Description
By Gino Bardi. Are We Aryans was produced by the US Communist Party-supporting Italian-American Gino Bardi in 1938 and was widely distributed amongst the Italian community in New York.
In this work, Bardi, who was also editor of the Communist L’Unità del Popolo newspaper, attempted to refute the sudden anti-Semitic and racial turn taken by Mussolini in 1938. Bardi points out Mussolini had earlier been very pro-Jewish and had spoken out strongly against racial ideologies, and had claimed that Jews were completely integrated into Italy.
Written from an extreme anti-Fascist and Communist perspective, this booklet nonetheless provides a short but valuable summary of the history of Italian Jews dating back to Casear’s time right up to the early days of Fascism—which, ironically as Bardi points out—many leading Italian Jews supported, including, Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s mistress.
After listing the penalties (the expulsion of Jews from the schools, the expropriation of their property, their exclusion from public life) inflicted upon the Jews since the promulgation of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic Decrees after his sudden alliance with Nazi Germany, Bardi warned his Italian American audience that it was in their interests to reject fascism in Italy and America.
About the author: Gino Bardi (real name Giuseppe Bascetta) was born in Italy in 1907, and moved to New York with his family as a child. He obtained a degree in philosophy at Columbia College and returned to Italy to teach at the University of Florence. When the Italian government attempted to draft him into the army, he returned to the States, and become co-editor of the American Communist Party’s Italian-language weekly, “L’Unitàdel Popolo.” In 1940, Bardi unsuccessfully ran for Congress as the American Labor Party’s candidate for a district representing Greenwich Village. In 1942, he enlisted in the US Army, writing for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, before being recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to assist Italian partisans behind enemy lines. After the war, Bardi return to Italy and worked in the Italian film industry. Bardi died in the States in May 1978 and is buried in St. John’s Cemetery in Queens.
39 pages. Paperback. This is an unaltered exact reproduction of the original.