The reconfigurations of the Jewish situation brought about by October 7 and the war it triggered are what K. stubbornly strives to examine and understand. This week, historian and demographer Sergio DellaPergola offers us a remarkably comprehensive and accurate overview, all the way from Israel. It stands out in particular for its ability to take into account both sides of the Jewish perspective, Israeli and diasporic. The coup de force lies in the way they are articulated, which, rather than reducing one to the other, allows us to grasp what prevents them from drifting apart. On the Israeli side, the experience of Hamas’ genocidal antisemitism and the failure of the Jewish state to function as a refuge have shattered certain illusions about overcoming the diasporic condition. Outside Israel, it has been necessary to confront the metamorphoses of antisemitism, and in particular the reversal of the accusation of genocide against Israel, which reflects a profound change in the Western world’s relationship with the memory of its crimes. Will we then see the issues diverge, or, on the contrary, bring the two sides closer together? DellaPergola does not play the prophet when it comes to the fate of the Jews. But he offers us a sketch of the future, in which the best outcome is still that of decisive intervention by the diaspora in the Israeli political crisis: the Jewish people must reclaim their own modern history.
Among the tasks that fall to the university, its critical function is of decisive importance for the reflexivity of democratic societies. It should come as no surprise that reactionaries of all stripes, who…
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The aftermath of October 7 has profoundly reshaped Jewish identity and community practices, as well as how they are perceived by the rest of Western societies. In this article, demographer Sergio DellaPergola offers a general assessment of these changes from an Israeli perspective, highlighting what he believes are the major issues facing the future of the Jewish people.
How does the most “critical” fringe of French universities justify its desire to boycott Israeli higher education institutions? Our resident watchdog, Karl Kraus, has looked into the report commissioned by a number of lecturers and students at Sciences Po Strasbourg to assert the need to break off all partnerships with Reichmann University. All he discovered was the frustration of searching for guilt without finding it, and the perfidy of maintaining the initial bias despite everything.
On 3 October 1989, at around 6 pm, Dr. Joseph Wybran, a leading doctor and president of the C.C.O.J.B, the Belgian Jewish federation, was shot at close range in the parking lot of the Erasmus hospital in Brussels. Thirty-three years later, justice has still not been served. Agnès Bensimon reviews for K. the twists and turns of an investigation into a murder whose treatment by the Belgian police and justice system raises questions. Until its latest development in March 2025, which has reignited disillusionment...
Accused by the Israeli Minister of Education Yoav Kisch of “anti-Israeli ideology”, sociologist Eva Illouz has seen her nomination for the Israel Prize contested. She revisits the affair, denounces the authoritarian excesses of the Netanyahu government and defends an intellectual position that is at once critical, universalist and deeply attached to the State of Israel. For her, “this government acts as if those who fight to prevent Israel from becoming a pariah state were enemies”.
Who is invited to share the meal of liberated humanity, and what is there to eat? Through a comparison between the Seder and the Greco-Roman banquet, Ivan Segré highlights a specifically Jewish conception of liberation, and what it implies. For what is shared during this Jewish “feast of words” is the story of a liberation that took place but which, in order to be effective, must be re-enacted for each human being: “where do you stand, individually, with the story of your own exodus from Egypt?”
Between April and July 1994, in just over three months, nearly a million Tutsis were murdered in Rwanda. Written in 2007, K. is republishing this text by Stéphane Bou today, on the occasion of the week of commemoration of the beginning of the genocide.
Hadas Ragolsky, former journalist, activist and founder of the Women in Red movement, met twice with K., the first time in her office in Tel Aviv City Hall in June 2024, and the second time this past week to talk about the repeated assaults on democracy and on the opposition resistance as well as women’s rights while part of the Israeli society is marching against Benyamin Netanyahu’s government dangerous actions. A strong call for a Diaspora support to the movements of protests.
Faced with the collective experience of modern powerlessness, democracies are doubting and populists across the board are promising to regain control by ‘taking action’. Goethe’s Faust and Walter White, the hero of Breaking Bad, paradigmatic figures separated by two centuries, embody this headlong rush: when understanding the world is no longer easy, we destroy and rebuild it. But always, in the shadow of these stories, a Jewish figure accompanies the destructive impulse, embodies negation, or bears the blame. In moments when modernity cracks, what becomes of the Jewish minority, asks the philosopher Julia Christ? While large sections of our societies are listening to the whispers that promise an immediate way out of powerlessness, she reminds us that only the possibility of building solidarity can guarantee minorities against the tyranny of majority desire.
Who, as a child, has never dreamed of discovering a secret lineage, an obscure origin that would answer the nagging question of identity? Ubiquitous in fiction, this trope of the “family saga”, well identified by Freud, sometimes intersects with a semblance of reality. It is from this tenuous junction point that Romain Moor investigates the subject of those who discover themselves to be Marranos long after the fact.
David Hirsh was invited, in his capacity as academic director of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, to the International Conference on Combating Antisemitism organized by the Israeli Ministry of the Diaspora. In this text, he explains why he chose not to participate in this initiative which, by giving pride of place to the extreme right, discredits the fight against antisemitism and endangers Jews in the diaspora.
Can the fight against antisemitism be anything other than a parody when it is organized by the far right? By inviting members of Europe’s authoritarian and xenophobic right to parade on the stage of its “International Conference on Combating Antisemitism”, the Israeli Ministry of the Diaspora has committed a serious political error, which rings like a betrayal of its mission. Here, Michael Brenner reports on the drift represented by this move and the trap into which it is locking Jews.
On Sunday, January 19, the sixth edition of the “Choosing a Jewish School” fair, launched in 2019 by Elodie Marciano, was held in Paris. In 2023, K. had already devoted an article to this event, which has shaken up the institutional world and has become an unmissable meeting place for the entire ecosystem of French Jewish education and youth. One year and three months after October 7, we decided to go back, curious and concerned about the effects of the current climate on the youngest. Between the stands of the youth movements and the large school complexes, the images of the hostage release were on a loop against a background of Am Israel Chai – let’s follow the guide!
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Thanks to the Paris office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their cooperation in the design of the magazine’s website.