focus on Jews in an Israeli or American context. The near absence of negative stereotypes about Jews in hard news articles is a further indication of their utility as political tools. In order to preserve the political potency of the victim frame, both Corriere and Repubblica were vigilant in their exclusion of negative stereotypes of Jews from hard news coverage, instead choosing to depict Jews as the ultimate victims, the defense of whom solidifies the moral bona fides of the papers’ respective political ideologies.
What thus emerges from a careful study of representations of Jews in the Italian media is a case study in politicization and moral appropriation of the historical and contemporary victimization of Jews. Through their aggressive maintenance of different aspects of the victim frame, their presentation of Israeli issues, their focus on interreligious contact, and the trends in their selection of which Jewish individuals and stereotypes to include in their coverage, it is clear that the overarching role of Jews within Italian media is to serve as a political tool to advance the liberal and conservative ideologies represented by Repubblica and Corriere.
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[1] Brint, Juliana. “Shelter or Silence?” Differing Conceptions of Italian Responses to Fascist Anti-Semitic Policies.” Final Paper, Introduction to Jewish Civilization. 13 Dec. 2010.
[2] Azzellini, Dario. "Italy, from the Anti-fascist Resistance to the New Left (1945–1960)." Ed. Immanuel Ness. The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
[3] Henderson, David. "Italy's `respectable' fascist." New Statesman & Society 8.340 (1995): 12.
[4] Edelman, Samuel. “Antisemitism and the New/Old Left.” Michael Berenbaum, ed. Not Your Father’s Antisemitism. St. Paul, Minn: Paragon House, 2008.
[5] Johnson-Cartee, Karen S. News Narratives and News Framing: Constructing Political Reality. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
[6] O'Reilly, Charles T. The Jews of Italy, 1938-1945: an Analysis of Revisionist Histories. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.
[7] Orefice, Gastone O. "An Historical Perspective." The Italian Jewish Experience. Ed. Thomas P. DiNapoli. Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 2000.
[8] O'Reilly, Charles T. The Jews of Italy, 1938-1945: an Analysis of Revisionist Histories. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.
[9] De Felice, Renzo. The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History, 5th Edition. Trans. Robert L. Miller. New York: Enigma, 2001. 460
[10] U.S. Department of State. “Background Note: Italy.” . 12 May 2010.
[11] Israely, Jeff. “10 Questions For Massimo D’Alema.” Time Magazine. 27 Aug. 2006. Section: Page. . Web.
[12] U.S. Department of State. “Background Note: Italy.” . 12 May 2010.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Cooperman, Bernard Dov, and Barbara Garvin, eds. The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity. Potomac: University of Maryland, 2000.
[15] DiNapoli, Thomas P, ed. The Italian Jewish Experience. Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 2000.
[16] Hibberd, Matthew. The Media in Italy: Press, Cinema and Broadcasting from Unification to Digital. Maidenhead, England: McGraw Hill/Open UP, 2008.
[17] Dardano, Maurizio. Il Linguaggio Dei Giornali Italiani. Roma U.a.: Laterza, 1986.
[18] Beccaria, G. L. "Il Linguaggio Giornalistico." I Linguaggi Settoriali in Italia. Milano, 1978.
[19] Reiglová, Lucie. “La pecularietà del linguaggio giornalistico dal putno di vista sintattico: Lo stile ellittico.” Brno, 2006. Web.
[20] Pounds, Gabrina. "Attitude and subjectivity in Italian and British hard-news reporting: The construction of a culture-specific 'reporter' voice." Discourse Studies 12.1 (2010): 106-137. Web.
[21] Johnson-Cartee, Karen S. News Narratives and News Framing: Constructing Political Reality. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
[22] Liepach, Martin, Gabriele Melischek, and Josef Seethaler, eds. Jewish Images in the Media. Wien: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2007.
[23] Parfitt, Tudor, and Yulia Egorova, eds. Jews, Muslims, and Mass Media: Mediating the 'Other.' London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005.
[24] Parfitt, Tudor, and Yulia Egorova, eds. “Introduction.” Jews, Muslims, and Mass Media: Mediating the 'Other.' London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. Pg. 3.
[25] Edelman, Samuel. “Antisemitism and the New/Old Left.” Michael Berenbaum, ed. Not Your Father’s Antisemitism. St. Paul, Minn: Paragon House, 2008.
[26] Tischauser, Jeffrey. Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim Bias in American Newspapers: How They Reported the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah and Israeli-Hamas Wars. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2010.
[27] Hibberd, Matthew. The Media in Italy: Press, Cinema and Broadcasting from Unification to Digital. Maidenhead, England: McGraw Hill/Open UP, 2008. Pg. 100.
[28] "Does Anyone Trust the Media?" EMarketer. 9 May 2009. Web.
[29] "Quotidiano." Wikipedia.it. 12 Feb. 2011. Web.
[30] Although the inclusion of the terms Antisemit* and Sionis* might impact the results I receive by making anti-Semitism and Zionism seem more significant in press coverage than they actually are, I think the importance of studying how these two major themes within the Jewish experience are covered. I did, however, do my best to be conscious of any selection bias that may have occured based on the inclusion of the terms Antisemit* and Sionis*.
[31] Udris, Linards, and Mark Eisenegger. "Jewish and Muslim Actors in the Media Presentation of a Method for Capturing Typifications of Inclusion and Exclusion." Jewish Images in the Media. Ed. Martin Liepach, Gabriele Melischek, and Josef Seethaler. Wien: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2007. 121-37.
[32] Schatz, Roland, and Christian Kolmer. "The Portrayal of the War in the Middle East: Media Analysis of News Coverage by ARD and ZDF." Jewish Images in the Media. Ed. Martin Liepach, Gabriele Melischek, and Josef Seethaler. Wien: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2007. 139-49.
[33] All newspaper quotes included in this paper were translated by me from Italian into English with the aid of ’s Italian-English dictionary and language forum. These quotes all come from my textual analysis corpus.
[34] "Lettere." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 11 July 2006, Commenti: 20. Repubblica.it. Web.
[35] “Gli occhiali della bibbia." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 14 March 2006, Prima Pagina: 1. Repubblica.it. Web.
[36] "I tre giorni della Memoria: tributo del Duse alla Shoah." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 25 Jan. 2006, Bari: 10. Repubblica.it. Web.
[37] "Prete e prefetto eroi resistenti." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 8 Feb. 2006, Genova: 10. Repubblica.it. Web.
[38] "Su Auschwitz il silenzio fu della Chiesa." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 31 May 2006, Commenti: 22. Repubblica.it. Web.
[39] It is difficult to directly translate the meaning of the phrase “Italiani brava gente.” The phrase has obvious moral connotations and is a signifier of how Italians, particularly those affiliated with the resistance movement, conceptualized their involvement in the Holocaust. Due to the relatively low mortality rate of Italian Jews in the Holocaust, a widespread belief arose that Italians did as much as they could to help their Jewish neighbors and should thus be judged by history as good people.
[40] "Italiani brava gente, il mito infranto." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 25 March 2006, Terza Pagina: 37. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[41] "Quando i Cattolici erano Filoebraici." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 15 April 2006, Terza Pagina: 35. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[42] "Conflitti il libro." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 29 Dec. 2006, Cultura: 47. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[43] "Vaticano e Stato ebraico: documenti inediti in un saggio di Uri Bialer." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 18 Jan. 2006, Cultura: 39. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[44] "‘Antisemita e xenofoba’, commissariata Radio Maryja." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 14 May 2006, Primo Piano: 10. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[45] "Slogan pro Hezbollah al corteo per i libanesi." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 11 Aug. 2006, Milano: 3. Repubblica.it. Web.
[46] "Bertinotti contro Liberazione per la vignetta su Israele." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 16 May 2006, Primo Piano: 10. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[47] "Noi e Israele, il muro del pregiudizio." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 16 July 2006, Cultura: 34. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[48] "Debole e isolato, però è vivo." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 20 Jan. 2006, Primo Piano: 5. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[49] "Noi, maestri di tolleranza." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 8 Jan. 2006, Domenicale: 28. Repubblica.it. Web.
[50] "Gli occhiali della bibbia." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 14 March 2006, Prima Pagina: 20. Repubblica.it. Web.
[51] "L’ira dei dottori dell’Islam: L’Occidenti non ci rispetta." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 11 Feb. 2006, Politica Estera: 19. Repubblica.it. Web.
[52] "L’Ucoii: non siamo antisemiti." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 22 Aug. 2006, Politica Interna: 11. Repubblica.it. Web.
[53] "Le bandiere bruciate e la solita scusa del provocatore prezzolato." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 20 Feb. 2006, Cultura: 26. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[54] Taqiyya is a term from Twelver Shi’ism that refers to the sanctioned practice of concealing one’s faith when faced with oppression. [“Taqiyya.” Robert Gleave. Encyclopoedia of Islam and the Muslim World. Richard C. Martin, ed. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004. 678-697.]
[55] "Israel critica Gad Lerner: no alla difesa di D’Alema." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 5 March 2006, Politica: 15. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[56] Ibid.
[57] "Le bandiere bruciate e la solita scusa del provocatore prezzolato." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 20 Feb. 2006, Cultura: 26. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[58] "A Milano una manifestazione senza incidenti: E l’ex sessantottino porta la bandiera di Israele." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 19 Nov. 2006, Primo Piano: 2. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[59] "Le bandiere bruciate e la solita scusa del provocatore prezzolato." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 20 Feb. 2006, Cultura: 26. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[60] "La grande fuga dal Libano." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 19 July 2006, Prima Pagina: 1. Repubblica.it. Web.
[61] "Bombe e razzi, vittime tra i civili." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 5 Aug. 2006, Prima Pagina: 1. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[62] Dardano, Maurizio. Il Linguaggio Dei Giornali Italiani. Roma U.a.: Laterza, 1986.
[63] "Libano, fine del combattimenti Nasrallah: ‘Restiamo in armi’." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 15 Aug. 2006, Primo Piano: 8. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[64] "Il muro di Sharon e la battaglia di tutti." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 7 Jan. 2006, Cultura: 30. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[65] "Il Primo Attentato." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 27 Jan. 2006, Primo Piano: 8. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[66] "Ottanta lanci, uccise due donne. Missili sulla terza città dello Stato ebraico." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 14 July 2006, Primo Piano: 2. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[67] Ibid.
[68] Ibid.
[69] “In defense of Israel’s ‘disproportionate’ response in Gaza.” Christian Science Monitor. 9 Jan. 2009, Opinion. . Web.
[70] "Bunker intatti e missili a spalla; Nel Sud resta il dominio scita." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 15 Aug. 2006, Primo Piano: 8. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[71] "Noi e Israele, il muro del pregiudizio." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 16 July 2006, Cultura: 34. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[72] "‘È in gioco la vita di una nazione; Basta con il Partito dei Tuttavia’." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 17 July 2006, Prima Pagina: 1. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[73] "‘Una Guerra giustificata ma ora serve la tregua’." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 7 Aug. 2006, Primo Piano: 3. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[74] “Majnun” is a popular Arab expression for “madman” derived from a classical Arabic story. [“Layla and Majnun.” Wikipedia. 24 April 2011. Web.]
[75] "E se Hezbollah avesse perduto la guerra?" Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 27 Aug. 2006, Cultura: 32. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[76] Shindler, Colin. “Reading The Guardian: Jews, Israel-Palestine and the origins of irritation.” Parfitt, Tudor with Yulia Egorova, eds. Jews, Muslims and Mass Media. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
[77] "Diliberto vuole la fiducia solo per tacitarsi la coscienza." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 3 July 2006, Politica Interna: 12. Repubblica.it. Web.
[78] "La grande fuga dal Libano." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 19 July 2006, Prima Pagina: 1. Repubblica.it. Web.
[79] "Slogan pro Hezbollah al corteo per i libanesi." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 11 Aug. 2006, Milano: 3. Repubblica.it. Web.
[80] "La grande fuga dal Libano." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 19 July 2006, Prima Pagiana: 1. Repubblica.it. Web.
[81] "Il mondo secondo Ahmadinejad: Facciamo un referendum su Israel." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 25 Sept. 2006, Politica Estera: 13. Repubblica.it. Web.
[82] "Tredici racconti di un popolo in gabbia." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 10 May 2006, Roma: 7. Repubblica.it. Web.
[83] "‘Noi sempre più fragili dopo’." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 16 July 2006, Primo Piano: 4. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[84] "Bush appoggia Olmert: ‘Sì al ritiro unilaterale.’" Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 24 May 2006, Esteri: 17. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[85] "Chi raccoglierà la sua bandiera." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 7 Jan. 2006, Prima Pagina: 1. Repubblica.it. Web.
[86] "Lerner: Il presidente ds può fare il ministro degli Esteri: La polemica e le comunità." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 3 March 2006, Politica: 13. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[87] "D’Alema: sì a missione Onu; Berlusconi: niente equidistanza." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 18 July 2006, Politica Interna: 10. Repubblica.it. Web.
[88] “A Ciampi il premio De Gasperi: L’Europa deve acquistare forza.” La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 20 Aug. 2006, Politica Interna: 11. Repubblica.it. Web.
[89] "Il mondo secondo Ahmadinejad: Facciamo un referendum su Israel." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 25 Sept. 2006, Politica Estera: 13. Repubblica.it. Web.
[90] "Ancora Ahmadinejad: Via il regime sionista." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 9 July 2006, Politica Estera: 27. Repubblica.it. Web.
[91] "Chissà se gli studenti che hanno osato urlare ‘Morte al dittatore’ e bruciare..." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 12 Dec. 2006, Prima Pagina: 1. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[92] Johnson-Cartee, Karen S. News Narratives and News Framing: Constructing Political Reality. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.
[93] "Concerti in piazza, teatro e visite al Tempio Maggiore." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 3 Sept. 2006, Roma: 4. Repubblica.it. Web.
[94] "Aperti per ferie." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 18 Aug. 2006, Roma: 17. Repubblica.it. Web.
[95] "I tre giorni della Memoria: tributo del Duse alla Shoah." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 25 Jan. 2006, Bari: 10. Repubblica.it. Web.
[96] "Concerti in piazza, teatro e visite al Tempio Maggiore." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 3 Sept. 2006, Roma: 4. Repubblica.it. Web.
"Cultura ebraica in 6 mila visitano templi e sinagoghe." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 1 Sept 2006, Roma: 1. Repubblica.it. Web.
[97] "I tre giorni della Memoria: tributo del Duse alla Shoah." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 25 Jan. 2006, Bari: 10. Repubblica.it. Web.
[98] "Gli occhiali della bibbia." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 14 March 2006, Prima Pagina: 1. Repubblica.it. Web.
[99] "Vaticano e Stato ebraico: documenti inediti in un saggio di Uri Bialer." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 18 Jan. 2006, Cultura: 39. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[100] Ibid.
[101] "La Bibbia: Giudizio." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 19 Oct. 2006, Cultura: 53. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[102] "Le Shoah e le colpe del tedeschi." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 30 May 2006, Prima Pagina: 1. Repubblica.it. Web.
[103] "Prime." Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 27 March 2006, Tempo Libero: 13. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[104] "La scrittrice sull'Unità: Clara Sereni e ‘la colpa di essere ebrea’" Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 17 Jan. 2006, Primo Piano: 13. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[105] Ibid.
[106] Bayraktar, Hatice. “‘Dear Editor, Once again, Jews are only about money’: anti-semitic letters to the editors in the Swiss media and the crisis over Holocaust-era dormant accounts (1995-2002). Liepach, Martin, Gabriele Melischek, and Josef Seethaler, eds. Jewish Images in the Media. Wien: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2007.
[107] "Sachs, i sogni e gli incubi di un Americano ribelle." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 4 April 2006, Milano: 11. Repubblica.it. Web.
[108] "Il mondo secondo Ahmadinejad: Facciamo un referendum su Israel." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 25 Sept. 2006, Politica Estera: 13. Repubblica.it. Web.
[109] “Wandering Jews, wandering stereotypes: media representation of the Russian-speaking Jews in the FSU, Israel and German.” Liepach, Martin, Gabriele Melischek, and Josef Seethaler, eds. Jewish Images in the Media. Wien: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2007.
[110] "Concerti in piazza, teatro e visite al Tempio Maggiore." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 3 Sept. 2006, Roma: 4. Repubblica.it. Web.
[111] Urdis, Linards and Mark Eisenegger. “The portrayal of war in the Middle East: media analysis of news coverage by ARD and ZDF.” Liepach, Martin, Gabriele Melischek, and Josef Seethaler, eds. Jewish Images in the Media. Wien: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2007.
[112] “Tredici racconti di un popolo in gabbia." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 10 May 2006, Roma: 7. Repubblica.it. Web.
[113] “Coen, l’inventore di Paese Sera." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 5 Jan. 2006, Cultura: 42. Repubblica.it. Web.
[114] “Sinistra-ebrei, 60 anni di corto circuito." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 14 Nov. 2006, Politica Interna: 14. Repubblica.it. Web.
[115] “Cultura ebraica in 6 mila visitano templi e sinagoghe." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 1 Sept. 2006, Roma: 1. Repubblica.it. Web.
[116] "Parigi: Il comunismo è morto, evviva Marx. Lenin e Stalin? Scrocconi... " Corriere della Sera [Milan, Italy] 30 Oct. 2006, Cultura: 25. Dow Jones Factiva. Web.
[117] “Noi, maestri di tolleranza." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 8 Jan. 2006, Domenicale: 28. Repubblica.it. Web.
[118] “Concerti in piazza, teatro e visite al Tempio Maggiore." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 3 Sept. 2006, Roma: 4. Repubblica.it. Web.
[119] “Aperti per ferie." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 18 Aug. 2006, Roma: 17. Repubblica.it. Web.
[120] "Gli occhiali della bibbia." La Repubblica [Rome, Italy] 14 March 2006, Prima Pagina: 1. Repubblica.it. Web.sa
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