In 1939, Jewish Italian families faced an important question: If Fascism takes over your country, do you stay or do you flee? In a new podcast executive-produced by Stanley Tucci, the documentary filmmaker David Modigliani (Running with Beto) tells the story of his grandparents—the Nobel Prize-winning economist Franco Modigliani and his wife, Serena—and their escape from Mussolini’s racial laws. Using extensive family archives that include personal diaries, official documents, and hundreds of love letters, as well as taped interviews with surviving relatives in Italy, Modigliani weaves a narrative not only of his grandparents, who escaped to New York before the outbreak of W.W. II, but of the relatives who didn’t or couldn’t flee and had to face the Nazi regime. Speaking in 2024, Modigliani is quick to point out the parallels between this history—which holds the horrible fallout of rising anti-Semitism—and the state of the world today. —Paulina Prosnitz