Patrizia Guarnieri, Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism: From Florence to Jerusalem and New York. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xv + 275 pp.

Fascism exerted multiple, complex, and often perverse influences on Italian society and on the lives of Italian Jews in particular. The better-known outcomes of Italian Fascism are the development of a dictatorial regime grounded on the cult of personality, the bloody repression of political opposition, delirious imperialist adventures, the legal codification of anti-Jewish persecution, the late military alliance with Nazi Germany, and a catastrophic defeat in the Second World War. But Fascism also played a paramount role in conceiving new patterns of rural and urban development, industrial management, state and church relations, and educational reform, some of whose legacies have long outlasted the pernicious regime. Some public works, among them the embankments of the Tiber River and other aspects of urban renovation in Rome, and land reclamation in the central-southern regions of Italy, quite amazingly were not much developed beyond the regime’s endeavors in the 1920s and 1930s. Likewise, at least until recently, much of the public education system in the country—compulsory as well as academic—was regulated by principles laid down during “the infamous twenty years.” Those far-reaching influences have deeply affected Italy’s university ...